Victorian Teachers' Salaries and Wage Determination Criteria

Abstract

Generations of students in Labour Economics can repeat as a litany the possible causes of occupational wage differences. Textbooks are brimful of recitations about the interaction of supply, demand, power, sociological and rationalising or work value influences. But while it is easy to survey the field of possible explanations—and to stress from the bias of one or another discipline a favourite explanation to which primacy may be attached—little guidance flows from theory to policy. It is interesting, therefore, occasionally to docu ment criteria employed in a wage arbitration setting, and to compare these criteria with the combined range of issues normally canvassed in the literature on occupational wage differences. This form of exercise helps to highlight a deficiency of the Labour Economics literature, in that it does not regularly relate the theories it canvasses to the applied settings in which arbitrators or wage policy determintators find themselves placed. The wage situation we have chosen to briefly document and comment upon in this article is that of deter minations of the Victorian Teachers' Tribunal, in particular its use of the work value concept. Teachers' salaries seem an especially suitable example for our purpose, since their determination is characterized by a particularly strong interplay of social and economic considerations.