Wage supplements and capitalism in the UK

Grover, Chris (2025) Wage supplements and capitalism in the UK. In: Research Handbook on Social Policy and Employment :. Elgar Handbooks in Social Policy and Welfare series . Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 71-86. ISBN 9781035317936

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Abstract

This chapter focuses upon wage supplements aimed at increasing the wage-related income of workers. Drawing upon heterodox political-economic understandings of social policy and, primarily, debates about, and the practice of, supplementing wages in the UK, the chapter argues that wage supplements are more concerned with helping to manage tensions in capitalist economies and societies than they are with concerns with the financial circumstances of individual labourers. As such, the chapter argues that wage supplements help to manage dilemmas created by capital’s continuous demand for commodified labour power in a system in which wages are paid as a price for labour that is often inadequate as a living, creating in-work poverty and potential financial disincentives to do wage-labour. The chapter demonstrates that, although wage supplements are often presented as being relatively new, their efficacy has been a source of policy debate for at least two hundred years in the UK, and that classical political economy has been used both to prohibit and encourage their use. The chapter argues that while the current focus in the UK is more upon predistribution (increasing regulated national minimum wages), it is the relatively neglected issue of in-work poverty that may in the future increase once again state interest in supplementing wages.