Contenu du sommaire : Les disparités de salaires (1ère partie)

This paper in studying the formation of individual wages structure through some deflned jobs among sets of flrms belonging to the same sector or to the same labor-market. A decomposition of the variance of individual wages, for every job, into an internai wage-variance (inside the firm) and an « inter-firms » wage-variance shows that the differentials of average wages between flrms play an important role in the formation of the wage-structure. Such a resuit urget to go further in studying the « firm's effect » on the wage level. This was done in two directions : 1° by studying the «firm's effect» consistency according to the varions jobs and by observing eventual systematic selection policies of the manpower ; 2° by studying the laws of the « firm's effect » on the labor's price level : analysis of the relationships between labor's price and total productivity surplus by factor unit ; analysis of the relationships between « labor-market effect » and firm independence with respect to this market.

In this study on the labour market price of engeneers and higher administrative personal, the following conclusions have been reached. Concerning the graduates (university level), their responsibilities and then their salaries rise in relation with their age. However, in order to be detected and to have an effect on salaries, the variations in responsibilities have to exceed a certain level. In industry, for the sake of convenience, age is taken as an indicator of responsibilities and therefor the relation age-salary becomes the basic relation upon which is determined the labor market price of graduate engeneers and higher administrative personnel. As for the salaries of the non-graduates, they are probably determined by comparing summarily their responsabilities to those of the graduates. This relation age-salary, upon which is based the labour market price of the engeneers and higher administrative personnel has been strenghthened during the past years due to the fact that many surveys have been made, giving for a definite age and degree a corresponding average salary, thus helping spread information on the current market price. The form of this relation age-salary appears to be the same in France an in England, but these two countries appear to differ from the U.S.A. in this respect.

The purpose of this paper is to study the french industrial structure of wages in 1962. The statistical data which were used are those given by the industrial census of 1962. This study includes three steps. Firsthly, we had to figure out to what extent the qualitative differences concerning the employed labor-force (distribution according to the sexus, average qualification) can explain the interindustrial differentiels of wages. Thus, the first model which was tested, on samples, disaggregated to different degrees, lead to insignificant results. The failure of the first model testing required the study, as a second step, of a statistical relationship between the wage level and the average productivity of labor. Such a statistical relationship appeared to be significant, for any level of disaggregation. Then, the purpose of the third step was to state precisely the economie signification of the relationship : wages and labor productivity. In this respect, we had to study the value-added distribution among the production factors (worker's labor — non-worker's labor-capital) for the various industries.