Economic Nonsense: 48. Labour Unions are essential to improve wages and conditions for workers

It is actually improved productivity, not labour unions, that has improved the rewards of labour.  People earned less money in former times because productivity was low.  People were paid according to the worth of their input into the production process.  When each worker contributed little, they were low paid.  As technology and production methods improved, so did the worth of each worker's input, and wages increased accordingly.

Employers compete for labour to produce goods and services and to make profits.  They have to pay wages that attract enough workers, and compete with other employers to do so.  It is true that unions can use coercive methods to impose higher costs on employers, but this limits total employment in those sectors, and thus opportunities for employment to non-unionized labour.  The US auto industry features somewhat higher wages in unionized car plants, but there are far fewer of them than there are non-union plants.

Although it is improved productivity that brings higher wages, the effect of unions is often to lower productivity through restrictive work agreements that spread work out among more employees.  More employees equals more members paying union dues.

In post war Britain, one group that received among the highest reward increases was the completely non-unionized sector of people who clean homes – the ones who used to be called char-ladies.  The demand for their services from businessmen and women who did not have the time to do it themselves, coupled with declining numbers available to do it, led to huge pay increases.

The fundamental truth is that unions do not increase pay for workers generally.  They can increase pay for their own members, but at the expense of non-members rather than at the expense of employers.  Declining union membership in both the UK and the US has been the result in changes in the type of work being done.  Mass manufacturing has become more automated, meaning higher wages for fewer workers, leaving others to seek non-unionized work elsewhere.  Some goods once produced domestically are now bought more cheaply from countries with non-unionized workforces.  The result is fewer union jobs.  In the UK unionization has increasingly become a feature of public sector workers rather than private industry.

Maybe Keynes was right after all?

It has to be said that we're not great fans of macroeconomics around here. Not enough good data from enough different places to definitively answer most questions: and that's before we get onto Hayek's point about simply not being able to calculate the economy without using the economy itself to do so. However, this makes us think that Keynes might well have been right on one point: It took far too long but Britain’s traumatic national pay cut is coming to an end. Even on the somewhat crude median earnings measure, pay is finally going up again, even after accounting for the effects of price rises. Wages are rising a little faster and inflation has collapsed, a golden combination for employees across the country.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution and the spread of capitalism, gradually rising wages have been the norm, apart from in wartime and during brief periods of extreme economic dislocation. The fact that this process went into partial reverse over the past few years despite the recovery came as a shock and helped to explain why so many people began to fall out of love with capitalism. It is therefore excellent news that normality is finally re-establishing itself.

One view of unemployment is simply that it happens when labour is more expensive than people are willing to pay for it. That's obvious in that one sense of course. The question becomes then well, how quickly will the repricing happen if we do ever get to that stage? There are those who insist that it happens immediately and thus unemployment and recessions cannot happen. Not an entirely convincing view. There are also those who insist that it can take forever and this justifies all sorts of interventions. And then we've got the evidence of the past few years.

It could be argued that labour in the UK did become too expensive. We had just had the largest and longest peacetime expansion of the economy after all. So, a repricing was necessary. And this is where Keynes could be said to be correct. It takes time because nominal wages are sticky downwards. People really, really, don't like lower numbers on their paycheques. They'll grumble about their real wages falling if it's disguised with a little bit of inflation but they'll riot if the equivalent fall were at a steady price level.

We don't say that the past few years prove it: only that what evidence we have is consistent with this explanation. And, given the paucity of our evidence base, that's probably the best we can do.

Pay is determined by your best alternative job

Economic theory tells us that we really ought to be paid our marginal productivity. And no one at all believes that that actually happens in detail. However, we can take a step back to a point which even Karl Marx got, which is that your pay will reflect the demand for labour. More specifically, the better the alternatives you have the more your pay is going to go up. And here's a nice little story from the Frozen North to illustrate that:

There’s been a lot of attention paid to how Canada’s oil boom has helped make gasoline cheaper. What many people may not realize is that the boom is also driving up the prices they pay for burgers and steaks.

Surging energy investment in Prairie Provinces, home to most of the nation’s farms and cattle ranches, has boosted domestic crude output to a record and sent pump prices to a three-year low. That’s led to jobs on drilling rigs or pipe crews paying two-thirds more than those in livestock, luring cowboys and beef-plant workers to the oil patch.

By cowboy there they really mean more what we English might call a cowman, rather than some Bill Cody type. But it's obvious what is happening. There's no more to do out on the prairie than just oversee the creation of cowpats and that's driving up the wages of those who are there. It's the very same process that leads to a hairdresser making very much more money in the UK than one in China does: the pay of hairdressers is not determined directly by the productivity with comb and scissors, rather by the pay on offer in the next alternative job.

This doesn't mean that the economic theory is wrong though: only that it operates in a rather clunky manner and so is something that gets tended towards rather than an equilibrium state at which we all always exist. As higher productivity jobs appear then they will tempt away some of the labour force. And so all wages tend towards the productivity of the work being done.

At which point we might have a little snark about the UK. There's a lot of complaining going on that the jobs being created these days aren't very well paid, something which is true. But it's also true that the highest productivity jobs in the UK have for some decades been those in wholesale finance in The City. Which is exactly the sector that those same complainants are determined should shrink.

Just like oil wells push up wages for cowboys, so does shutting down highly paid jobs in banking reduce other wages in the same economy.

As we've said before there's something a little odd about UK inequality

We're often told that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in Europe. We're also often told that this is bad, very bad, and something must be done. We've pointed out a number of times that there's another difference in the UK economy, something that makes us rather different from other European economies. And that's the massive importance of London in our economy. In the latest release of figures from the ONS we can see this quite clearly too:

The UK's highest earners live in Wandsworth, Westminster, and Richmond upon Thames - all in London.

The weekly wage of the average worker in those areas was £660.90, £655.70 and £655 respectively in April 2014.

At the other end of the spectrum, the average weekly earnings of someone in West Somerset were just £287.30.

The ONS prefers to use the median as its measure of average earnings “as it is less affected by a relatively small number of very high earners and the skewed distribution of earnings”.

Because we're using the median we're not just recording those bankers in the City there. This is the number which 50% of the people earn more than and 50% less than in each area. And a goodly part of that recorded UK inequality is because of these regional differences in income.

It's also true that living costs vary wildly across the country. Most especially housing costs of course although that's not all. London prices for a pint would choke a fellow from West Somerset just as much as rents or house prices would do.

Given that this is all so then actual inequality is rather lower than we're always told it it. For, of course, we should, if we're going to be concerned about inequality at all, be concerned about inequality of consumption. And if people in one part of the country have higher wages but also face higher living costs then that's an inequality that shouldn't be concerning us.

In no other European country is the capital such a dominant force or influence in the economy,. Thus our inequality is different from their: and arguably our inequality is lower than it is elsewhere, given this specific difference.

The problem with low pay

The Resolution Foundation tells us that there's some great big problem with low pay in the UK. Looking at their actual statistics though it's difficult to see what the problem is. Of course, everyone would like more money for whatever it is that they do. But what keeps people in those low pay jobs seems to be that people opt to stay in those low pay jobs. Only one in four low earners has managed to permanently escape the prison of low pay in the past decade, according to a major study published today.

The Resolution Foundation think tank uncovered the most graphic evidence to date of the scourge of in-work poverty, in which millions working part-time, in sales jobs and the hospitality industry, cannot move up the income ladder. Fewer than one in five people working in restaurants, pubs, takeaways and catering left low pay for good in the past 10 years.

A scourge, eh? Well, that's what the Independent says. The report itself is a bit more measured.

And what they mention, but don't emphasise, is the interesting stuff. For example, many on low pay actively decline to take promotions that will earn them more:

Part of the reason that many of these people who are usually in employment do not progress may be to do with the limited appeal of moving into positions of greater responsibility. The limited pay increases received for moving from an entry-level position to a supervisory role were often as little as 30p or 40p extra an hour. When weighed against the additional stress which comes with the role and the hassle of rearranging their work-life balance, for many people progression may not appeal.

They also find that those who stay in low pay over the long term tend to be single mothers and a number of people who are only in the workforce intermittently. And, of course, given that part time pay is generally lower than full time pay per hour the low paid (defined as those on less than two thirds of median hourly wage) are predominantly those working part time.

When we add all of that together, what do we see? The intermittency will at least in part be women leaving the workforce to have children. Single mothers are obviously balancing that work life balance, and the most common, we would think, reason for not taking a promotion that disrupts that work life balance would be the need to take care of children. And, of course, there's many more women working part time than there are men for exactly the same reason.

It's entirely true that it's not in fact necessary for women to do the bulk of the childcare but that is the way our society generally works. So, we find women with children concentrated in those part time areas, not taking promotions, dropping in and out of the workforce as further children arrive. And thus earning low pay as these are the very things that seem to identify those who stay on low pay.

In other words the Resolution folks have simply found the flip side of the gender pay gap in the UK. That there isn't one but there is a motherhood pay gap. Women with children generally earn less than men or women without children. It's not a great stretch to move from that to the idea that women with children will be predominant among the low paid. And while they don't emphasise this this is the rough outline of their finding.

And the point is that, despite everyone wanting more money for their labours, this is a result of the choices of those individuals. There's a series of trade offs there, responsibility for higher pay, more rigid hours for higher pay, longer hours for higher pay and so on. And people are deciding which they prefer. Which ain't the higher pay.

And, given that it's all a result of individual choices there's really nothing that we should be trying to do about it.

Equal pay for equal work

A recent speech by Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, sheds a good deal of light on the cost of living crisis and the union-led "Britain Needs a Payrise" campaign. Haldane points out how grim the recent situation has been for real wages in the UK economy:

Growth in real wages has been negative for all bar three of the past 74 months. The cumulative fall in real wages since their pre-recession peak is around 10%. As best we can tell, the length and depth of this fall is unprecedented since at least the mid-1800s.

But is this because employers have suddenly become selfish capitalists, whereas before they were paying workers out of the good of their heart? Or is something else at play?

Productivity – GDP per hour worked – was broadly unchanged in the year to 2014 Q2, leaving it around 15% below its pre-crisis trend level. The level of productivity is no higher than it was six years ago. This is the so-called “productivity puzzle”. Productivity has not flat-lined for that long in any period since the 1880s, other than following demobilisation after the World Wars.

We usually think that wages and productivity will be pretty closely related. Employers are unlikely to consistently pay above productivity, because they'd lose money. But equally, they'll be unable to consistently pay far below productivity (less the share needed to rent the capital involved) because in a reasonably competitive market firms will compete their workers away with more attractive job offers.

We might think this is particularly true at the low wage end of the market, because much less of low-skilled workers productivity is job specific. An accountant makes a very poor lawyer, and a civil engineer is not qualified to write code, but a worker in McDonalds will be similarly good at Burger King, or for that matter Waterstones, JR Wetherspoon, Lidl or most other relatively low-skilled areas.

So basic economic models suggest pay will track productivity. And what do we see on the macro level?

The deficit in pay tracks the deficit in productivity. Of course, the situation for public sector workers is a bit different—we actually measure their productivity mainly by inputs. If their pay goes up, their measured productivity goes up. It's hard to see how else we would do it. But the overall picture suggests that the real pay decline is down to a real productivity decline. We haven't moved away from equal pay for equal work—we've just had a big horrible recession and a sluggish recovery!

Where does Will Hutton get these ideas from?

This is just fascinating from Will Hutton:

The fall in real wages is blamed on EU immigrants, when the real culprit is more old-fashioned: workers in general, and young workers in particular, have not been organised enough to offer countervailing labour market power. It is not technology, globalisation or immigration that have triggered such a generalised collapse in real wages – it is the weakness of trade unions.

Where does this confident assertion come from? He provides us with no actual evidence to support it. Just the flat statement that it is so because Will Hutton has declared it to be so.

This is a statement that rather needs to be tested, don't you think? For example, unions are rather stronger in Germany than they are in the UK. Real wages have been declining in Germany:

After a decade of falling real wages, Germans’ purchasing power has started to increase over the past few years. In 2013, wage hikes are clearly outpacing inflation on the back of rising employment and a robust economy.

Unions are rather weaker in the US private sector than they are in the UK. And we all know the complaints about the stagnation and possibly fall in real wages over there.

We even have a report about this. The effects of globalisation upon incomes around the world. By a real economist using actual real data. The finding of which is that the people who haven't seen much gain from globalisation, the people who have had those stagnant real incomes as a result of it, are largely those below median incomes in the already rich countries. We can argue about whether that makes it all worth it or not (the 80% rises in income for almost all of the poor of the world make it so for us) but it's very definitely evidence that it's not the absence of unions that has led to the current situation: it's globalisation.

So where does Willy get his confident assertion from?

Video: the state of the minimum wage debate

Last month I spoke on the minimum wage at LibertarianHome's meet-up, and they have uploaded the video of the talk, as well as a very good summary write-up of my comments. I had a great time at the talk and I'm looking forward to attending more of their meet-ups in future.

The NHS is meant to be for patients, not staff

Jeremy Hunt has annoyed people today by refusing to give NHS workers a blanket 1% pay rise on top of the incremental pay rise they were already supposed getting. That’s hardly a surprise: the NHS is a religion, and Hunt’s decision is the equivalent of giving the finger to the Pope. But he’s got a point.

According to the BBC’s Nick Triggle, “all NHS staff will be getting at least a 1% pay rise. Just over half receive incremental pay rises each year - determined by their length of service and performance. Those whose incremental increase is less will have their pay rise made up to 1%, but many will get more. Last year, the average incremental pay rise was 3.5%.”

In other words, today’s announcement means that NHS staff won’t be getting an additional 1% pay rise over their existing agreed pay increases. That’s a real terms drop, but lots of the coverage I’ve seen has suggested that this means that nurses won’t be getting any rise at all.

Remember that real private sector wages have fallen every year since 2010. Public sector workers already have greater job security than private sector workers, so it's difficult to see why they should be regarded as being automatically entitled to pay rises that most private sector workers aren’t getting.

Obviously, there’s no ex-ante reason NHS staff should get a pay rise. The point of the NHS is to provide care for patients, not to provide welfare to NHS staff. Since the NHS's budget is limited, a pay rise to staff means foregone spending elsewhere.

It’s worth noting that, at least according to the government, this pay rise would be equivalent to 6,000 nurses. Now, I don’t know how the NHS should spend its money – it may well be the case that NHS patients are better served by additional staff or more investment in medical equipment than they would be by this wage increase. Maybe a pay rise is the best way to improve patients’ outcomes, maybe not.

I’m left wondering why NHS pay should be a political issue at all. In the end, this story just underlines the need for devolution of pay bargaining to NHS trusts. National pay bargaining makes little sense given differing labour markets and patient needs across the country. In other words, a pay rise that makes sense for patients in Suffolk may not make sense for patients in Sunderland. We don’t want Whitehall to determine supplies of medical equipment or the allocation of labour hours between staff. Why should pay negotiations be any different?

There's no such thing as a free minimum wage hike

Paul Kirby, who was head of the No. 10 Policy Unit until last year, has a long post calling for a “dramatic, historic increase" to the minimum wage, bringing the levels from the current £6.10/hour to £10/hour in London and £8/hour in the rest of the country. It’s a bold post, but ultimately most of his arguments fail. In this post I try to address the key points he makes in favour of a hike.

Low wage earners are, overwhelmingly, providing services for domestic consumers within the UK economy. They work in shops, cafes and hotels. They cut our hair, they clean our houses, they look after our kids and they care for our elderly.  They are not  in manufacturing, competing on the price of their labour with other countries. What they do has to be done in this country. Nor is it tradable with other countries. If the Minimum Wage increases, it impacts equally on all of an employer’s competitors, so there is no disadvantage.

Even though nobody can switch to a cheaper hairdresser in India, they can get their hair cut less often, or have their homes cleaned less frequently, or send their children to creches with fewer minders per child or their parents to care homes with fewer carers. Kirby is assuming that demand for domestic services is inelastic – that is, it does not change much according to price. Obviously, this may differ between different services, but in without evidence to the contrary (Kirby gives none) it does not seem reasonable to assume that people’s demand for services will stay the same even if the prices of those services rise.

Bear in mind that a minimum wage increase would only affect the bottom of the market, where you would expect customers to be the most price-sensitive. The economic evidence suggests that increases in the minimum wage lead to slower job growth, particularly for young workers and in industries with a high proportion of low-paid staff.

Raising the lowest wages does not mean that employers simply have to, or will, just cut jobs or working hours to keep the wage bill constant. The evidence is clear that employers find a variety of solutions.  Firstly, they restrain pay growth for their better paid staff. Secondly, they increase prices to consumers. Thirdly, they improve productivity and get more out of each hour that they are paying for. And then they squeeze their profits. Through productivity gains, they either earn more revenue or cut the amount of labour they need.

Employers do not try to ‘keep the wage bill constant’. They try to make a profit on the labour they hire. If hiring an extra manager led to extra profits, it wouldn’t matter that doing so also increased the overall wage bill. A minimum wage imposes a price floor on labour, so any worker whose total productivity is less than the minimum wage floor represents a net loss to their employer – which a profit-maximising firm will respond to by firing the worker. It makes no difference whether or not that firm has ‘restrained pay growth’ for its other workers: if an employee is loss-making at the lowest wage a firm can pay them, a profit-maximising firm will fire them. (Or simply not hire additional workers who would be loss making on net.) Even if firms can only tell the average productivity of their workers, because of information problems, they will demand less labour in total.

On the possibility of raising prices to make the worker profitable, see the previous point: if demand for the service is price inelastic, this might work, but it’s quite a claim to say that this is the case for most minimum wage-supplied labour.

Wages are not the only cost of labour to firms, either. Firms may reduce costs in response to minimum wage increases by cutting back on perks like lunch breaks and sick leave, as Starbucks did after it agreed to pay additional corporation tax in 2012.

Increasing low pay has a limited impact on the overall costs of most businesses. In some sectors, very few earn less than the living wage, e.g only 6% in manufacturing. Even in hotels and catering, which is one of the biggest sector for the Minimum Wage, only 17% of jobs are below the living wage and raising the Minimum Wage to the Living Wage would only add 6% to the wage bill. This is the highest impact for any sector. More importantly, labour is only a proportion of all costs, e.g. 25-35% for restaurants.

Is a 2.1% increase in costs for labour-intensive firms not something to be concerned about? The fact that ‘most businesses’ would not be affected seems beside the point. (The reverse of this is true too: if Kirby’s other points were correct, would his suggested minimum wage hike be a bad idea because it would affect “only” 17% of workers?)

There is no real evidence of any minimum wages in the world adversely effecting employment levels.

This is totally wrong. In 2006 Neumark and Wascher reviewed over one hundred existing studies of the employment impact of the minimum wage. Of these, two-thirds showed a relatively consistent indication that minimum wage increases cause increases in unemployment. Of the thirty-three strongest studies, 85 per cent showed unemployment effects. And “when researchers focus on the least-skilled groups most likely to be adversely affected by minimum wages, the evidence for disemployment effects seems especially strong”.

Few people stay on low-wage jobs for their whole lives: minimum wage work is usually a stepping-stone to something better where employees can acquire human capital. There is evidence that suggests that minimum wages deter young workers from acquiring these skills that allow them to get better jobs in the long run. Note also that minimum wages have been used explicitly to kick away the ladder for minorities: by whites in pre-Apartheid South Africa; by anti-Hispanic campaigner Ron Unz in California; and by, er, Polly Toynbee in a recent Guardian column.

Tyler Cowen reminds us to make sure our views of sticky wages and minimum wages are consistent: if “worker-imposed minimum wages” (sticky wages) lead to unemployment, as most Keynesians (among others, including me) believe, why would “state-imposed minimum wages” not also do so? (“Have you no respect for the law (of demand)?”, asks Will Wilkinson.)

Given that we know that minimum wage increases usually cause some unemployment, why take this chance when we could just give money to poor people directly? As we’ve been saying for years, the difference between the current pre-tax minimum wage and the post-tax “living wage” is roughly as much as a minimum wage worker pays in income tax and national insurance: in other words, if that worker didn’t pay tax, they would be earning a living wage. It looks as if the personal allowance will soon rise to the minimum wage level, but the national insurance contribution threshold needs to rise too.

But let’s go even further: if we replaced the tax credit and welfare systems with a Negative Income Tax (or Basic Income – call it whatever you want), we would top-up the wages of low-paid workers directly. Jeremy Warner calls for this in the Telegraph today, and I outlined something similar a few weeks ago. Yes, I’d like all the standard supply-side deregulations as well, but a Negative Income Tax would act as an insurance policy against the potential down-sides of such deregulations, strengthening workers’ bargaining power and addressing the fears of those who worry that deregulations will hurt some workers.

I understand that many Conservatives are coming to see a minimum wage hike as a political ‘free lunch’ – a popular and surprising way of showing an interest in the welfare of the poor that does not affect the government’s balance sheet. I hope this is not true. Contrary to Kirby’s claims, there are good empirical and theoretical reasons to think that raising the floor on the price of labour will cause more unemployment. And unemployment destroys lives. There are lots of things we can and should do to help the poor right now. Raising the minimum wage isn't one of them.