Tag Archives: alison wold

Time for the Lib Dems to blow the final whistle on national wage settlements

It’s over 50 years since the campaign by Jimmy Hill, then chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, successfully scrapped the maximum wage which operated throughout the football league until 1961. Some probably lament the commercialisation of the game which it set in motion. But the idea that individuals should have a ceiling placed on their wage-earning potential by the authorities seems quaintly absurd today.

Except in the public sector. If you’re paid by the government — if, for example, you work in schools, colleges and universities, or the civil service and local government — then your wages are defined by national pay rates determined by Whitehall and trade union negotiations. It doesn’t matter which part of the country you work, you operate within that centrally-set national pay framework. It is as quaint and as absurd as the wage rules of football were half a century ago.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 97 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • cim
    @David Allen I think the key - for electoral communications, at least - is to skip the description of the process entirely and go straight to the outcome. Yo...
  • David Warren
    The last sentence sums up it for me. We are getting squeezed out in the majority of constituencies and the beneficiaries of the progressive protest vote are the...
  • Alex Macfie
    "those on the left don’t tend to see individuals but see people as members of identity groups," so do many on the Right, using "identity groups" to divide peo...
  • Jana
    My son-in-law is a police officer. He tells me that there is no point arresting shop-lifters as they always get bailed and will be shop-lifting again within the...
  • Jason Connor
    Well done for putting in the effort in an inner London constituency, and showing how it can be done. There have been similar issues in Greenwich where the rulin...