THE EFFECT ON CO-OPERATION.
The Co-operative movement in general is profoundly influenced by conditions of unemployment, which is our excuse for what has been written above. The vast majority of Co-operators depend for their incomes on their being employed in ordinary industrial undertakings, and when the machinery of industry breaks down their spending power is affected. Those in fortunate positions can carry on economically for a longer or shorter period on their investments in their societies, but those fortunate individuals constitute but a small proportion of the whole membership. When an unemployment crisis comes it means distress to a large number of Co-operators, for those who have large savings to fall back on are usually in more or less important positions in the concerns by which they are employed and are amongst the last to be dismissed—are, in fact, rarely out of employment at all. Sales of Co-operative societies go down, while working expenses continue. In this respect, however, the Baking Society has always been the last to suffer, for people continue to buy bread when they have almost ceased to be able to purchase anything else. But there is always during such crises a proportion of Co-operators, varying in different districts, whose incomes are barely sufficient to meet physical needs while they are in constant employment and who are thrown on their beam ends by even a fortnight of unemployment, and the hardship of these crises is that this is the class of people on whom the curse of unemployment falls first and on whom it rests longest.
Fortunately, the milk of human kindness is not quite dried up in Co-operators, and so soon as genuine cases of distress are known steps are taken to ameliorate the condition. In this process of amelioration the Baking Society has always played a big part. We have already seen that during the miners’ and engineers’ strikes and during periods of distress due to unemployment the Society distributed thousands of pounds worth of bread, and now, during 1904–05, the same policy was pursued.
If one was inclined to moralise much might be said about the mentality of a people who continue content to endure such straits in a country where wealth abounds in superabundance, and also about the mentality of statesmen who could find no remedy for such a constantly recurring cancer of the body politic; but this is hardly the place for that, and all that can be done is to suggest that in a country in which the Co-operative principle was predominant a remedy would be found. The sufferers themselves, and those who act for them, have tried to do something through limitation of output and the shortening of the working day, but in normal times the onward march of production has more than kept pace with such crude attempts to outwit it. The remedies had the fatal defect of attempting to deal with a symptom while leaving the root disease untouched, and the result, necessarily, has been failure.