The prevention of unemployment.

  • National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution.
Date:
[1910?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The prevention of unemployment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ONE PENNY. jO EMPLOYMENT. h Supplement to The Crusade. THE PREVENTI THc. STRUGGLE FOR WORK. 1 his picture illustrates a typical incident in the life of the casual worker. Some months ago during a dispute at the Hamburg docks an office was opened in London to recruit dockers from the East End to replace the German strikers Notwithstanding the feeling against “blacklegging, which must have kept thousands away, it was necessary to engage a large force of police to control the crowds which daily attended on the chance of securing temporary employment in a foreign city. At times they fought to gain admission to the office—some even clambering up ihe gutter pipe and entering by the window. Any complete scheme for remedying un- employment resolves itself naturally into two parts. The first part must deal with the arrangements necessary to prevent the occurrence of unemployment and the second with the character of the provision which must be made for the maintenance of those who, in spite of our preventive measures, are still unable to obtain work or wages. On the present occasion we are only concerned with the first part of the problem, the prevention of unemploym.ent. That unemployment, even under present industrial conditions, is to a very large extent preventable was perhaps the most unexpected and certainly the most welcome piece , of information which the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission had to give to the world. Practically all previous writers, with the excep- ? tion of Mr. Beveridge, whose book on unemploy- ment appeared a few weeks before the Reports of the Royal Commission, accepted the phen- omenon of unemployment as an inevitable accom- paniment of capitalism and competitive industry. and confined their attention to the problem of how to provide for the “ out-of-work ” and his family. The Minority Commissioners, however, after a more extensive and searching investigation than had ever before been undertaken, came to the conclusion that unemployment was mainly due to defects of industrial organisation which it is fully in the power of the State to remedy, if and when it chooses. As a consequence of this new know- ledge we are now as a nation morally respotisible for the continued existence of the great army of “ out-of-works “ in our midst in a far more direct and unmistakable sense than ever before. It is in our power to deal with the causes of this great evil if we will. What are these causies? Broadly they are three—cyclical fluctuations of trade, seasonal fluctuations, and the prevalence of casual labour. The term Cyclical Fluctuations refers to the alternate periods of boom and de- pression, affecting all trades more or less simul- taneously, with which we are so familiar. These