Farm Wages
Local Records
The Museum of Agriculture in Reading has the pay records of a farm in
Stoke Poges in the 1930s. The average weekly wage for nine workers rose
from £1.11s.10d in 1930 to £1.14s.9d in 1931 before
falling back to £1.10s.8d for twelve workers in 1933 and
£1.10s.7d for only eight in 1934. It looks as though the
recession began to hit farming.
There are also records of a farm in Taplow in 1942 where the average pay was £3.4s.8d. How do these individual records compare with the national picture? And how do farm wages compare with that of other workers?
The National Picture:
farming and engineering
We have figures of pay for some occupations going back to the start of
the last century. In 1900 a farm labourer
earned on average 14s.10d per week. At the same time a fitter and
turner in engineering earned £1.18s — two and a
half times as much.
In 1930 an adult male on a farm was paid £1.11s.8d a week on average (almost spot on the Stoke Poges figure) while a fitter and turner earned £3.2s.11d.
By 1947 farm pay had risen to
£4.0s.10d and fitters/turners to £5.6s.7p
— now only one and a quarter times the farm worker's, surely
reflecting the urgent need for more home-grown food as war-time
rationing continued. We also know that
the weekly wages of shop assistants and hairdressers were around
£4.10s to £5.
From the 1950s till now
There was little relative change during the fifties and sixties but in
the turbulent seventies and eighties the gap opened up again. By 2005
the pay of a skilled agricultural worker averaged £295 a week
while a skilled worker in the metal and electrical trades earned
£450 a week on average.
Comparing 1900’s
Wages with Today’s
Before we make comparisons with 1900 we must allow for inflation.
Retail prices (prices in the shops and elsewhere) in 2005 are almost
100 times higher than in 1900. A pound in 1900 would buy what it would
need £100 to buy in 2005 – apart from the fact that
what is available to buy has changed so much!
Thus we can calculate that the equivalent of today's £295 a week on the farm was £71 in 1900, a fourfold increase in "real terms", while the 1900 equivalent of the fitter and turner's £450 was £181, an increase of two and a half times.
In Real Terms, Farm Wages
have Fallen Back
These figures are drawn from a variety of official sources and we may
not always be comparing like with like exactly. (In particular skill
requirements have changed.) But, for what they are worth, the chart
suggests that since the nineteen sixties, in terms of what they will
buy, farm wages have risen little and fallen back in relation to wages
in engineering.
Reference:
Museum of Agriculture in Reading &
Office of National Statistics
© STEAM
2005
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