By the end of March 1932 over 82 per cent of married women’s claims had been disallowed. It had always been difficult to calculate how many women were unemployed. Now it became all but impossible, since there was so little incentive for women to register for unemployment benefit.
While the number of disallowed claims once the ‘genuinely seeking work’ requirement had been dispensed with confirmed some in their conviction that there had been ‘abuse’ of the system, it could also be read as revealing a distressingly prevalent aspect of the slump: low wages and widespread underemployment.
Lancashire textile-weaving families needed more than one income to survive even when the main breadwinner was in work. ‘We were very poorly paid. The wives couldn’t stay at home on a husband’s wage. Women have always had to work in Macclesfield,’ said one woman interviewed for a study of the Northern silk-industry town. In 1937 a cotton-weaver working full time would make just over £2 a week, while the national average industrial wage for an adult male manual worker the following year was £3.9s. An insured worker with three children who was in receipt of unemployment benefit would receive twelve shillings a week more than an employed cotton-weaver. And in the worst years of the slump Lancashire men’s wages were often further depressed by ‘playing the warps’, or working less than a full complement of looms — and accordingly being paid less.
Moreover, in 1931 when the Lancashire cotton trade was at its lowest, it was hit by another blow when India imposed tariff barriers against imported cotton goods. ‘Strong appeals went forth to … Gandhi to use his influence towards their abolition,’ reported Alice Foley who had started work in a Bolton mill at the age of thirteen and was by 1931, aged forty, a JP and secretary of the Bolton and District Weavers and Winders Association.
The great Indian leader paid a personal visit to Lancashire. He chose Darwen as his seat of investigation and later came to Bolton … He arrived at the Weaver’s office, accompanied by his little spinning wheel, but minus the goat which, presumably, he had left in safe keeping with his hostess, Miss Barlow, a member of a wealthy spinning family … He was a thin, angular figure, draped in a soft white dhooty [sic] garment, and with kindly eyes peering through round glasses. Gandhi listened gravely to the various appeals from leaders and officials, erstwhile [sic] plying his spinning wheel … I think he was gravely moved by what he had heard and seen of the effects of low earning, unemployment and persistent under-employment but could do nothing immediately; his people, he reminded us had always been on the verge of starvation.
In the evening a dinner had been arranged at our local Swan Hotel in his honour, but Gandhi declined to eat anything but bread and water at the repast, somewhat to the embarrassment of his hosts.
After the distinguished, diminutive visitor had left the benighted towns where unemployment for women had reached nearly 60 per cent, some ‘hard-headed folks’ opined that Gandhi was ‘a bit of a fraud’, but to Miss Foley he seemed like ‘a passing saint in a world of gross materialism’ in those hard, grim years.
The 1930s economy is often characterised as one divided between those in work and the unemployed, whereas in fact there were a number of economies operating: full-time work adequate to a family’s needs, full-time work inadequate to a family’s needs, unemployment and underemployment. When sixteen-year-old Doris Bailey’s father, a French polisher in Bethnal Green in East London, was put on short-time work, she was obliged to abandon her matriculation, since the family needed money. She eventually found work in an underwear factory in Holborn, and contributed her wages to the family budget. To qualify for unemployment benefit a worker had to experience three continuous days of unemployment in any one six-day week, which meant that those who worked non-consecutive days, or for part of four separate days, were excluded from benefit. For Kenneth Maher, a miner who was often only in work part-time, it was an iniquitous system. ‘Nearly all the pits in Wales were on short time. Even then the coal owners and the government of the day kept bashing the miners. The favourite trick was to work on Monday and Tuesday, off Wednesday, work Thursday, off Friday, work Saturday, or off Monday, work Tuesday, off Wednesday, work Thursday, off Friday, work Saturday. In this way the men could not claim any dole. They were taking home maybe three days’ pay — about £1 or 25/-. That was bad enough, but those on the dole were in an awful plight — 18/- for a man 6/- for a wife.’
‘The miners were always subject to a day or two days out. If they got four shifts a week they were lucky,’ recalled Clifford Steele, whose father was a miner at Grimethorpe colliery in South Yorkshire. ‘And then there were the odd occasions, perhaps in wintertime when coal was demanded, that they worked pretty regularly. It was the case of only a few hours’ notice. If a man was on day shift starting at six in the morning he had to be hanging about at night to see whether the pit buzzer went. If the pit buzzer went at half past eight it meant that there was no work the following day. So it was a case of don’t put me snap [packed lunch] up Mother.’
However, in industries where demand fluctuated but was generally depressed, part-time work could act in the interests of both employer and employee. A study of the workings of British industry between the wars has shown that in the harsh market conditions of the 1930s in the iron and steel industry it became imperative for over-capitalised firms to secure orders ‘at any price simply to provide sufficient cash flow for their creditors’. Short-time working meant that skilled men were kept on the firm’s books in case an order came in, and if this was on a regular basis ‘the sequence of idle days almost invariably enables the workers to qualify for Unemployment Benefit’. This suited the employers, since it allowed them flexibility and a team of experienced workers. And the employees knew that if it didn’t suit them, there were plenty of unemployed men eager to take their place.
A similar situation affected women workers. As a Macclesfield Silk Trade Association member explained to a Board of Trade inquiry: ‘Trade … was slack … It went up and down — and the married women thought it wasn’t fair that they should be put on the dole when work was found for the girls. The boss … tried to explain. “My girls will go where there’s work,” he told them, “and they won’t come back when things improve and I’ll lose them. They’ll find work in another mill. Besides there’s only one wage going in with a girl.” But he took no notice that many of the men were on short time or the labour [i.e. receiving benefit] too, as well as their wives.’
In the crisis year of 1931, the Ministry of Labour became concerned that payment of benefit for short-time working was ‘one of the abuses of the present system’. However, an inquiry into the iron and steel trades revealed that most — though not all — employers believed that 80 per cent of short-time workers needed benefit payments in order to survive. As one employer put it: ‘We know all our men and their domestic circumstances, and but for the “dole,” they would be physically unable to do their work when there is any for them.’ Overall it seemed that only about 15 to 20 per cent of the men normally employed in the industry ‘would not be reduced to “needy” circumstances if unemployment pay is not granted’ — presumably these men were members of the small aristocracy of affluent skilled labour, for differentials in the industry were very wide.
Far from suggesting that short-time workers were abusing the system by drawing benefit, the employers argued that if benefit was not allowed, there would be no sense in a man being prepared to work three days a week: he would be better off not working at all and drawing a full week’s benefit. The government took the point, and the system continued. One effect, however, was to further disadvantage the ‘hard kernel’ of long-term unemployed, since there was always a reserve pool of short-time labour when an industry began to recover, and it was these men who stood to benefit, since there was little incentive to offer work to those who had been out of the