Trade Boards Act 1909
| Act of Parliament | |||||||||
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| Long title | An Act to provide for the establishment of Trade Boards for certain Trades. | ||||||||
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| Citation | 9 Edw. 7. c. 22 | ||||||||
| Territorial extent | United Kingdom | ||||||||
| Dates | |||||||||
| Royal assent | 20 October 1909 | ||||||||
| Commencement | 1 January 1910 | ||||||||
| Repealed |
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Status: Repealed | |||||||||
| Text of statute as originally enacted | |||||||||
The Trade Boards Act 1909 (9 Edw. 7. c. 22) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed in 1909. It provided for the creation of boards which could set minimum wage criteria that were legally enforceable. It was expanded and updated in the Trade Boards Act 1918. The main provision was to set minimum wages in certain trades with historically low wages, often due to a surplus of available workers due to the widespread employment of workers or lack of skills needed for employment.
At first it applied to four industries: chain-making, ready-made tailoring, paper-box making, machine-made lace making, and finishing trades. It was later expanded in 1912: mining and then to other industries with a preponderance of unskilled manual labour.
Background
The act was introduced to counteract the current system referred to as "sweating" that was used in British Trades. The term was used to describe harsh conditions like long hours, unsanitary work environments and inadequate wages.By the early twentieth century, there was a serious pressure among reformers as well as other affected workers to combat these brutal conditions. The workers addressed the issues through government intervention. They felt like relying on market forces to rectify the conditions may never solve anything.
Debates
The act was very controversial from its introduction. It provoked strong disagreements among contemporaries over whether it had enough strength to address low pay. Supporters such as the social reformer R.H. Tawney and Churchill saw it as a great breakthrough combating exploitative working conditions. Critics such as Macdonald and Ramsay argued that the Trade Boards Act did not go far enough. They claimed that it set wages according to what industries could afford instead of what a liveable wage was.
Winston Churchill, MP then President of the Board of Trade, put the argument for the legislation as follows:
It is a serious national evil that any class of His Majesty's subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. It was formerly supposed that the working of the laws of supply and demand would naturally regulate or eliminate that evil. The first clear division which we make on the question to-day is between healthy and unhealthy conditions of bargaining. That is the first broad division which we make in the general statement that the laws of supply and demand will ultimately produce a fair price. Where in the great staple trades in the country you have a powerful organisation on both sides, where you have responsible leaders able to bind their constituents to their decision, where that organisation is conjoint with an automatic scale of wages or arrangements for avoiding a deadlock by means of arbitration, there you have a healthy bargaining which increases the competitive power of the industry, enforces a progressive standard of life and the productive scale, and continually weaves capital and labour more closely together. But where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes the trade up as a second string, his feebleness and ignorance generally renders the worker an easy prey to the tyranny; of the masters and middle-men, only a step higher up the ladder than the worker, and held in the same relentless grip of forces—where those conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.
Subsequent developments
The whole act was repealed for England and Wales and Scotland by section 25(3) of, and the fourth schedule to, the Wages Councils Act 1945 (8 & 9 Geo. 6. c. 17), which came into force on 28 March 1945
See also
Notes
References
- ↑ Holcombe, A. N. (1910). "The British Minimum Wages Act of 1909". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 24 (3): 574–577. doi:10.2307/1885215. ISSN 0033-5533. JSTOR 1885215.
- ↑ Wrigley, Chris, Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion, p327, ISBN 0-87436-990-8
- ↑ Sheila Blackburn, "Ideology and social policy: the origins of the Trade Boards Act." The Historical Journal 34#1 (1991): 43-64.
- 1 2 Blackburn, Shelia C. (2009). Curse or cure? Why was the enactment of Britain’s 1909 Trade Boards Act so controversial?. Vol. 47 (47 ed.). p. 214-239.
- ↑ "Hansard Series 5, Vol 4, col 388". 28 April 1909. Archived from the original on 1 June 2019.
- ↑ "Wages Councils Act 1945", legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives, Geo6/8-9 c. 17
Further reading
- Bean, Jessica S., and George R. Boyer. "The Trade Boards Act of 1909 and the alleviation of household poverty." British journal of industrial relations 47.2 (2009): 240-264. online
- Blackburn, Sheila C. "Curse or cure? Why was the enactment of Britain's 1909 Trade Boards Act so controversial?." British Journal of Industrial Relations 47.2 (2009): 214-239. online
- Blackburn, Sheila. "Ideology and social policy: the origins of the Trade Boards Act." The Historical Journal 34#1 (1991): 43-64.
- S Webb and B Webb, Industrial Democracy (Longmans 1902)
External links
- Text of the Trade Boards Act 1909 as originally enacted or made within the United Kingdom, from legislation.gov.uk.
