See C.P.Mills, "Legislation and Decisions Affecting Industrial Relations", Journal of Industrial Relations, March, 1968.
2.
The weighted average minimum weekly award rate for adult males rose by $7.30 during the period. There were two basic wage increases of $2 each, and general margins increases in 1963, 1965 and 1966. A rough estimate of the overall effect of these margins increases is 79c, 59c and 86c respectively. No allowance has been made for the effect of the 1966 minimum wage decision.
3.
J.E. Isaac, Wages and Productivity (Cheshire, 1967 ), p. 125.
4.
James Robinson, "Summing Up", Arbitration in a Whirlpool, 1968Residential Convention of the Industrial Relations Society of Victoria, p. 22.
5.
Keith Hancock, Arbitration in a Whirlpool, ibid.
6.
Quoted in Australian Financial Review, 4.12.69, p. 5 (my italics).
7.
See Hancock, op. cit., and also J. R. Crossley, "Wage Structure and the Future of the Incomes Policy", Scottish Journal of Political Economy, June, 1968, for a discussion of the same problem in a British context.
8.
"One of [our findings] deserves further comment: it concerns cases in which earnings in a given employment have fallen behind those generally available elsewhere to the grades of labour concerned. The fact that a fall in relative earnings has reduced the supply of labour does not seem to us inconsistent with our other findings, that a rise in relative earnings is not generally indispensable if the supply is to be raised: the stimulus to leave a given employment is evidently greater when earnings there are exceptionally low relative to those in most alternative employments than when earnings in only one or a few other employments are exceptionally high." (O.E.C.D., Wages and Labour Mobility, Paris, 1965, p. 19.)
9.
Commonwealth Public Service Board, Press Release, 20.12.69.
10.
Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Labour Report no. 50, pp. 81-2. In September, 1960, 14.9 per cent of private employees received award wages with a margin of less than $4 per week or the basic wage itself. If all general wage increases are added to this $4 margin together with the estimated effect of the 1967 Metal Trades decision (see C. P. Mills, op. cit.), but not including minimum wage decisions, the total is just 26 cents over the current minimum wage.
11.
Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Labour Report no. 52, pp. 87-103.
12.
This is borne out by the fact that had the under $36 group worked the same hours as the average worker, their straight-time wage would have been almost the basic wage. Yet the 1960 survey shows a group of about the same size as the under $36 group earning margins of up to $2 per week. To reconcile the two surveys would then require the assumption that the under $36 group received virtually no margins nor over-award payments.
13.
Successful, that is, in shepherding the growth of wages along its productivity path while maintaining internationally low levels of inflation in a full-employment economy.
