British wartime and postwar wage growth outpaced a full century of prior gains

Evidence

By 1920, nominal weekly wages for British manual workers had soared 178 percent with respect to their prewar levels— a high of £3.70 compared to £1.26 in 1910 (Scholliers and Zamagni 1995, table A.23, 261). To give a sense of these gains, consider that for an entire century before the war, the incremental increase of average British weekly earnings from one year to the next never exceeded more than £0.10. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 359

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: WWI conscripted over a third of Britain’s male workforce — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 165; Postwar British workers commanded a historically unprecedented share of national income — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1485; Postwar labor power drove real wages and wage shares to postwar highs. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1553 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Postwar British workers commanded a historically unprecedented share of national income #corroborates (0.95) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1485
• Postwar labor power drove real wages and wage shares to postwar highs. #corroborates (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1553
• British wartime state intervention raised real wages while Italian workers’ real wages fell. #expands (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1653
• Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174
• Labor shortage forced Britain to abandon free-market wage distribution #qualifies (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 153
• Pound revaluation in the 1920s forced down wages through mass unemployment #complicates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1683