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Trade Boards Act 1909

Act of Parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Long title	An Act to provide for the establishment of Trade Boards for certain Trades.
Citation	9 Edw. 7. c. 22
Dates
Royal assent	20 October 1909
Other legislation
Relates to	Trade Boards Act 1918

The Trade Boards Act 1909 was a piece of social legislation passed in the United Kingdom in 1909.^[1] It provided for the creation of boards which could set minimum wage criteria that were legally enforceable. It was expanded and updated in the Trade Boards Act 1918. The main provision was to set minimum wages in certain trades with historically low wages, often due to a surplus of available workers due to the widespread employment of workers or lack of skills needed for employment.^[2]

At first it applied to four industries: chain-making, ready-made tailoring, paper-box making, machine-made lace making, and finishing trades.^[3] It was later expanded in 1912: mining and then to other industries with a preponderance of unskilled manual labour.

Winston Churchill, MP then President of the Board of Trade, put the argument for the legislation as follows:^[4]

It is a serious national evil that any class of His Majesty's subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. It was formerly supposed that the working of the laws of supply and demand would naturally regulate or eliminate that evil. The first clear division which we make on the question to-day is between healthy and unhealthy conditions of bargaining. That is the first broad division which we make in the general statement that the laws of supply and demand will ultimately produce a fair price. Where in the great staple trades in the country you have a powerful organisation on both sides, where you have responsible leaders able to bind their constituents to their decision, where that organisation is conjoint with an automatic scale of wages or arrangements for avoiding a deadlock by means of arbitration, there you have a healthy bargaining which increases the competitive power of the industry, enforces a progressive standard of life and the productive scale, and continually weaves capital and labour more closely together. But where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes the trade up as a second string, his feebleness and ignorance generally renders the worker an easy prey to the tyranny; of the masters and middle-men, only a step higher up the ladder than the worker, and held in the same relentless grip of forces—where those conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.

• UK labour law
• Trade Boards Act 1918
• Wages Councils Act 1945
• National Minimum Wage Act 1998
• S Webb and B Webb, Industrial Democracy (1898)
• Liberal reforms
• History of the welfare state in the United Kingdom

• Bean, Jessica S., and George R. Boyer. "The Trade Boards Act of 1909 and the alleviation of household poverty." British journal of industrial relations 47.2 (2009): 240-264. online
• Blackburn, Sheila C. "Curse or cure? Why was the enactment of Britain's 1909 Trade Boards Act so controversial?." British Journal of Industrial Relations 47.2 (2009): 214-239. online
• Blackburn, Sheila. "Ideology and social policy: the origins of the Trade Boards Act." The Historical Journal 34#1 (1991): 43-64.
• S Webb and B Webb, Industrial Democracy (Longmans 1902)

• Trade Boards Act 1909 on Wikisource