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The Social Problems of the ‘Sixties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
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There would be fairly general agreement among those who can remember earlier days that Catholic interest in ‘the social question’ has declined. It is not difficult to find the reason for this present lack of interest, for ‘the social question’ no longer exists in the form it did a generation or two generations ago. The development of industrialization in this country, as in many others, brought with it the growth of a wage-earning proletariat; and for many the wage which was their sole source of income was insufficient to provide them with the requirements of a decent life. Even at the outbreak of war in 1939, our social order was marred by the effects of low wages and unemployment, the twin evils produced by the low level of economic activity. Thus in 1936, Rowntree’s survey of York showed that something like one-third of the working-class population of that city was living in poverty, and that the major cause of such poverty was unemployment and low wages.
Today the position is very different. In a more recent survey, it was shown that now only three per cent of the working class population of York is living below the poverty line, and that virtually none of this remaining poverty is the result of either unemployment or low wages. If we look at the level of unemployment, the comparison with the years even just before the war is startling. The Government White Paper on Employment Policy published in 1944 was still thinking in terms of an average level of unemployment of eight per cent, and this was the figure used for actuarial calculations in connection with the National Insurance Scheme.
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- Copyright © 1960 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare Sate, London, 1950.
2 Even when basic wage rates are determined by national agreements between employers and trade unions, a very large proportion of workers may be on piece work that is paid at rates determined locally. Earnings will be further reduced in these areas by the absence of overtime and even short‐time working.
3 Thus the Australian Hierachy has suggested that the State has an obligation to pay family allowances in social justice, the Bishop of Fribourg has suggested that this obligation is one of strict justice arising from the service rendered to the State by parents in having children. This latter idea will not appeal to many, and it is also difficult to see how an obligation in strict justice can arise in the absence of some kind of contractual relationship.
4 If the right to a retirement or window's pension is ‘earned’ by one's contributions, why should it be reduced or abolished if one earns more than a certain amount? National Insurance widow's benefits are denied to a widow who had been married for less than three years, no matter how long her late husband contributed. And whilst earnings reduce pensions, unearned income does not.
5 This is not incompatible with substantial state subsidies for education. See J. Wiseman's paper, ‘The Economics of Education’ read to the 1958 meeting of the British Association and re‐printed in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy, February 1959.
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