HC Deb 15 February 1979 vol 962 cc623-4W
Mr. Ron Lewis

asked the Secretary of State for Employment if he will publish in the Official Report a table showing the relative positions, in terms of wages and salaries, of specified major groups of manual and professional workers in 1970, 1974, 1978 and at the latest available date.

Mr. Harold Walker

The published new earnings survey 1970, 1974 and 1978 results, available in the Library, include extensive information on earnings for April reference pay periods of full-time manual and non-manual men and women in a large number of major occupational and other groups which are identified in the survey and represented in the sample by at least 100 employees. Information is given in several forms, including average weekly earnings and their make-up, average hourly earnings, and the distributions of weekly and hourly earnings above and below the averages. It would he neither practicable nor reasonable to republish such extensive information in theOfficial Report, with the groups rearranged to show their relative positions according to one or each of the various measures of earnings levels.

Such positions would depend on whether pay settlements affecting the groups had been implemented before the survey or subsequently, possibly with retrospective effect on the pay for the reference period. Moreover, they would not take account of other variations in average earnings from month to month due to the incidence of overtime, bonuses and other variable components of total pay, work stoppages and absences and seasonal and other flow of workers into and out of the groups. They would not have regard to the spread of earnings within groups.

The following figures express the survey estimates of average gross weekly earnings of broad groups of full-time employees aged 18 and over whose pay for the survey reference period was not affected by absence as a percentage of the corresponding estimate for all such employees:

1970 1974 1978
Non-manual men … 135 129 126
Manual men … 102 104 101
Non-manual women … 69 70 76
Manual women … 52 57 63
All men and women … 100 100 100

These figures are affected by under-representation of some groups in the 1974 survey and by exclusion of the effects of some belated settlements from the 1978 survey returns.