Peter Ingram

University of Surrey · School of Economics

Wage claims have been an important feature of British industrial relations during the postwar period. They help set the boundaries within which wage negotiations take place and provide an insight into the conduct of negotiations, especially during periods of change in industrial relations. Despite this, claims remain an underinvestigated area. This...

The election of the Conservative government in 1979 is seen as a watershed in pay determination in the UK, ending formal pay policies. While the government withdrew, the UK's major employer organisation, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), endeavoured to operate an alternative system of employer coordination on pay between 1979 and 1997. H...

Drinkwater S. and Ingram P. How different are the British in their willingness to move? Evidence from international social survey data, Regional Studies. This paper analyses people's willingness to move using data from the 1995 British Social Attitudes Survey and International Social Survey Programme. The personal characteristics and sub-regional i...

Two widely accepted stereotypes about strikes in British manufacturing industry are analysed using newly available data on some 5,000 pay contract negotiations. First, the reason why large workplaces have more strikes than others is examined. Second, the association between multi-unionism and strikes is elaborated.

 < The number of strikes reported in British industry has been on a downward trend over the past two decades, falling in 1998 to its lowest level since records began. This may indicate that relations within British industry have improved; however, the same period has also witnessed a sharp increase in the number of individual ACAS and employment tr...

Against a background of increased decentralisation in the structure of wage decision making, we analyse the effects of unions on the dispersion and persistence of pay settlements over the medium term using a longitudinal data set covering British private sector establishments over the period 1987-2001. It seems that the union effect of a reduction...

We examine representative, group-level wage settlement data to augment the debate on nominal pay rigidity in Britain. We investigate the characteristics of groups that settle at zero and the role of within-firm and external influences. Nominal settlement cuts are rare. Zero nominal wage settlements are more common, but still relatively unusual, hig...

Deregulation of the system of pay determination in Britain was started in 1979 with the removal of incomes policy. The objective was to give employers the freedom to determine wage increases without the restrictions of pay norms or statutory limits. Instead, companies would be able to link changes in pay to the fortunes of the individual enterprise...

How much changed regarding the wage employment relationship in Britain between 1979 and 1994, as the government tried to encourage greater wage and employment flexibility? This paper uses settlement group wage contact data to track the evolution of nominal wage settlements over time and examines the impact that inflation has on these outcomes. We s...

The deregulation of the system of pay determination in Britain in 1979 was intended to give employers the freedom to determine wage increases without the restriction of pay norms or statutory limits. Yet thirteen years later, despite a rise in productivity, nominal wage growth and the growth of unit labour costs were still widely perceived as endur...

One important feature of labour market policy over the past 15 years has been an emphasis on promoting greater flexibility and responsiveness in wages to the fortunes of individual firms. This study analyses the patterns of persistence in British private manufacturing wage settlements using a unique longitudinal dataset of bargaining groups over th...

One of the enduring problems of British economic management has been the mismatch between the rate of growth of wages and output per person. This paper investigates the relationship between pay and performance since 1980. Industry level analysis confirms the absence of a direct relationship between increases in earnings and the rate of growth in pr...

In British manufacturing during the 1980s, about one in forty wage settlements involved a strike. Using data provided by the Confederation of British Industry, the authors analyze the incidence of strikes in some 6,000 negotiations at the level of the bargaining group. Among their findings are that multiunionism (the presence in a workplace of more...

One-in-forty manufacturing settlements involved a strike during the 1980s. Strike days lost were equivalent to half a day for each worker in manufacturing. On average, for the decade as a whole, real pay increases where there was a strike were 0,7 per cent a year higher than settlements without a strike. Larger bargaining groups were more likely to...

The 1980s witnessed a considerable increase in the rate of growth of manufacturing productivity in Britain. This paper attempts to reveal the extent of systematic change at the work-place which was associated with this improvement. The study focuses on changes in working practices introduced concurrently with negotiations over wage increases; in ev...

Around 1-in-40 wage settlements involves a strike in British manufacturing during the 1980s. The average strike duration was 12 days. Data kindly made available by the CBI are used to analyse strike incidence, duration and pay changes for some 70000 settlements at the level of the bargaining group. Numerous new findings are reported. For example mu...