| This dissertation, based on recently opened archival sources, studies the efforts of successive Conservative and Labour governments to institute a consensual incomes policy between the "pay pause" of 1961 and the wage-price freeze of 1966. It also tries to place these efforts within a larger framework of the postwar trend, both in Britain and throughout the industrialized world, towards neo-corporatist interpenetration of the state with the peak organizations of labor and management. The failure of voluntary incomes policy is recounted along with moves to reinforce the policy by parliamentary statute. By the time of the government-imposed wage-price freeze of July 1966, tripartism, which was an integral part of the postwar settlement, had been seriously compromised. Reasons for the failure of consensual incomes policy are adduced that include both the interaction of the British institutions of collective bargaining with the "logic of collective action," which encouraged small bargaining units to "free-ride," as well as the antiestablishmentarian tenor of the 1960s, which made it difficult for elite policy-makers at the center to command allegiance from the rank and file of labor or business. British incomes policy's connections with Britain's balance of payment problems and with mid-1960s' strains on the international monetary system are also examined, and the importance of transatlantic financial diplomacy is highlighted. |
