Inventing Unemployment

Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia

Anthony O'Donnell

• Publisher: Hart Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509928217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Labour & Employment Law
• Index: Law

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment happen?'. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over time? Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the 'employed', the 'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' – are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as 'unemployment' and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways of ordering employment relationships. In doing so, Inventing Unemployment challenges the preconception that casual work, self-employment, and the 'gig economy' are recent phenomena. Those forms of work confounded earlier attempts to define 'unemployment' and are again unsettling our contemporary understandings of joblessness. This thought-provoking book shows that the category of 'unemployment', rather than being a taken-for-granted economic variable, has its own history, and that history is intimately related to our changing understandings of 'employment'.

1

A Disorganised Labour Market

When, in 1928, Australia’s newly established National Development and Migration Commission turned its enquiries to the issue of unemployment, it named the problem as one of labour market ‘disorganisation’. Large sections of the Report were spent discussing casual and irregular labour and the need to reform hiring practices.¹ A Royal Commission on National Insurance had similarly concluded, a year earlier, that casual labour constituted ‘the greatest problem in connexion with unemployment’.² This might strike us as perplexing. Although the perils of underemployment and precarious work are receiving renewed attention today, for most of the post-war period they were perceived as incidents of a status distinct from that of unemployment. Yet the conflation in the 1920s of the problem of casual or intermittent employment with that of unemployment was a common one, and perfectly consistent with a body of social and economic enquiry emerging from Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Walters has argued that ‘the casual labour problem marks the point at which the problems of poverty and pauperism begin to be linked to forms of employment’. Concerns about irregular work created a space of enquiry where the links between labour markets, forms of employment and forms of social and moral life became established.³ This preoccupation with casual labour was significant for two reasons: on the one hand it reflected the reality of emergent industrial labour markets; on the other, it pointed to a social and administrative programme in which the labour exchange would play a crucial role.

The British Context

Until the twentieth century, unemployment in British social thought remained an ill-defined concept. The old poor law, originating in Tudor times,⁴ covered all forms of poverty, whether caused by sickness, old age, desertion, low wages or lack of work. The main distinction made was that between the ‘able-bodied’ poor and the sick, old or infirm. For example, the law in the sixteenth century distinguished between the impotent poor who were allowed to beg and the able-bodied vagrant who was to be whipped. As one commentator has observed, the law ‘made no provision whatsoever for the man who desperately desired to be employed but had no job to go to’.⁵

The nature of the labour market from the seventeenth through to the eighteenth century meant work was subject to seasonal and cyclical fluctuations and regulated by task rather than time. This made for irregular working days, weeks and years, with periods of intensity and idleness alternating.⁶ These fluctuations and irregularities in an occupation could often be offset by a labourer’s ability to pick up alternative occupations, often according to seasonal variation, and his or her ability to rely on subsistence forms of provision, or, in the face of regional variations in the availability of work, the practice of ‘tramping’ in search of work.⁷ Overall, the general problem of poverty or pauperism was not easily correlated with labour market status, and lack of work in a given occupation ‘cannot have been the threat to livelihood it later came to pose’.⁸

Lack of work would become a greater threat once wages became the ‘sole precarious base’ of living, rather than one component among many.⁹ Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, workers were increasingly incorporated into a monetised, market economy. Their ability to raise their standard of living through non-waged activities decreased, as customary use-rights – such as gleaning or collecting wood – were eroded.¹⁰ The new large cities both concentrated workers and offered only minimal alternatives to waged labour.

Some skilled workers could enjoy more-or-less regular work, for the same employer, for many years. But the small-scale, undercapitalised artisan workshops that predominated in this period were particularly vulnerable to trade depressions, shifts in industrial technique, and business failure due either to bad debts or simply to the ‘personal failings of the proprietor which ranged from simple … incompetence to drunkenness and crime’ – and any one of these events would likely result in loss of employment.¹¹ In any case, a lot of the work was organised around discontinuous, irregular employment. Seasonal fluctuations and the multiplicity of small-scale employers produced a highly irregular demand for goods and services, one commentator observing that ‘as most trades are “brisk” and “slack” at various periods of the year, a large number of workmen [were] employed only in the busy season and discharged in dull times’.¹² Certain sectors displayed particular variations on this theme: clothing and textile producers tended to enter subcontracting arrangements with outworkers, making it easier for enterprises to utilise workers only as the needs of their business required; port transport and construction industries also relied on short-term engagements, and tended to attract many workers who preferred this lifestyle.¹³ For workers in these situations, periods of joblessness were a common occurrence.

Casual labour of this sort dominated London, partly because of its role as a transport and distribution hub, and partly because the city retained its ‘pre-industrial’ character, dominated not by a factory proletariat but by manifold small commercial enterprises. It was perhaps not typical of the industrialisation that was transforming cities such as Leeds and Manchester. Despite – or because of – this, London became the focus both of a certain political anxiety around joblessness and of various investigations that would attempt to define the unemployed according to some uniform criteria.

Across the middle years of the nineteenth century, the lack of adequate work had become a mobilising force in certain quarters of working class politics and by the 1880s was manifesting itself in street-level demonstrations and rioting in London.¹⁴ For the middle class, the term ‘the unemployed’ was a dramatic way to refer to a threatening mass of out-of-work men; for speakers at street meetings, the term evoked a clear and proud identity for the assembled jobless.¹⁵ As Noel Whiteside observes:

It is unlikely that the temporarily unemployed labourer was really much worse off than his father or grandfather had been. Rural underemployment had been much less visible than its urban counterpart … The new visibility of labour market disorganisation at home, … the extension of the franchise to most working men in 1884, the growth of trade and labour organisation and the inability of traditional institutions to cope with the situation all combined to promote the unemployment question as a key issue in national politics in the early twentieth century.¹⁶

So by the 1890s, the jobless poor in Britain had succeeded in creating a public awareness of their condition, but the government response had been merely to tinker with the poor law, which treated the jobless worker only indirectly, continuing to focus on categories such as the able-bodied poor, the sick or the insane.¹⁷ That is, unemployment had no clear existence in the administrative or legal imagination as a separate and discrete labour market category.

This would change, principally due to the work of a number of social surveyors and investigators. Such surveyors were anxious to discredit many of the claims of socialists and others regarding the extent of poverty and destitution caused by joblessness and to furnish the debate with accurate statistics. Systems of classification like that developed by Charles Booth led to conclusions which were more socially reassuring than the prevailing popular rhetoric of ‘starving millions’ and the imagery of barbarians of the slums ready to overthrow civilisation.¹⁸ And the work of surveyors such as Booth helped ‘unemployment’ emerge as a much more potent administrative category. This would be a fairly drawn out process, but by the end of the nineteenth century, it already ‘seemed agreed … that the pool of casual workers lay at the heart of the problem’.¹⁹

Social Surveys, the Casual Worker and the Problem of Unemployment

Booth was a shipowner and merchant from a wealthy Liverpool family. His interest in social problems led him to fund and organise surveys of the London working class, published in 1903 as the 17-volume Life and Labour of the People of London. Booth’s preoccupation with disaggregating and classifying the constituent elements of the working class was not conceptually that original nor unfamiliar to those who had followed discussions of the ‘labouring poor’ since the late 1860s. Instead, his contribution lay in an analysis of causes of poverty and strategies for its cure.²⁰

Booth distinguished eight classes of labourer in terms of both income and regularity of work. He labelled the classes A to H. Class A was a small group of semi-criminals, ‘battered figures who slouch through the streets and play the beggar or the bully’, and who could, for purposes of labour market reform, be largely ignored. The real problem of poverty was concentrated on classes B, C and D. Class B represented a casual residuum, men who worked irregularly largely because they were incapable, for ‘mental, moral and physical reasons’ of steady work. Classes C and D, however, were poor through a mixture of low wages and irregular work, but they were ‘decent steady men’ whose labour market position was partly the result of competition for jobs from Class B. That is, overall there was a surplus of labour leading to generalised underemployment.²¹

Booth’s surveys began to draw greater attention to employment status as an explanation of poverty. In particular, he highlighted the lack of regular work as a cause of poverty. Some saw this as a moral problem. The overwhelming concern of the charity organisations of the time was to make the poor self-reliant and to inculcate in them the virtues of thrift, sobriety and familial responsibility. Casual earnings were not conducive to thrift; nor were the habits of casual work conducive to the building of ‘character’. As men flitted from job to job, their success in securing work was governed by chance rather than an established employment record.²²

Booth’s approach challenged certain prevailing conceptions of poverty, but still relied upon a distinction between the deserving and undeserving unemployed. A punitive poor law was seen as quite appropriate for those whose poverty could still be attributed to their own failings: drunkenness, profligacy, criminal disposition and so on. By contrast, there was presumed to be a group of deserving unemployed, labourers clearly capable and willing to undertake regular work but who were unable to find...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A Disorganised Labour Market
• 2. Defining Unemployment: Pre-War Endeavours
• 3. The Labour Exchange Solution
• 4. Social Policy in Wartime
• 5. Unemployment in a Time of Full Employment
• 6. Limiting Unemployment
• 7. Reinventing Unemployment
• 8. Marketing Unemployment
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page