Real wage index numbers have been used to measure movements in the standard of living of the typical worker. This paper describes some of these indicators for the United States and England. A new real wage index is proposed that resembles the sliding scale used to adjust wages in certain industries years ago. This new index is applied to US manufacturing industry and it implies a fall in real wages by about 40 percent since 1960. Workers' distributional position in US manufacturing has deteriorated considerably.

In the March 1977 issue of this Review I presented a critique of the published Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) series on real wages by contrasting them with some constant-utility index numbers of real wages. The latter are derived first by solving the representative consumer-worker's indirect utility function for that wage rate which restores some base period's utility after all commodity prices have changed, and second by expressing this constant-utility wage rate as a fraction of actual wage rates. In making these calculations I made use of recently published estimates of the StoneGeary utility function by Michael Abbott and Orley Ashenfelter. Unfortunately, I subsequently discovered that Abbott and Ashenfelter had miscoded some of their data so that their estimates were incorrect. This also rendered my constant-utility index numbers incorrect. Abbott and Ashenfelter have now reestimated their system of equations and with their revised estimates I now present my recalculated constant-utility real wages.' For details of the underlying argument, the reader is referred to the original article. The recalculated estimates of the parameters of the Stone-Geary function are presented in the first two columns of Table 2. The estimate of 'Yh (namely, 2,331 hours per year) implies that the constraint (,yh h) > 0 is not satisfied for the years 1929-33, 1937, and 1939-45. For this reason I do not present estimates of these constant-utility wage rates for these years and, in particular, I have selected 1946 (rather than 1939 as in TABLE 1-PUBLISHED INDEX NUMBERS OF REAL WAGES

Index numbers of workers' real wages are constructed by comparing observed changes in an index of consumer goods' prices with a measure of changes in their money wages. Four such index numbers, each based on slightly different definitions and drawn from different sources, are shown in Table 1. From 1939 to 1967 they record an increase in real wages of between 59 and 106.5 percent. As measures of the true standard of living of the typical worker, each is deficient in a number of respects. For instance, the consumer goods' price index used to deflate wages is the familiar baseweighted type which does not recognize that individuals will alter the composition of the basket of commodities they consume in response to relative price changes. It is well known that such a Laspeyres index overstates increases in the cost of maintaining a level of utility whenever consumers are induced by relative price movements to substitute among the commodities they purchase. Moreover, while the two Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) series on real spendable weekly earnings of production workers (as shown in columns (iii) and (iv) of Table 1) include an adjustment for federal income taxes and social security taxes, they do not discriminate between increases in weekly earnings that arise, on the one hand, through increases in hourly wage rates with hours worked constant and, on the other hand, through increases in hours worked with hourly wage rates fixed. An index of the ratio of average hourly earnings to consumer prices (as shown in column (i) of Table 1) TABLE I-INDEX NUMBERS OF REAL EARNINGS

Using data collected by the authors on the largest and most durable of worker-owned firms in U.S. manufacturing, this paper is addressed to two questions. First, are the responses of cooperatives to changes in their economic environment different from those of conventional firms? It appears that cooperatives are more inclined to adjust pay than employment. Second, how profitable has membership in the cooperatives been? Using information on share prices, we find membership to have been extremely profitable, and in this sense, the prices of co-ops' shares have been underpriced. The riskiness of cooperative membership is discussed.

Using data collected by the authors on the largest and most durable of worker-owned firms in U.S. manufacturing, this paper is addressed to two questions. First, are the responses of cooperatives to changes in their economic environment different from those of conventional firms? It appears that cooperatives are more inclined to adjust pay than employment. Second, how profitable has membership in the cooperatives been? Using information on share prices, the authors find membership to have been extremely profitable and, in this sense, the prices of co-ops' shares have been underpriced. The riskiness of cooperative memberships is discussed.