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The aim of this study was to investigate whether perceptions of fair pay are characterised by social norms about the appropriate bases of pay differentials.

In order that the employees could voice their opinions without the restrictions of pre‐coded categories individual interviews were carried out with employees from five private sector organizations. The design of the study allowed an examination of attitudes towards pay criteria in the context of changes in organizational pay structures towards more individualism in pay awards.

The most popular bases of pay were “responsibility”, “qualifications” and “performance”. The attitudes appeared to reflect widespread norms about the most appropriate bases of pay. There was some evidence for an interaction between employee attitudes towards pay determination and organizational characteristics on the design and implementation of pay policies.

The interview methodology restricted the size of the sample and consequently the generalisations that can be made from the findings. Future research could use qualitative or quantitative methods to check whether the findings replicate with different types of groups of employees.

The paper contains useful information for human resource practitioners about maintaining “felt fairness” in the design of new pay systems.

The qualitative approach of this study produces rich information about employee perceptions of pay differentials in the context of current changes towards more individualised pay determination.

A striking feature of Jaques' work is his “no nonsense” attitude to the “manager‐subordinate” relationship. His blunt account of the origins of this relationship seems at first sight to place him in the legalistic “principles of management” camp rather than in the ranks of the subtler “people centred” schools. We shall see before long how misleading such first impressions can be, for Jaques is not making simplistic assumptions about the human psyche. But he certainly sees no point in agonising over the mechanism of association which brings organisations and work‐groups into being when the facts of life are perfectly straightforward and there is no need to be squeamish about them.

Industry studies suggest that since 1945 there have been both contractions and expansions in the earnings differentials of skilled and semi‐skilled workers. Unpublished data from the New Earnings Survey for Britain enables further detailed study of these differentials to be made. Changes in the distribution of employment were a less significant contributor to changes in male earnings differentials than were changes in differentials which took place within each industry. For females it is shown that similar differential narrowing took place but changes in the rankings of industries by pay level were also influential.

Existing research concerning the impact of unions on relative wages provides evidence for the existence of significant union/non‐union wage differentials. However, union practices are deemed to have a more pervasive effect on the overall distribution of wages, reducing wage differentials across and within establishments. Attempts to explore union effects on wage dispersion in the context of the Italian labour market. Several indicators of wage dispersion are computed, using both industry and establishment level data, in the attempt to ascertain the different routes through which union presence affects the structure of wages. The empirical evidence shows that Italian trade unions have pursued “egalitarian” objectives and have succeeded in shaping pay policies which, through central and local negotiations, raise low wages and reduce wage differentials both among skill categories and across establishments.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review and critique of what we already know about pay systems in Chinese state‐owned enterprises, to identify the gaps in the literature and to stimulate more research in this area.

The paper first describes the policy issues at the macro‐level (government policies) in order to put micro‐level pay practices in a pertinent context. Then the paper provides a detailed review and critique on current empirical studies on pay practices in Chinese enterprises, their antecedents and consequences. Finally, the paper identifies potential research questions and provides some directions for future research.

The paper concludes from the extensive review of the current literature that the following research areas merit attention: Why do some firms pay their employees more than other firms? Why do we observe different types of internal pay structures among firms? What are the consequences of these different structures? Why is the link between pay and performance weak in some firms but strong in others? Under what conditions pay‐for‐performance enhances firm performance?

The paper is one of the most comprehensive reviews of the literature on compensation practices of Chinese companies.

Aims to provide new evidence about gender differentials in domestic work time, market work time and total work time, that updates the evidence provided by Jenkins and O'Leary in 1997 and Layte in 1999 using UK time‐budget surveys.

Investigates gender differentials in work times using the British Household Panel survey (BHPS). The BHPS is a nationally representative longitudinal data set consisting of some 5,500 households (and 10,000 individuals) first interviewed in the autumn of 1991 and followed and re‐interviewed every year subsequently.

The picture that emerges from the BHPS data is a rather “traditional” and well‐known one. On average, women (be them married or single) work more at home and less in the labour market than men. The comforting side of this pessimistic conclusion, is that the trends in domestic and paid work time over the 1990s show a narrowing in the gender differentials, thanks mainly to the changing behaviour of women and not of men.

An important message that seems to emerge is that women are far more flexible than men. That is, men hardly react or change their behaviour in front of (certain) situations that clearly affect women's time allocation decisions (e.g. presence of children, cohort effects). Finally, the paper identifies and characterises the men who do better at home in relative terms: the “new” men.

This paper analyses gender wage differentials in full‐time employment using recently released data from the National Child Development Study and the British Cohort Study 1970. The paper compares the situations of individuals in their early thirties in 1991 and 2000 and the position of full‐time employees in NCDS as the cohorts aged between 33 and 42. The distribution of individuals' experiences of unequal pay is emphasised by comparing distributions of gender differentials of an “index of unequal treatment”. Passing from age 33 to 42, unequal treatment increased substantially, across the whole distribution.

Equal Pay—Objectives and Achievement Equal pay for women has a history of policy declarations dating back in Great Britain to the resolution of the Trades Union Congress in 1888: “That in the opinion of this Congress it is desirable, in the interests of both men and women, that in trades where women do the same work as men, they shall receive the same pay.” On an international level the International Labour Organisation included the concept of “equal remuneration for work of equal value” in its constitution adopted in 1919, reiterating the principle in Convention 100 in 1951, which was not however ratified by this country until 1971, one year after the passage of the Equal Pay Act. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states that “everyone, without distinction, has the right to equal pay for equal work”, with a more precise definition in its 1967 Declation on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, “that all appropriate measures shall be taken to ensure to women,… the right to equal remuneration with men and to equality of treatment in respect of work of equal value”. In contrast, under Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome member states of the European Economic Community are required to “ensure and subsequently maintain the application of the principle that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work”.

This paper examines the role of the bargaining regime in bringing about inter‐industry wage differentials in the Belgian private sector. Empirical findings, based on the 1995 Structure of Earnings Survey, emphasise that sectors offering high/low wages are similar for workers covered by different bargaining regimes, even when controlling for individual characteristics, working conditions and firm size. Moreover, results show that, ceteris paribus, the dispersion of inter‐industry wage differentials is higher when wages are collectively renegotiated at the firm level, and workers covered by a company collective agreement (CA) earn 5.1 per cent more than their opposite numbers whose wages are solely covered by national and/or sectoral CAs.

In this paper, three implementation and interpretation issues are examined associated with Krueger and Summers' method for calculating inter‐industry wage differentials. The literature tends to report a less than complete set of industry wage differentials, use the wrong standard errors, and misinterpret the meaning of the industry wage differentials. The solution to the first two issues follows from making explicit the restriction that the employment‐weighted average of all industry wage effects is zero, the same restriction that Krueger and Summers are implicitly imposing on industry wage effects. All industries have thus a wage effect relative to an average worker net of any industry effect and correct standard errors are available via the Delta method. Finally, a method is proposed for analysing inter‐industry wage differentials as actual differences between the wage levels expressed in percentage points and not as log points, which is the current misleading standard. The procedure calculates actual average percentage wage differences by industry and avoids the distortion in differences across industries that log point comparisons engender. An application is provided, using the United States Outgoing Rotation Files of the Current Population Survey for 1989 and 1996, and so updates the work by Krueger and Summers.