The outbreak of English agricultural unionism that began in Warwickshire in 1872, owing much to the charismatic leadership of Joseph Arch, a labourer and lay preacher, is well documented in labour history, but its impact on agricultural wages remains a source of dispute. Contemporary trade union leaders and later historians of trade unionism have generally attributed the sharp rise and subsequent decline of agricultural wages in the 1870s to the growth and collapse of unionism, although historians' conclusions about its long-run effects are typically less optimistic than trade unionists'. Economic historians, however, have ascribed these agricultural wage changes to the economy-wide boom and slump and have maintained that unions had only a small positive effect in the short run and no effect in the long run.

In Discussion Paper No. 484, George Boyer and Research Fellow Tim Hatton note first that previous studies have been based on extremely weak data: some authors present wage rates for certain counties in 1874 or 1875 without citing their sources, while others present `average' wage changes from 1870-1 to 1874-5 without stating the wage rate or specifying which counties are included. Second, none of the authors controls explicitly for other possible determinants of agricultural wages: several arbitrarily assign the entire wage increase during 1870-4 to unionization, while others assign most if not all of the increase to `favourable market conditions'.

In this first econometric study of the effect of this outbreak of rural unionism on wages, Boyer and Hatton first apply cross- sectional analysis to a series of annual observations of weekly cash wages for 117 farms located throughout England for 1870-80, reported by A Wilson Fox in his second report to the Board of Trade on agricultural labourers (1905). Using regional data on union density and changes in urban wages and county-level data on occupational structure and farming patterns as additional `control' variables, they find that unionism raised wages by about 9% in highly unionized counties and by about 3% overall, while unionism's subsequent decline eliminated most of these gains.

They then employ a time-series approach to estimate the impact on the average agricultural wage over 1864-1902, controlling for the effects of urban employment conditions (through migration) on rural labour supply and the agricultural wage. They find that rising union density at its peak raised average agricultural wages by 6% and that this effect, although reduced by the subsequent decline in unionism, persisted into the 1880s. Surprisingly, the brief revival of rural unionism in the early 1890s had no discernible effect on agricultural wages.

Did Joseph Arch Raise Agricultural Wages? Rural Trade Unions and the Labour Market in Late-Nineteenth Century England
George R Boyer and T J Hatton