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From International Socialism (1st series), No.25, Summer 1966, p.30.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Occupation and Pay in Great Britain 1906-60
Guy Routh
Cambridge/NIESR, 35s
Guy Routh has produced a fair contender for this journal’s Discovery of Britain cup. He shows the variety of change in occupation and pay since before the first world war within a remarkably enduring set of relationships between skilled and unskilled, manual and non-manual, one trade and another. He has gathered an immense amount of information and ends with a refutation of conventional supply/demand explanations of the pay structure. His own explanation relates pay to status and to degrees of inflation.
It is a pity that the main body of analysis stops short at the 1951 Census. We might yet look back on the years since then, the period of permanent arms economy proper, as the period of greatest economic and industrial change in Britain this century (as is partially recognised on p.49). It is a pity, too, that the analysis of occupational change is not rounded out with a study of mobility between jobs. Nonetheless, it is a major undertaking well done.
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Last updated on 24 April 2010