Britannica Money

Table of Contents

The supply price of labour

The foregoing directs attention to the supply price of labour to the job—the rate that must be paid if employers are to be able to attract and retain the quantity of labour that they wish to employ at that rate. Entry into an occupation generally imposes certain monetary costs; there may also be subjective costs, for example, in the effort of concentration required by preparation for examinations. The exercise of any occupation may be attended by disadvantages that require monetary compensation or may provide satisfactions and amenities that make workers willing to accept lower pay. For each occupation the various costs and benefits can be set off against the pay, and entrants will choose the one in which the prospective balance of advantage seems greatest. If more workers are to be attracted to and retained in a given occupation with unchanged conditions on the side of supply, the rate of pay in that occupation must be raised relative to others. An extension of supply will work to the opposite effect: for instance, if there is more public provision for secondary and tertiary education, and if rising standards of living enable more families to bear the costs of training, then a given number of workers will come to be available in a given occupation at a lower relative rate of pay. Here is to be found the reason for the occupational pay structure extending over a smaller range in developed than in poor countries and for the reduction in the margins for skill and the relative rate of pay for clerical work in the developed economies during the present century.

A number of considerations thus indicate that changes in the supply of labour influence its relative wage, although it is quite another thing to affirm the general theory of prices and assert that the rate of pay in any occupation tends to equality with the long-run supply price of labour to that occupation. The highly subjective nature of many of the costs and benefits involved in labour supply, and their dependence upon socially determined norms, strips the notion of a long-run supply price of any practical meaning. Nevertheless, in the absence of an extension of supply, a fall in the relative rate of pay of an occupation will bring a check to recruitment, followed by some withdrawal to other jobs of those already in the occupation. A rise in the relative rate of pay needs longer to take effect where proficiency takes long to acquire. Some types of proficiency may be limited by nature, and the rise in the rate of pay that follows on an extension of demand for them constitutes an economic rent—i.e., a payment that is not required to maintain supply. In general, however, given time, the number of proficient workers available to follow a given occupation will be increased by a rise in the relative rate of pay it offers.

Productivity and the price of labour

Orthodox economic theories

The complex character of labour as a commodity is nowhere more evident than in the relationship between pay and productivity. According to conventional economic theory, productivity should be the straightforward determinant of the employer’s demand for labour. An employer who wishes to maximize profits will continue to recruit only up to the point at which the extra output gained from another worker equals the wage that worker is to be paid. This theory of marginal productivity lies at the heart of the orthodox economic theory of labour.

The value of the theory, however, has come under question. Empirically minded economists note the profound difficulty of applying the theory when the productivity of individual labour in most organizations is unmeasurable and wage structures are internally connected. Aware of its weak analytic power, contemporary theorists in the orthodox tradition have suggested minor elaborations. Noting a number of apparently discordant empirical and institutional features of the labour market, they have tried to bring them into the scope of formal economic analysis. Thus, taking the finding that local labour markets support a wide range of wage rates for a given grade of labour, search theory has tried to explain the phenomenon as a product of imperfections in information about available jobs and the consequent cost of searching. The same phenomenon is addressed by efficiency wage theories, which propose that the higher-paid occupants of a job grade are also achieving above-average productivity. Implicit contract theories, noting the considerable duration of most labour contracts, account for it as a necessary cost in the effort to overcome the difficulty of monitoring an employee’s performance. That wages do not fall to levels that might, according to orthodox theory, eliminate unemployment is explained by insider–outsider theorists as a reflection of collusion between self-interested parties—in particular, those possessing jobs.

Such theorizing is promising, but it has shown relatively little explanatory power. It remains limited by a highly constraining view of the worker as an individual of purely rational motives and by an inability to grasp the significance of collective norms and behaviour in labour matters. It fails to explore the consequences of a world of imperfect product and labour markets, and its blindness to the open-ended character of the employment relationship prevents it from analyzing the significance of the varied institutional devices with which managers try to elicit productivity.

Empirical, multidisciplinary analysis

Something can be learned from the way in which employers manage productivity in practice. Employers pay great attention to internal pay structures, using job evaluation and other techniques to assure a stable and controlled structure of status within the work force. They give less detailed attention to what other employers are paying, so long as they keep the general level of pay increases broadly in line. They generally use specific incentive schemes more to generate an atmosphere of cooperation and flexibility than to make people work harder. Improvement in labour productivity comes overwhelmingly from technological change, requiring employees not to work harder but to work differently. The stress of such change to the employee is essentially temporary. It involves working with different workmates, facing the daunting challenge of learning a new skill, mourning for the lost opportunity to perform a skill of which one was once proud, and so on. Managers typically respond to the stress of meeting technological change with a temporary payment, although it may not seem temporary at the time. They may, for instance, introduce a new skill grade to match the new technique but remove it in a grade restructuring after a few years when memories of the upheaval have dimmed.

Employers are primarily concerned with unit costs, which involve both absolute wage levels and labour productivity. This concern arises from the pressures of the product market, which tend to override opportunities to pay what the labour market will bear. Employees, by contrast, think primarily of relative wages, especially very local relativities, and have only a fitful, vague, and temporary concern with their own productivity. They also place a relatively low priority on the opportunities offered by alternative wage levels in the labour market. It is in meeting this asymmetry of aspirations that the successful management of productivity lies, requiring constant tactical skill and personal attention on the part of employers.

Such management implies the antithesis of marginal-productivity theory for two reasons. The first is that in a complex organization the productivity of the individual means nothing, and the productivity of the overall organization means everything. The second is that, in a world of imperfect markets, expecting prices to approach equilibrium in just one—the labour market—misses the important fact that competition is a total process, pursued on many fronts, such as design, marketing, and labour productivity—of which a competitive price for labour is only one.

Labour is by any standards an exceptional commodity. The quality of it is molded by its social context, and it is able to influence the shape of its own markets. Only a multidisciplinary analytic approach can unravel this complexity. The competitive forces of the economists’ marketplace do indeed have a substantial impact upon the price of labour, although through more than just the specific market for labour itself. The level at which these forces are most evident is at that of broad aggregates and long time spans.