“Ques. How have you managed to live without parish relief?
“Ans. By working hard.
“Ques. What do the paupers say to you?
“Ans. They blame me for what I do. They say to me, ‘What are you working for?’ I say, ‘For myself.’ They say, ‘You are only doing it to save the parish, and if you didn’t do it you would get the same as another man has, and would get the money for smoking your pipe and doing nothing.’ ’Tis a hard thing for a man like me.”
The Failure of Work or Maintenance in France
One would have thought the experience of the French Revolutionary Government of 1848 would have been conclusive as to the right to work. Louis Blanc had published, in 1839, his great work, Organisation du Travail, in which he preached the right to work and urged on the French Government the advantages of its embarking on industrial production. The Government was to raise a large loan, and with it establish and equip national factories in every branch of industry. Workmen were to be employed, but were to determine by popular election the grades of the different workers. The net profits were to be divided into three parts, one to be distributed equally among the workers, the second to be devoted to the maintenance of the old, incapacitated and the sick, the third to provide capital for extensions and renewals of the industry. The French Government appointed Emile Thomas to set up ateliers nationaux, having previously issued a decree that the Provisional Government of the French Republic bound itself to guarantee the existence of the worker by means of work and to guarantee work for all its citizens. The comic and the tragic side of that great adventure are well described in Histoire des Ateliers Nationaux, by Emile Thomas, and in The Right to Work, by J. A. R. Marriott, M.P., Oxford University Press, and are too well-known to require repetition. They proved a disastrous industrial and economic failure, which of itself led directly to the revolution of June 1848.
Impossibility of Providing Suitable Work
At one time Labour proposed that only work should be provided for every unemployed person, not “suitable work,” but the ludicrous absurdity of this proposal became too obvious when it was seen to involve, for example, the transference of the skilled shipwright or boilermaker from the Tyne or the Clyde to work on afforestation in the Highlands of Scotland, or on roadmaking, or some other work of which they had no experience, in another remote part of the country. Now the demand has been modulated into one for “suitable work,” which, at any rate, looks more sensible on paper. Whatever chance, however, there may be of finding some work for persons unemployed, there is much less scope for finding suitable work. The lines of demarcation, which confine in water-tight compartments the work of every trade, are so closely drawn, and the determination of every Trade Union is so inflexible as to allow at no time any other person than its own members to engage upon the work of its particular trade, that at times of trade depression it is most difficult to find suitable work. If no suitable work can be found in the district, it can hardly be suggested that in times of depression shipwrights and boilermakers on the Clyde, if they are out of work, should be moved to other places, for example, to the Tyne or the Mersey, where there would be, from the nature of things, local men of their own craft available.
Employment Depends Primarily on Demand
If workers are employed to produce commodities and services, and nobody wants to buy them, it is obviously absurd to place workers on that class of production. On the other hand, if they are called upon to produce commodities and services which people do want and are prepared to buy at a remunerative price, those goods and services can, and ought to, be provided by the ordinary machinery of industry which is normally engaged upon their production; to put unemployed upon that work is merely to compete with, and undercut, those workers who are ordinarily engaged upon that species of output, and throw them out of employment, making the case no better than before. The truth is, as Mr. Harold Cox so forcibly puts it in Economic Liberty, p. 74: