for comments. The Rise and Fall of the Sliding Scale or Why Wages Are No Longer Indexed to Product Prices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There were many employment agreements linking wage rates to product prices, known as sliding scales, in Britain and the United States from the 1860s through the 1930s. They disappeared after the 1930s, despite the spread of long-term union contracts in the United States and the introduction of published wholesale price indices that gave workers new information about product price and materials cost. This paper explains why sliding scales disappeared after the 1930s, and examines what historical experiments with sliding scales reveal about the fundamental constraints on wage indexation.- 1-1Very rare exceptions include union contracts with the Magma Copper Company, which linked hourly wages to copper prices, along with the CPI, through 1992 (Charlier 1991, 1992), and 1990s union contracts with Inco, a Canadian nickel producer, which linked wages to the spot price of nickel (Bagnell, 1997). Many theoretical models of long-term labor contracts (for example Blanchard, 1979; Hall and Lazear, 1984; Card, 1986; Oswald, 1986) imply that workers with bargaining power over an employer have incentives to index their wages to prices of the employers products, or to product
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.176 | 0.075 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".