“…Even Beveridge called, in 1906, for "unemployables" to undergo "the complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights-including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood". 47 The key difference was a belief in state action through, for instance, labour exchanges or unemployment insurance. This explains how eugenics could endure in the early 20 th c. even as Liberal Welfare Reforms were enacted: in 1906, free school meals; in 1908, old age pensions and in 1911, national insurance.…”
Section: Welfare Solutions; Further Interventionmentioning
Alice Bonzom 10 This impression of doom and gloom ran along gendered lines: the parliamentary committee on physical deterioration of 1904 argued that "the laziness of the women, coupled with drink, [was] at the root of many evils of degeneracy". There was a black list of habitual drunkards in which women featured prominently, many female petty "Human Derelicts" and the Deterioration of the Nation: Discourses of Identity...
“…Even Beveridge called, in 1906, for "unemployables" to undergo "the complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights-including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood". 47 The key difference was a belief in state action through, for instance, labour exchanges or unemployment insurance. This explains how eugenics could endure in the early 20 th c. even as Liberal Welfare Reforms were enacted: in 1906, free school meals; in 1908, old age pensions and in 1911, national insurance.…”
Section: Welfare Solutions; Further Interventionmentioning
Alice Bonzom 10 This impression of doom and gloom ran along gendered lines: the parliamentary committee on physical deterioration of 1904 argued that "the laziness of the women, coupled with drink, [was] at the root of many evils of degeneracy". There was a black list of habitual drunkards in which women featured prominently, many female petty "Human Derelicts" and the Deterioration of the Nation: Discourses of Identity...
“…The purpose of labour exchanges was to rationalize the labour market – to improve economic performance by giving full‐time work to the best candidates. “The general principle of state policy in the matter of the unemployed … should not be an industrial system arranged with a view of finding room in it for everyone” (Beveridge, 1906, p. 327). Nationally organized labour exchanges would expel those who could not (or would not) work regularly, while fostering labour mobility both within and between trades and towns.…”
Beveridge's wartime proposals to eliminate idleness relied on the precepts of Keynesian economics and substantial extensions in the powers of central government to regulate industry and labour. Using convention theory, this paper demonstrates how these stipulations proved politically untenable. With the disappearance of full employment in the 1980s, the labour market problems Beveridge encountered in his youth have re‐emerged accompanied by old problems of working poverty. Established forms of labour market analysis are obsolescent and employment rights disappear. The paper suggests a more decentralized and variable analysis of relations between work and idleness may offer a way forward.
“…Every place in ‘free’ industry, carrying with it the rights of citizenship – civil liberty, fatherhood, conduct of one's own life and government of a family – should be a ‘whole’ place involving full employment and earnings up to a definite minimum. (Beveridge : 326–7)…”
Section: Policy and Labour Markets In The Late‐19th Centurymentioning
Unemployment emerged as a specific social issue in the late-19th century, but the nature of the threat it posed and the governing instruments available to address it varied widely. Using Britain and France as strongly contrasting cases, this article demonstrates the variable and historically contingent constructions of unemployment as a problem, and demonstrates how policy to address it was developed using administrative agencies that embodied specific, normative visions of how society and employment should operate. The different governing trajectories through which the issue was tackled is analyzed in terms of the context within which the problem of unemployment originally emerged. The article demonstrates the socio-political nature of unemployment's construction and, with reference to recent labour market change, questions its utility as a means of assessing economic or social well-being.
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