“The Dirty Scruff”: Relief and the Production of the Unemployed in Depression‐era British Columbia

Abstract

In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression-era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning of unemployment shaped the contours of the Federal Unemployment Relief Scheme, which housed men in work camps and aimed to both discipline and rehabilitate the unemployed. However, the relief camps were plagued by several contradictions exploited by the Relief Camp Workers Union, which constructed oppositional understandings of unemployment. In discussing the relationship between unemployment and relief I attend to questions of space, highlighting the urbanisation of unemployment and the ideological distinctions between the city and the country.

A fix in the forests: relief labor and the production of reforestation infrastructure in Depression-Era Canada

“…Relief policies in Canada had generally followed the British Poor Laws, which resulted in municipalities initially shouldering the responsibility for the unemployed (Struthers, 1983), yet they quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the scale of the problem. In response, a patchwork of provincial relief camps were established across Canada between 1930 and 1933, which ultimately proved to be ineffective as provinces lacked the fiscal capacity to sustain the relief camps and large factions of the unemployed were becoming increasingly politicized and had managed to seize control of many relief camps (Brown, 1987;Ekers, 2012;Howard, 1985).…”

“…The overall objective was to "restore and maintain the physical condition and morale of these men... in return for a measure of work on undertakings to the general advantage of Canada" (Department of National Defense, 1937: 1). Relief workers were paid 20 cents per day, which, when combined with the isolation of the relief camps and physical labor, was meant to deter the so-called undeserving poor from seeking relief (Ekers, 2012). These camps followed broader relief trends aimed at quelling the political activism of the unemployed, regulating the labor market by ensuring that men were physically and mentally ready for work, while also pursuing the development of infrastructure (Peck, 2001;Piven and Cloward, 1971;Struthers, 1983).…”

“…The forestry relief camps were partially focused on ensuring that relief personnel were "job ready" when the labor market rebounded. As Peck ( 2001) explains, relief initiatives frequently operate as labor market policies and in the 1930s the provision of relief was structured in a way that foreshadowed contemporary workfare policies but was decidedly gendered in its emphasis on the rehabilitative value of outdoor work for men in particular (Ekers, 2009(Ekers, , 2012. The Forest Service (1935a: 1) remarked that from the standpoint of the physical welfare of the men, the out-door work in the woods is clean and healthful, and in the case of young men, particularly, the improvement in health and strength after even a few months of such work is evident.…”

Providing places for structures of feeling and hierarchical complementarity in urban theory: Re-reading Williams’The Country and the City

“…However, the frame of reference shows the fields in spatial research that are affected by the book. The range of themes under which Williams is cited as a source extends from postcolonial criticism of senses of place in English literature (Hulme, 2012), to more ecological argumentations against the transformation of former plantations into spaces of recreation (Bunce, 2008), discourses on the masculinity of farm labour (Ekers, 2012), ecocriticism (Giblett, 2012) and bucolic idealisations (Price, 2012) (see Figure 1).…”

“…Unsurprisingly, gender themes, by comparison, were in the past and are still less widely discussed in research with reference to The Country and the City (Grayzel, 1999; Little and Austin, 1996). Recent discourses on gender work that cite the book refer to arguments such as asymmetric gender roles (Driscoll, 2013) and masculine domination in farm labour associated with rural life (Ekers, 2012). In current discussions of transformations of rural female labour markets, e.g.…”