The Persistent Problem of Low Pay

The pro-trade board sentiments of social reformers like Tawney were rewarded when, in 1913, the system was extended to five more industries. ¹ Tawney’s optimism was not completely shared by the trade union movement. In 1910, the secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, W.A. Appleton could remark that the Trade Boards Act demonstrated the futility of attempting to achieve the millennium simply through acts of Parliament. ² From 1911, the TUC and the Labour Party, concerned with rising prices and rents, agitated for a universal minimum wage. Will Crooks introduced a bill in the Commons proposing a general legal minimum of thirty shillings a week for all adult workers. ³ The motion was subjected to trenchant criticism, most notably by Arthur Steel-Maitland, for being crude and unworkable. ⁴ When the national miners’ strike of 1912 prompted further interest in a living wage, Crooks renewed his campaign. Beatrice Webb confided smugly in her diary: ‘The ordinary Trade Unionist has got the National Minimum theory well fixed in his slow solid head.’ ⁵