By 1921, a total of sixty-three Trade Boards covering 39 trades and governing the wages of approximately 3,000,00o workers in the United Kingdom had been set up. Of these boards nineteen, being established for Irish industries, now fall under the control of the Irish Free State, one is inoperative and one new board has been set up since 1921, making 44 boards active in Great Britain in 1928.
The Trade Boards System as it now stands is bipartite. Legis lative, that is rate-fixing power, is vested in the board set up for each trade, while administrative and executive functions rest with the Ministry of Labour and in practice involve four distinct features: 1. Setting up of boards; 2. Confirmation or rejection of rates decided upon by the Trade Boards; 3. Enforcement of legal rates; 4. Decision in matters relating to the demarcation between boards and their spheres of activity.
The general composition of a Trade Board remains the same under the Act of 1918 as that of 1909. The underlying principle is that of representation and it falls to the Minister of Labour to discover the component parts of each industry, to assign ap propriate weight to each and to find acceptable persons to repre sent each interest, so that the board as a whole can represent the trade in entirety and work in harmony. It is customary for the Minister to consult the various organised sections of a trade con cerning these appointments and also to name persons who can express the point of view of such unorganised sections of the trade as there may be. The "appointed" members are usually chosen from among the professional classes such as professors, lawyers, social workers, etc. It is provided by statute that where a considerable body of women are engaged in the trade at least one of the appointed members must be a woman.
The Minister of Labour is empowered to make regulations with respect to the constitution and proceedings of Trade Board meet ings including the method of voting, but apart from those rules which he chooses to lay down boards govern themselves.
Rates are arrived at by a process similar to bargaining assisted by the appointed members in the capacity of conciliators. Ap pointed members, however, have the power to vote just as other members of a board, but in practice this vote is seldom cast unless agreement between the two sides after negotiation becomes impossible and then it is done with reluctance.
As to the matter of what is a minimum wage, the Act of 1918 gives no more guidance than that of 1909, and experience shows that the two sides of a board as well as the appointed members usually hold divergent views as to the terms of their reference. Employers probably most frequently interpret a minimum wage for a trade to be that already "payable to the lowest grade of worker in the least well equipped factory in the least expensive part of the country," while those on the workers' side stand for the current trade union rate in that or an allied trade as the minimum. Appointed members, on the other hand, are most likely to construe the minimum in terms of their philosophy of what wages are and should be. In practice the failure of the Act to provide a more definite guiding principle works both for good and ill, on the one hand giving leeway for a broad construction of the purposes of the Act, and on the other, in certain cases making for confusion and too wide divergency in rates between trades. When it comes to the bargaining co-incident to wage fixing in a board, workers generally press the argument of the "living wage" as a basis for negotiation, and employers adhere to "what the trade can bear." The result is almost invariably a compromise.
In this way the Trade Boards system enables the circumstances of each separate trade to be considered when the rate is fixed. Each trade, moreover, is able to vary its own minimum rates at any time without waiting upon the remaining trades. For an employer to pay wages below those fixed by a Trade Board is an injustice remedial by criminal law.
(1) To create instruments of self-government in poorly or ganised trades.
(2) To prevent a sudden fall in wages after the World War.
(3) To adjust wages upon a fair basis in future.