James Maxton, Independent Labour Party (ILP) MP for a Clydeside seat, attempted to get the centrist Conservative MP Harold Macmillan to agree to the following ‘facts’ in a BBC debate in December 1932: ‘That our present industrial system could not provide regular unbroken employment to the working population: that the earning power of the employed worker was not sufficient to allow of his making provision for extended periods of unemployment: that when the ordinary industrial system was unable to employ him, it was impossible for a man to employ himself remuneratively: that the State had some measure of responsibility for these conditions: that there were not merely breaks in continuity of employment — for some there was no hope of employment at all.’
It was never going to be possible for a series of additional tiding-over benefits to mean that unemployment could be funded by insurance contributions, and it had to be recognised that there were in effect two sorts of unemployed: those generally in regular work who occasionally lost their jobs and would be able to ‘cash in’ the insurance benefits they had been building up for the relatively short time it took before they found another one; and those who for reasons of their skills (or rather more often lack of skills), the trades in which they worked, the regions where they lived, or perhaps their age, were unlikely ever to find the regular work that would enable them to make unemployment insurance contributions. While the Exchequer contributed roughly a third (along with the employer and the employee) to the unemployed insurance scheme, the heavy financial burden of those out of benefit, for whatever reason, would last as long as there were high rates of long-term unemployment.
When a worker’s insurance benefit was exhausted, he or she could apply for transitional benefit, but might be ‘disallowed’ that benefit for a number of reasons, including refusing the offer of suitable employment. But what was ‘suitable employment’? Did it depend on how long they had been out of work? What if a skilled man had been unemployed for two years, but refused to take casual unskilled work, since it was likely to reduce the chances of his ever getting back into his old trade? How long could he be allowed to wait for a job if the industry in which he had previously worked was in decline, and those few jobs that remained were much more likely to go to someone who had recently been working than to one of the long-term unemployed, whose skills may have rusted with disuse? And of course in areas of high unemployment, urging a man to ‘take anything’ was hardly realistic since there was probably ‘very little of “anything” to do’.
If the Labour Exchange decided that a claimant was unreasonably refusing to accept offers of casual work, and that his chances of getting a job in his own trade were negligible, he would be referred to the Court of Referees, which was proclaimed to be independent. If the Court disallowed his claim, he would effectively forfeit his right to be part of the unemployment insurance scheme, and if he could not support himself and his family he would be obliged to apply to what had until recently been called the Poor Law Board of Guardians for relief, assuming he had no other resources. This was also the resort of those unemployed whose work was not covered by the insurance scheme — their numbers were estimated at between 120,000 and 140,000, not counting dependents — as well as those whose benefits or wages were insufficient to keep their family. Not that this was what it was officially called any more: the Poor Law, with its dreaded spectre of the workhouse, had been abolished in 1929, the Boards replaced (in name but often not wholly in personnel) by Public Assistance Committees (PACs), which were locally funded and notorious for the discrepancies of their awards in different areas of the country.
The tenor of most discussion about unemployment dwelt on unemployed men (as indicated by titles of E. Wight Bakke’s The Unemployed Man and the Pilgrim Trust’s Men Without Work). Yet a Fabian tract published in 1915, as women flooded into munitions factories, had recognised that ‘unemployment in industry affects women as well as men, and often differently from men. How often do we find the state of the labour market treated as if it were solely a matter of the relationship between supply and demand for men?’ However, although women tended to outnumber men in such fields as cotton, woollen, worsted and jute manufacture, and in the newer industries producing merchandise for the home market such as light electrical goods, chemicals and drugs, artificial fibres (mainly rayon or ‘art’ — artificial silk), tinned food and packaging, only 30 per cent of those working in the traditional heavy export industries subject to cyclical unemployment and covered by the 1911 Unemployment Insurance Act were female. Thus, between 1930 and 1932, during the worst of the slump, only 16.8 per cent of the insured unemployed were women, compared to 22.6 per cent men. And since around 50 per cent of working women did jobs that were not covered by unemployment insurance, and thus did not show up in the Ministry of Labour statistics, it is hard to be certain how many women were unemployed at any time, though the figure was undoubtedly higher than 16-odd per cent.
There was considerable prejudice against women workers, and consequently a certain lack of sympathy for those who were unemployed — particularly married women, who were often accused of ‘taking men’s jobs’, and were usually the first to be let go when times were hard. The First World War fear of ‘dilution’ — that women would be prepared to do the jobs men had left when they went to fight for less money, and would thus depress wages and exclude men from their ‘rightful work’ when the war was over — persisted long into the peace. The notion that a woman’s place was in the home impacted on the attitude to unemployed men — and frequently on their own sense of self-worth — in that a man’s wage was intended to support his family, and thus an unemployed man was not the ‘provider’ society expected him to be, while the ‘odd shilling’ a woman might contribute to the family budget by odd jobs such as sewing, ‘making up’, laundry or other domestic work, was seen essentially as pin money, to be dispensed with as soon as the man of the house found work again. In Nelson in Lancashire, for example, the local Weavers’ Association agreed to significantly improved rates of pay for male weavers (defined as ‘heads of households’) who were employed to operate six or eight rather than the customary three or four cotton looms, in return for the dismissal of the married women who comprised 37 per cent of the workforce.
The indignities could be subtle: in her novel We Have Come to a Country (1935) Lettice Cooper sketches the scene at the Earnshaw family’s tea table. Joe Earnshaw, a skilled joiner, is unemployed, and his daughter Ada has just started work.
The procedure on these occasions was invariable. Mrs Earnshaw picked out the biggest kipper and laid it on Joe’s plate. She gave the next two best to the children, and took the smallest herself. In the days when Joe had been in good work and come home ravenous, there had been two kippers for him. Nowadays there was never more than one each — not always that — but, as the man and the worker, he was still helped first and given the biggest. This evening some idea of celebrating — some feeling that it was Ada’s day — made Mrs Earnshaw do a thing she had never done before. She picked out the largest kipper first and slapped it, smoking, onto Ada’s plate. ‘There you are Ada,’ she said, ‘eat it up. You’ll have to keep well and strong