EXPENDITURE ON UNEMPLOYED BENEFIT
BY CERTAIN TRADE UNIONS HAVING A
TOTAL MEMBERSHIP OF ABOUT 650,000
| Year. | Expenditure. |
| 1898 | £234,000 |
| 1899 | 185,000 |
| 1900 | 261,000 |
| 1901 | 325,000 |
| 1902 | 429,000 |
| 1903 | 516,000 |
| 1904 | 655,000 |
| 1905 | 523,000 |
| 1906 | 424,000 |
| 1907 | 466,000 |
Thus, even in the best recent years, 1899 and 1900, these Unions had to pay out £185,000 and £261,000 respectively to sustain members out-of-work. Modern industry works with a constant margin of unemployed labour, a margin which ever tends to depress wages and to place the employed at a disadvantage in bargaining for the sale of their services.
The sums above named are part, of course, of the alleged working class "capital" referred to on page 56, and often advanced as proof of the riches of the poor. In plain fact they are abstracted from poor wages in order to keep the home together when those poor wages fail altogether in seasons of unemployment. To term them "capital," or to flaunt them as "wealth," shows a curious perversity of ideas.
While we do not know how many workers are unemployed at any given time, it is probable that, as the whole body numbers about 15,000,000, and 60,000 are sometimes unemployed out of a group of 650,000 of these, the total may reach 500,000 or 600,000 or more in bad years.
Yet, when we obtain particulars of the profits of capital in "bad years of trade," we see little diminution in the handsome sums confessed to the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, and we understand how profits are sustained at the expense of the suffering and partial degradation of a great body of British citizens larger in number than the entire landowning and capitalist classes. I shall be surprised if it does not occur to some of those who read these lines that in view of the extraordinary profits shown in the totals on page 112 the wholesale dismissal of workmen at the first symptom of slackening trade is a disgrace to our civilization.
As I have remarked earlier in these pages, unemployment is by no means confined to the manual labour classes. All the humbler units of commercial life are subject to treatment which is little better than that accorded the "workman." As I write there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of clerks, writers, warehousemen, shop assistants, travellers, canvassers, agents, and others out of work and undergoing terrible sufferings in the endeavour to keep afloat. Cases are frequent in which advertisements offering berths of small account are hungrily applied for by hundreds of applicants. It is a sad reflection that for the vast majority of our people there is no such thing as security of tenure of employment. The profits assessed to income tax, the income, that is, of about one-ninth of our population, continue to rise by leaps and bounds, but the state of employment remains very much as it was. After a careful examination of the employment records of forty years the Board of Trade gave their verdict in 1904 (Cd. 2337, p. 84), that "the average level of employment during the past four years has been almost exactly the same as the average of the preceding forty years."
But, as our population to-day is very much greater than in 1860, the same "average level of employment" means that there are far more unemployed workmen in England to-day than was the case forty years ago. The proportion of out-of-works is neither larger nor smaller, but the magnitude of the problem is greater because there are more of us.
No attempt is yet made by our inadequate Census to obtain particulars of the number of unemployed. The Census Bill of 1910 led to a wrangle as to whether a religious census should be taken, but there was not even a wrangle as to whether the golden opportunity should be seized to ascertain the number of unemployed. So the Census of 1911 will come and go. Before the Census of 1921 is taken many proposals will be made for dealing with unemployment, but no one will know the size of the problem to be dealt with.