Work and Unemployment 1834–1911: Working for Unemployment
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A defining feature of U.K. welfare reform since 2010 has been the concerted move towards greater compulsion and sanctioning, which has been interpreted by some social policy scholars as punitive and cruel. In this article, we borrow concepts from criminology and sociology to develop new interpretations of welfare conditionality. Based on data from a major Economic and Social Research Council‐funded qualitative longitudinal study (2014–2019), we document the suffering that unemployed claimants experienced because of harsh conditionality. We find that punitive welfare conditionality often caused symbolic and material suffering and sometimes had life‐threatening effects. We argue that a wide range of suffering induced by welfare conditionality can be understood as ‘social abuse’, including the demoralisation of the futile job‐search treadwheel and the self‐administered surveillance of the Universal Jobmatch panopticon. We identify a range of active claimant responses to state perpetrated harm, including acquiescence, adaptation, resistance, and disengagement. We conclude that punitive post‐2010 unemployment correction can be seen as a reinvention of failed historic forms of punishment for offenders.
The introduction of state insurance for the unemployed, under the 1911 National Insurance Act, forced the trade unions to make adjustments to their visions of how they treated the unemployed. Before the 1911 Act there was immense diversity and variation in how the trade unions supported their members and controlled the labour market through providing benefits for the unemployed. However, the 1911 Act, imposed a rigidity on unemployment, defining it by imposing a limit of benefits for 15 weeks per year, with those falling out of benefit being unfortunate rather than long-term unemployed. Since many unions ran the new state scheme it was their previous flexibility in providing benefits to a more liberally defined unemployed, and allowing local branch variation, was replaced by the state’s insistence on uniformity and centralisation.
The book provides a comprehensive account of work camp movements in Britain before 1939, based on thorough archival research, and on the reminiscences of participants. It starts with their origins in the labour colony movement of the 1880s, and examines the subsequent fate of labour colonies for the unemployed, and their broadening out as disciplined and closed therapeutic communities for such groups as alcoholics, epileptics, tuberculosis sufferers and the ‘feeble-minded’. It goes on to examine utopian colonies, inspired by anarchist, socialist and feminist ideas, and designed to develop the skills and resources needed for a new world. After the Great War, unemployed camps increasingly focused on training for emigration, a movement inspired by notions of a global British national identity, as well as marked by sharp gender divisions. The gender divisions were further enhanced after 1929, when the world economic crisis closed down options for male emigration. A number of anti-industrial movements developed work camps, inspired by pacifist, nationalist or communitarian ideals. Meanwhile, government turned increasingly to work camps as a way of training unemployed men through heavy manual labour. Women by contrast were provided with a domesticating form of training, designed to prepare them for a life in domestic service. The book argues that work camps can be understood primarily as instrumental communities, concerned with reshaping the male body, and reasserting particularistic male identities, while achieving broad social policy and economic policy goals.
‘I go about the street with water-creases crying, “Four bunches a penny, water-creases.”’ London Labour and the London Poor is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology. Mayhew conducted hundreds of interviews with London’s street traders, entertainers, thieves and beggars which revealed that the ‘two nations’ of rich and poor in Victorian Britain were much closer than many people thought. By turns alarming, touching, and funny, the pages of London Labour and the London Poor exposed a previously hidden world to view. The first-hand accounts of costermongers and street-sellers, of sewer-scavenger and chimney-sweep, are intimate and detailed and provide an unprecedented insight into their day-to-day struggle for survival. Combined with Mayhew’s obsessive data gathering, these stories have an immediacy that owes much to his sympathetic understanding and highly effective literary style. This new selection offers a cross-section of the original volumes and their evocative illustrations, and includes an illuminating introduction to Henry Mayhew and the genesis and influence of his work.
During the Great Famine (1845–51) hundreds of thousands of Irish refugees fled to Britain, escaping the hunger and disease afflicting their homeland. Many made new lives there, but others were subsequently shipped back to Ireland by poor law authorities under the laws of Settlement and Removal. This article explores the coping strategies of the Famine Irish in Britain, and the responses of poor law authorities to the inflow of refugees with a particular focus on their use of removal. We argue that British poor law unions in areas heavily affected by the refugee crisis adopted rigorous removal policies, and that the non-settled Irish were consequently deeply reluctant to apply for poor relief, doing so only when alternative sources of support were unavailable. Thus, the true scale of Irish hardship was hidden from the official record. The article also explores, for the first time, the experiences of those sent back to Ireland, a country suffering from the devastating effects of Famine. The combination of heavy Irish immigration to Britain and large-scale removals back to Ireland created distrust between the authorities at British and Irish port towns, as both sides felt aggrieved by the inflow of destitute Irish arriving on their shores. At the centre of all this were the Irish poor themselves. Uncertainty, dislocation and hardship were often their experience, and we argue that this endured long after the Famine had ended; that the events of the late 1840s, indeed, created a new reality for the Irish in Britain.
Evidence-based policy relies on measurement to trigger actions and to manage and evaluate programmes. Yet measurement requires classification: the making of categories of understanding that approximate or represent collective phenomena. In 1931, two decades after implementing the first compulsory unemployment benefits in 1911, the British Government began to carry out a census of out-of-work individuals. Why such an inversion, at odds with the exercise of rational-legal authority, and unlike to its French or German counterparts? To solve this puzzle, we document the making of ‘the unemployed’ as a category of scientific analysis and of public policy in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Our circumscribed contribution to the history of economic thought and methodology informs today’s controversies on the future of work, the weakening of wage labour through the rise in the number of part-time contracts and self-employed workers, as well as the rivalry between the welfare state and private charities with regard to providing impoverished people with some kind of relief.
This is a study of how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part. It attacks orthodoxies and sets up new questions by attending to a wide range of contemporary experience, from politics and work to language and art.
This book represents the first attempt to identify and describe a workhouse reform ‘movement’ in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England, beyond the obvious candidates of the Workhouse Visiting Society and the voices of popular critics such as Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale. It is a subject on which the existing workhouse literature is largely silent, and this book therefore fills a considerable gap in our understanding of contemporary attitudes towards institutional welfare. Although many scholars have touched on the more obvious strands of workhouse criticism noted above, few have gone beyond these to explore the possibility that a concerted ‘movement’ existed that sought to place pressure on those with responsibility for workhouse administration, and to influence the trajectory of workhouse policy.
The British social security system was moving away from the Beveridge model before 1979. But, alongside policies that stretched the ‘safety net’, the Thatcher administration injected a more overt moralising rhetoric into the debate. This discourse would resonate across future administrations shaping their approach to these issues. The long-term legacy of Thatcher, this chapter argues, can therefore be seen, in the twenty-first century, in a residualised social security regime and a harsher public environment for those in need.
This is the second edition of a book which has quickly established itself as a standard work for students and the general reader alike. It incorporates recent political developments and the latest research. It thus provides the fullest available range of evidence on which to base informed judgements on the past record, and future prospects, of the welfare state in Britain.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb are the most important British contributors to the socialist tradition. They had a hand in founding many of the institutions that form the fabric of British society; notably the Fabian society, the Labour Party, the London School of Economics, the New Statesman , the Political Quarterly and Tribune. This is the first authorized biography of the Webbs commissioned by the Passfield Trustees; this life of the 'oddest couple since Adam and Eve' differs from previous studies in considering their literary and institution-building accomplishments and not just their personal idiosyncrasies.
Acknowledgements - Abbreviations - Introduction - The Poor Law Crusade against Outdoor Relief - The Provincial Crusade: Results and Reactions - Victorian Ideology, Early Attempts to Organise Charity, and the Beginnings of the Charity Organisation Society - The Emergence of Provincial Charity Organisation Societies and Responses, 1870-1890 - The Activities of Provincial Charity Organisation Societies, 1870-1890 - Ideological Change in Late Victorian Britain: The Response of the Provincial Charity Organisation Societies and Local Government Board - Appendix A - Bibliography - Index
“A large muster of unemployed” assembled in the Vegetable Market in the West Midlands town of Dudley in mid-September 1921. Many of the men present had been out of work for long stretches and had used up their eligibility for national unemployment benefits. They met to discuss strategies for approaching local government bodies for assistance. The featured speaker of the gathering was James Wilson, the Labour Member of Parliament for Dudley. He rallied the crowd, insisting that
the unemployed of Dudley did not want doles, and they had not met there that afternoon to ask for doles. What they wanted was genuine employment. (Hear, hear.) They were not loafers, but were men who protested against unemployment and were entitled to approach their local authorities … and ask them to do all they could to remove unemployment and provide useful and productive schemes which would find them work.
The Labour Party became a major political force in Britain during the 1920s. It unexpectedly entered office as a minority government in 1924; five years later as the largest party in the Commons it took office again. For many the party's enhanced status was associated closely with its leader, Ramsay MacDonald. The years of optimism were destroyed by rising unemployment; in August 1931, the second Labour Government faced pressures for public expenditure cuts in the midst of a financial crisis. The Government collapsed, and MacDonald led a new administration composed of erstwhile opponents and a few old colleagues. Labour went into opposition; an early election reduced it to a parliamentary rump. This study offers a uniquely detailed analysis of Labour in the 1920s based on a wide variety of unpublished sources. The emphasis is on the variety of cultural identities available within the party, and demonstrates how disputes over identity made a crucial contribution to the 1931 crisis.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of social welfare and social policy in Britain before the modern welfare state. It examines the role played by voluntary social provision (including self-help and mutual aid), as well as the growth of state intervention, in meeting welfare needs. It offers detailed coverage of all the main areas of social policy and provides an introduction to the competing theoretical explanations for the growth of welfare states over the last 200 years.
The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited patriarchal relationships and nascent industrial capitalism. Both camps agree, as Creighton has recently put it, about “the out-lines of [the] development” of the male breadwinner family. Where they disagree is in “the factors responsible for its origins and expansion”. Why did families move away from an asserted “golden age” of egalitarian sourcing of incomes, which involved husbands, wives and children, to dependence on a male breadwinner who aspired to a family wage? Neo-classical economic historians emphasize the supply conditions, concentrating on income effects from men's earnings, family structure variables and alternatives to women's employment in terms of productive activities in the home. In contrast, dual systems theorists emphasize demand conditions in terms of institutional constraints on women's and children's employment exemplified by the exclusionary strategies of chauvinist trade unions, labour legislation which limited the opportunities of women and children, and the legitimation of men's wage demands by references to their need for a family wage. Our view is that systematic empirical investigation of the male breadwinner family has been lacking, even the timescale of its appearance and development remains obscure. Unless we fill in the outlines with more empirical detail we will never discover the reasons for its origins and expansion.
Book synopsis: On the brightly-lit street corners of Piccadilly and in the dark alleyways of Stepney, in public parks and private flats, in nightclubs and cafes, prostitution was intertwined with London's society, culture, and landscape. As public and political attitudes toward commercial sex hardened, uneven and imperfect attempts to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens examines how laws, policies and attitudes toward prostitution were translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex navigated a climate of repression, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the metropolis. Laite puts forward the controversial argument that laws directed against prostitution tended to do more harm than good; they encouraged the growth of vice syndicates, promoted illicit real estate and came down the hardest upon the women who worked as prostitutes. By examining the administration of the law and its consequences and by uncovering the lives and experiences of prostitutes, this book offers a compelling new look at the history of commercial sex in modern London.
This chapter examines the rhetoric and reality of British migration to Canada during the period from 1867 to 1967. The Confederation census reported in 1871 that 16% of Canada's population had been born outside the new Dominion. Following more than fifty years of continued British immigration, almost 84% of non-Canadian born citizens came from the British Isles. The influx of British immigrants continued until the points system was introduced in the 1960s.
In The Eternal Paddy, Michael de Nie examines anti-Irish prejudice, Anglo-Irish relations, and the construction of Irish and British identities in nineteenth-century Britain. This book provides a new, more inclusive approach to the study of Irish identity as perceived by Britons and demonstrates that ideas of race were inextricably connected with class concerns and religious prejudice in popular views of both peoples. De Nie suggests that while traditional anti-Irish stereotypes were fundamental to British views of Ireland, equally important were a collection of sympathetic discourses and a self-awareness of British prejudice. In the pages of the British newspaper press, this dialogue created a deep ambivalence about the Irish people, an ambivalence that allowed most Britons to assume that the root of Ireland's difficulties lay in its Irishness. Drawing on more than ninety newspapers published in England, Scotland, and Wales, The Eternal Paddy offers the first major detailed analysis of British press coverage of Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century. This book traces the evolution of popular understandings and proposed solutions to the "Irish question," focusing particularly on the interrelationship between the press, the public, and the politicians. The work also engages with ongoing studies of imperialism and British identity, exploring the role of Catholic Ireland in British perceptions of their own identity and their empire.
Few measures, if any, could claim to have had a greater impact on British society than the poor law. As a comprehensive system of relieving those in need, the poor law provided relief for a significant proportion of the population but influenced the behaviour of a much larger group that lived at or near the margins of poverty. It touched the lives of countless numbers of individuals not only as paupers but also as ratepayers, guardians, officials and magistrates. This system underwent significant change in the nineteenth century with the shift from the old to the new poor law. The extent to which changes in policy anticipated new legislation is a key question and is here examined in the context of London. Rapid population growth and turnover, the lack of personal knowledge between rich and poor, and the close proximity of numerous autonomous poor law authorities created a distinctly metropolitan context for the provision of relief. This work provides the first detailed study of the poor law in London during the period leading up to and after the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources the book focuses explicitly on the ways in which those involved with the poor law - both as providers and recipients - negotiated the provision of relief. In the context of significant urban change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, it analyses the poor law as a system of institutions and explores the material and political processes that shaped relief policies.