CHAPTER XI
THE LABOUR PARTY’S POLICY FOR UNEMPLOYMENT
2. ITS IMPRACTICABILITY
The Unsoundness of the Right to Work—The Failure of Work or Maintenance in France—Impossibility of Providing Suitable Work—Employment Depends Primarily on Demand—The Farm Colony Fiascos.
The utter impracticability of Labour’s principle of “work or maintenance” is almost self-apparent. The primary cause of unemployment is want of work, the result of economic forces, but the cure of unemployment, according to Labour, is to be the provision of work by the Government in the teeth of adverse economic conditions. The work is to be “suitable work,” and obviously must be either (1) the production of commodities and services which the consuming public will buy, that is to say, remunerative work, or (2) the execution of public works which, up to that time, have not been constructed, but which, although economic circumstances have not justified their construction before, are deemed proper to be carried out if work has to be found for unemployed persons. Their appropriate name is “relief works.” The maintenance is to be such weekly sum as the local medical officer of health deems necessary to maintain each unemployed person and his dependants in a state of physical efficiency. The Unemployed Workmen’s Bill, introduced by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald in 1907, was the first Bill enunciating the right to work. In 1908-9 similar Bills were introduced by the Labour Party under the same title. In 1910-11-12, Bills for the same object, called The Right to Work Bill, were introduced by members of the Party.
The Unsoundness of the Right to Work
Attempts were made to describe this principle of work or maintenance as the logical result of the Elizabethan Statutes, under which parish authorities were bound to provide work for the unemployed at wages paid out of a fund collected from persons of substance in the parish, at first voluntarily subscribed, but later raised by tax, and were accustomed to grant “relief in lieu of labour” to persons out of work, for whom work could not be found. Owing to the difficulty of finding work the overseers resorted largely to the latter alternative. The Labour Party’s Bill, needless to say, omitted the stern Elizabethan methods provided by law for treatment of the work-shy—whipping, boring through the ear—and for those who ran away, imprisonment for life. The social and industrial abuses to which the system gave rise in the early days of the nineteenth century are well described by Mr. Harold Cox in Chapter 5, “The Right to Work,” of his book Economic Liberty. It is to be feared Mr. Thomas Pearce (p. 57), labourer in husbandry, who was examined before the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834, would even to-day experience similar treatment.
“Asked whether in his parish there were many able-bodied men ‘upon the parish,’ he replied:
“Ans. There are a great many men in our parish who like it better than being at work.
“Ques. Why do they like it better?
“Ans. They get the same money and don’t do half so much work. They don’t work like me; they be’ant at it so many hours, and they don’t do so much work when they be at it. They’re doing no good, and are only waiting for dinner-time and night; they be’ant working, it’s only waiting.