Relative labour costs and the growth of part-time employment in British manufacturing industries

Abstract

Focuses on industry groups whose composition is stable over the period 1958 to 1982; food, drink and tobacco, clothing and footwear, paper and publishing, textiles, and timber and furniture. While the number is small, taken together these groups account for more than two-thirds of all part-time employment in manufacturing. In the next section of the paper, we outline a basic model of the demand for labour by profit-maximising firms within an industry. For an individual industry, unlike the economy as a whole, output is not given in the short-run, and changes in factor prices give rise to both substitution and scale effects on the demand for labour. Input demand functions are derived from the restricted profit function of the representative firm, rather than from the cost function as is more usually the case. The estimation of the model and the results obtained are discussed in Section II. -from Author