The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.

      There were also concerns that by ceasing to require that claimants must be actively seeking work (however ritualistic, and often harsh and excluding, that requirement had been), labour mobility would be impaired. It was argued that there would be no financial incentive for a man or woman to ‘get on his or her bike’ (or rather go on the tramp) in search of a job in areas away from the depressed regions, though this was hardly a realistic prospect for thousands of men who would either have to maintain a family back home, or move home and family for a job that turned out not to be permanent. Disquiet was not confined to the press: ‘Are we to legislate on the lines that these people should think that they need do nothing themselves; that they should wait at home, sit down, smoke their pipes and wait until an offer comes to them?’ ridiculed Labour’s Attorney General Sir William Jowitt. Even the Prime Minister became prey to alarmist thoughts. Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘colourful imagination … began to picture married women driving up in fur coats to draw benefit: and the retelling of such tales became a staple part of his conversation’.

      In November 1930 the Minister of Labour reported that the Act had admitted an extra 200,000 persons to benefit, and nervously cited examples of employers arranging the working hours of part-time workers so that they too would be able to claim. However, the abolition had coincided with a severe recession in the pottery and textile industries, both employers of large numbers of women — indeed, 38 per cent of married women claiming benefit in June 1930 had previously worked in the Lancashire cotton industry, where unemployment had risen from 13.3 per cent in November 1929 to 45.4 per cent in July 1930. That month, with male and female unemployment in the cotton industry at more than twice the national average, 71.3 per cent of claims for transitional benefit came from married women. A year later the figure was still 68.5 per cent.

      Pressure continued to grow to stem what were regarded as ‘abuses’ of unemployment relief — and to take urgent action to reduce the ever-rising borrowing by the Unemployment Fund, which had climbed from £50 million in March 1930 to £70 million in December, plus an additional £60 million from the Treasury to support the unemployed, with the cost of transitional payments alone reaching £30 million. Faced with the conundrum of obviously rising costs and equally obvious rising needs, the traditional prevaricating sticking plaster was applied: a Royal Commission was set up charged with recommending how the National Insurance Scheme could be made ‘solvent and self-supporting’ and what should be done about those outside the scheme who were ‘available and capable of work’.

      Reluctant to grasp the political hot potato of actually cutting benefits, as the interim report of the Commission recommended, yet anxious to find a way of reducing costs and staunching ‘abuses’ (or, as they could more judiciously be called, ‘anomalies’), the Labour government rushed through an Anomalies Act which came into effect on 3 October 1931, intended to deal with workers whose attachment to the labour force was considered to be marginal. Such categories included seasonal workers and married women who could claim benefit by virtue of the insurance contributions they had paid when they were single. The immediate effect of the Act was to exclude large numbers of married women from unemployment insurance benefit. Unless a woman had worked for a time since marriage and had paid a minimum of fifteen contributions, and could establish that she was normally in ‘insurable employment’ and was ‘actively seeking work’ — and likely to find it in her local area — her claim would be disallowed.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ