When is 3 plus 1 equal to 3.1? Suggested methods of examining wage settlements to determine their annual rate of adjustment

One focus in the current debate over labour market "flexibility" has been the extent to which there is a dispersion of wage settlements. But determining the degree of dispersion is no easy task. With the abandonment of the "12 month rule", which had applied in the legislation from 1974, a proportion of documents now have terms greater or less than 12 months. Harbridge (1988) found that 13 percent of the documents negotiated in the 1986-87 wage round had terms other than 12 months with a range from 3.5 to 17.5 months.