Kitabı oku: «The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain», sayfa 4

THREE Dole Country

This word dole has two meanings. It means a charitable distribution, especially a rather niggardly one. It also means, or did mean, in its archaic use, a man’s lot or destiny. We have contrived most artfully to combine these two meanings. As I looked back on it, the England of the dole did not seem to me to be a pleasant place. We could not be proud of its creation. We could not really afford to be complacent about it, although we often are. It’s a poor shuffling job, and one of our worst compromises.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)

‘At the present time I am out of work,’ recorded Frank Forster in his diary on Saturday, 14 December 1935. ‘I have been out for 3 or 4 weeks. I am safe for 6 months on the Labour and for this period will receive each week 17/-. But what is to happen after that if I do not get a job, I just don’t know.’ Forster, who was in his mid-twenties and of strongly left-leaning persuasions, lived at home in Saltney in Cheshire with his father, who worked in the sanitation department of the local rural district council, his mother and one of his two sisters (the other was married). ‘During the past few years my life has consisted of a series of periods of unemployment spaced out with periods of employment’ — as a fitter’s mate, in horticulture and as a casual labourer.

Life at home was not easy:

Our family at the present time is in rather straitened financial circumstances. From father’s side came only 9/- Union benefit. [Forster’s father was in hospital with ‘the old stomach trouble’.] Mother gets 10/- from cleaning at a public house in the village. Hilda [his sister] gives in about 8/- or 9/- from her wages. She is working on a stall in Chester market. I give 8/- out of the 17/- which I get from the Labour Exchange. We have had to cut down considerably on various things and are able to buy only necessities. We are helped a great deal by our various relatives who now and again give us food or money … There is at times talk of me getting a job somewhere no matter what it is or what the money being paid is. I do not relish making small money. [I] would sooner die fighting and starving than live cringing and in slavery. The thrill which I get out of the situation is the thought of what might happen when my point of view clashes with the law or with authority when our family is bought to the point of starvation, to Poor Law level. Then, at that time, I would be able to come into my own and express my opinion against this damnable society.

The Forsters’ pared-down family income would not have been unusual in an area where there was little regular work to be had — nor would Frank’s feelings of frustration as a youngish man with apparently no prospects. The money he received was unemployment insurance benefit, since at some point he had worked in the building trade, which was covered by the government insurance scheme that had been in existence since before the First World War.

An unemployed married man with two children still at school who was covered by the insurance scheme would receive thirty shillings per week, or half the national average wage of £3. This benefit was paid at a flat rate regardless of previous earnings, and the scheme was intended to insure the worker against unemployment, not against poverty. As the author of an informative if briskly upbeat coda, ‘The State Services for the Unemployed’, to Time to Spare, a book of a BBC series of talks published in 1935 which gave the unemployed ‘a chance to speak out freely, according to one of them’, explained: ‘Although the rates of insurance benefit may … have provided the subsistence of millions of persons, on and off, during recent years, they still have nothing to do with maintenance. No British Government, as yet, has ever accepted such a liability.’ This was not entirely true, since an Out of Work Donation had been briefly granted to those who had served their country in the First World War and who had been unable to find work, and there continued to be some minimal ‘liability’ not only for those unemployed workers who had exhausted their benefits, but also for those able-bodied unemployed in jobs not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme, who therefore had no benefit entitlement.

The first Unemployment Insurance Act had been passed by Asquith’s Liberal government in 1911 in response to demands for ‘something better than the current system of deterrent poor relief, eked out here and there by spasmodic local relief works and private charities. In those days the majority of the artisan class could and did somehow tide themselves over temporary out-of-work spells, either by saving or by trade union insurances. And as for the unthrifty and the lowest-paid workers, the opinion was that to dispense on easy terms to such people would be the road to ruin.’ Much had changed: little had changed.

The Act had ‘opened a new chapter in unemployment relief. The government took a leaf out of the trade union book and launched a cautious scheme of contributory insurance … the object was to cover short spells of unemployment and help men to eke out their family savings. There were no allowances for the wife and children in those days, and if State benefits, plus savings or trade union benefit, were insufficient or were exhausted, the only other public resource was the Poor Law. And in many areas the rule of the Poor Law Guardians was to offer the workhouse or the labour colony.’

Twenty years after that first Act, there was indeed a safety net in place for the unemployed and their families that had not been there before the First World War. It had been painstakingly knotted together in the growing realisation that unemployment was no longer merely an occasional eventuality that thrifty members of the ‘artisan class’ would be able to ride out. But the net sagged perilously in places.

Between 1920 and 1934 no fewer than twenty-one Acts concerned with unemployment insurance had been passed as various governments tried to rein in the mounting costs of unemployment benefits, grappling with the problem of those without work in a changed world, informed by the old Poor Law principle of ‘less eligibility’, meaning that it must not be more financially advantageous not to work than to work.

Until the slump of 1920–21, unemployment had generally been assumed to be cyclical and short-term: economic fluctuations might throw men out of work, but they would soon find another job. This informed the framing of the early Insurance Acts. Indeed, the original Act only covered seven trades, including shipbuilding, iron and steel and the building industry, where it was recognised that seasonal unemployment was frequent. But by 1930 the rate of unemployment averaged not the 4 per cent on which calculations had been made, but around 16 per cent, and in the ‘black spots’ such as the Welsh Valleys, Teesside, Tyneside and Clydeside it was more than double that. And in such areas more than half of the unemployment was not cyclical and short-term — it was structural and long-term. By 1934, thirteen million workers came under the umbrella of the contributory unemployment scheme, though agricultural workers, public servants (including the armed forces, the police, teachers and civil servants), non-manual workers earning more than £250 a year, domestic servants and the self-employed — which included such categories as shopkeepers — continued to be excluded until 1938, as were workers under sixteen or over sixty-five. But since a rising number of workers — about one in every fifteen of those who registered as unemployed; and again, the figure was higher in the unemployment ‘black spots’ — had been unemployed for longer than twelve months, they had exhausted their right to statutory benefits, and had to be supported by a series of ad hoc measures sequentially known as ‘extended’, ‘uncovenanted’ or ‘transitional’ benefit (the last designation having been adopted in 1927, when a brief upswing in the economy suggested that such relief could be phased out within eighteen months or so).

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 for your work.’ None of them realised that a small revolution had taken place in their family life, and that Mrs Earnshaw had paid her first homage to the new head of the house. Henceforth, little fourteen-year-old Ada would be the man of the family.

And in Walter Greenwood’s best-selling novel of the Depression, Love on the Dole, published in 1933, Sally Hardcastle’s fiancé, Larry Meath, breaks off their engagement when he loses his job in a foundry. ‘Why can’t we be married as we arranged?’ Sally demands. ‘There’s nowt t’stop us. You’d get your dole, and I’m working.’ But Larry refuses: ‘A humiliating picture of himself living under such conditions flashed through his mind: it smacked of Hanky Park [the working-class area of Salford where the novel is set and where Greenwood had been brought up] at its worst … “No …” he said, sharply, suddenly animated. “No, no, Sal. No, I can’t do it … It’s no use arguing, Sally. It’d be daft to do it. Yaa! Fifteen bob a week! D’y'think I’m going to sponge on you. What the devil d’y’ take me for?”’

As the social investigator and occasional politician Sidney Webb observed, the assumption was that ‘a woman always had some kind of family belonging to her, and can in times of hardship slip into a corner somewhere and share a crust of bread already being shared by too many of the family mouths, whereas the truth is that many women workers are without relatives, and a great many more have delicate or worn-out parents, or young brothers or sisters, or children to support’.

For unmarried women, this domestic vision translated into working in other people’s homes rather than their own. With female unemployment running at around 600,000 in 1919, various committees and schemes had been set up to investigate the problem. As these committees were composed — predictably — mainly of middle-class women who rather minded the difficulties they were having in finding maids and other staff, their recommendations were invariably that domestic training was the answer. Between 1922 and 1940 the Central Commission on Women Training and Employment trained an average of 4,000 to 5,000 women every year on Home Craft and Home Maker courses. To begin with such training was provided on non-residential courses, but the first residential centre opened at Leamington Spa in January 1930. According to the Ministry of Labour, ‘This experiment [was] designed to accustom trainees to live and sleep away from home and to observe the routine which resident domestic service entails.’ The experiment was judged a success, and by 1931 seven such centres had been opened, each providing eight-week training courses.

But on the whole women had no desire to do domestic work. A 1931 survey found that while more women in London were still employed in domestic service than in any other industry, their numbers had fallen by over a third since the turn of the century, and they now had a choice of other occupations ‘which appear more attractive to most London girls’. Indeed, ‘the London girl has always been particularly averse to entering residential domestic service’, and most young women, wherever they lived, would prefer to do almost anything rather than opt for life ‘below stairs’ or, in the case of the prevailing ‘cook general’ of the inter-war years, accommodated in a poky back bedroom in a middle-class villa. In an unnamed textile town in the North-West a Ministry of Labour survey revealed that of the 380 unemployed women on the employment exchange register who were single and under forty — natural recruits into domestic service, it might be thought — only four were prepared to consider such an option, while in Preston, out of 1,248 women interviewed, a bare eleven were prepared to train for domestic service. It was partly because wages were low — a live-in housemaid in London earned around £2.3s a week and a cook general perhaps a few shillings more (though with board and food included this was not as bad as it might appear); it was partly because domestic service was not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme until 1938, so a domestic servant would not be able to claim benefit if she lost her job; but it was also partly the life: the long hours, the loss of personal liberty — ‘No gentleman callers’ — entailed in being a servant rather than an employee.

However, an unemployed woman who refused domestic work, or declined to be trained for it, could have her benefit refused or reduced, since she could be said not to be ‘genuinely seeking work’. This had been one of the criteria for benefit since 1921, and until it was repealed by the Labour government in 1930 it had put the onus on the claimant to prove that he or she had been assiduously searching for a job, regardless of whether there was any work to be had. It was not until the end of 1932 that the Ministry of Labour finally acceded to pressure and agreed that refusal to accept a training place for domestic service should not automatically lead to loss of benefit: it would only be withdrawn if a young women had accepted training, then taken a post in service, but subsequently left it and refused all further offers of such work.

The abolition of the ‘genuinely seeking work’ clause caused an outcry that it was a sponger’s charter that would encourage opportunists, scroungers, malingerers and loafers. The particular fear was that married women who had no real intention of seeking work, but had accrued insurance entitlements prior to their marriage, would now come forward to claim benefits — and indeed employers wrote in maintaining that they knew of women who had worked for them who were now claiming benefit even though they had left work for reasons of pregnancy or domestic duties.

Sections of the press enjoyed a field day peddling stories of abuse. A Nottingham newspaper attested to the case of a girl of sixteen who had allegedly received £150 unemployment pay in the course of a year, having paid only twenty-four shillings’ worth of insurance stamps. Rebutting the charge in the House of Commons, the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first woman Cabinet Minister, claimed that to achieve this remarkable feat the girl ‘must have maintained, with dependents’ allowances, not only herself but a husband or parent, and at least twenty-three children’.