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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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:
“It becomes clear that we cannot increase the sum-total of paid employment unless we also increase the volume of commodities and conveniences which all men want. None of the schemes ever proposed for State employment for the unemployed do this. They are all designed not to produce things that somebody wants, but to provide an excuse for paying wages to people who cannot find work. In every case the work is made for the sake of the workman, and that very fact implies that the work is not wanted for its own sake.”
That brings us directly to the question of “relief works.” The only economic justification for them is, that when, on humanitarian grounds, payments have to be made out of public or municipal funds for the maintenance of unemployed persons and their dependants, it is better, instead of giving a dole without requiring any work, to ask for work which may confer some benefit on the community paying wages for it. The irony of the position is that the Trade Unions always ask that the wages paid shall be full Trade Union rates, forgetting entirely that the work is not remunerative work and that it is not at the time wanted by the community, but only provided by the community at an economic loss.
We have had some experience of attempts to provide “remunerative work.”
The Hollesley Bay Farm Colony was established in 1905 by the Central Unemployed Body; the total expenditure on it between 1905 and March 31, 1912, was £178,253, the total realized by sales of produce of the colony during the same period was £41,755, showing a net loss during that time of £136,498. (See Sixth Report Central (Unemployment) Body, 1913, pp. 7 and 16.) Mr. John Burns, President of the Local Government Board, speaking in the House of Commons, March 13, 1908 (Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 186, 70), said in regard to the Hollesley Bay colony: “The labour and the work of these men is brought into competition with the local market gardeners and farmers, and when I go down to Hollesley Bay I am confronted with small deputations of professional decent agricultural labourers and servants of market gardeners, complaining of the fact that our attempt, well-intentioned, charitably inclined, and fed with State money, on behalf of the unemployed, is dispossessing the decent agricultural labourer.” The South Ockenden Farm Colony was established by the West Ham Guardians. Mr. John Burns said, in regard to it: “In the whole time that that colony has been in operation—and no one will but admit that I have given it the most generous and the most fatherly assistance—out of the 790 who have gone through that colony, its object being to train men for the land and to take them back to the land, there is not a recorded instance of the men going back to agricultural work” (Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 186, 70). On the same occasion Mr. Burns referred to the Laindon colony established by the Poplar Guardians: “I saw an old agricultural labourer between sixty and sixty-five years old, digging in a field within 200 yards of the colony, getting 15s. or 16s. per week”—Mr. Burns had previously mentioned that the average cost per week per man on the colony was 24s.—“I said to him, ‘How long does it take you to dig an acre of land?’ He said, ‘It takes me a fortnight to dig an acre of that land.’ I went across the rail and found on the public works sixty-seven able-bodied men ... taking ten days to dig an acre and a half.” Thus, in the colony each man was digging at the rate of one acre in 446 days, while the old agricultural labourer on the adjoining land was digging one acre in 14 days. It will be remembered that the express object of the Central Unemployed Body in setting up these colonies was to provide productive work for the unemployed. No wonder that Mr. Burns, with his great experience, expressed himself in the following terms, July 19, 1906 (Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 161, 425):—
“I believe that relief works ought to be the last resort of any community. They sterilize volition, sap self-reliance, and introduce into industry those very conditions of irregularity and low pay which we are seeking to remove.... If the works are State-aided, charity-fed, tax-founded, or rate-subsidized, they will only be a form of public benevolence that will divert the right money in the wrong way to wasteful ends with demoralizing results. New works unproductive and unremunerative, fed by rates and taxes, are about the worst form of relief that can be imagined.”
Mr. Burns’s conclusion will be confirmed by every person who has any experience of relief works. The work done is per unit immensely more costly than if it were done under normal industrial conditions; the men know it is not serious work, and therefore do not work.
If relief works have to be provided—and the unemployed cannot be left to starve—what the works shall be, the conditions under which they shall be executed, the extent to which the State ought to go, raise extraordinarily difficult questions calling for the nicest judgment.
It is wholly unnecessary to emphasize the evil of doles, whatever form they take, whether Poor Law outdoor relief or anything else. I have had many cases under my personal notice of men who, being offered work at reasonable rates of pay, refused to take it, stating that they were doing better out of their various payments for unemployment—and they were.