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The Origins of Unemployment Insurance in Edwardian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2017

Tomoari Matsunaga
Tomoari Matsunaga*
Affiliation:
Yokohama National University
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 614 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research in Japan: 15K03910.

References

NOTES

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23. In 1886, the head of the Commercial Department of the Board of Trade, Robert Giffen, who was also a famous economist, made a speech in which he emphasized the great increase in working men’s income over the previous fifty years, insisting that “they should be prepared to some extent for a reduction in money wages” at the time of deflation. Giffen, Robert, “Further Notes on the Progress of the Working Classes in the Last Half Century,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 49 (1886): 72–73Google Scholar.

24. NA, LAB2/1480/L555/1900.

25. NA, LAB2/1598/L263/1904.

26. NA, LAB2/1598/L263/1904, 19 March 1904.

27. NA, LAB2/1/L128/1902.

28. Blackburn, A Fair Day’s Wage, 111–12.

29. NA, CAB 37/91/26, 1908.

30. Cambridge University, Churchill College, Winston Churchill Papers, CHAR 11/3, 5 April 1909.

31. Morris, Jenny, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades (Aldershot, 1986), 224Google Scholar. Jerold Waltman also indicates that the operational proceedings of the Trade Boards Act were “seemingly designed to impede quick action.” Waltman, Jerold, Minimum Wage Policy in Great Britain and the United States (New York, 2008), 64Google Scholar.

32. NA, CAB 37/97/13, 1909.

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46. Churchill Papers, CHAR 11/5.

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51. In the Manchester District, which has an exceptionally long consecutive record of time rates for engineering workers, time rate of wages increased rapidly from 1906 to 1908. Yates, M. L., Wages and Labour Conditions in British Engineering (London, 1937), 103Google Scholar.

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53. King, , Actively Seeking, 20–26Google Scholar.

54. Harris, , Unemployment, 298–99Google Scholar.

55. University of Bristol Library, Liberal Party Archive, National Liberal Club, Transactions, vol. 5, pt. 15, 1907.

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58. Hennock, E. P., British Social Reform and German Precedents (Oxford, 1987), 163Google Scholar.

59. Parliamentary Papers 1910, xlviii, Royal Commissions on the Poor Laws, Minutes of Evidence, 6–45.

60. Parliamentary Papers 1910, xlix, Royal Commissions on the Poor Laws, Minutes of Evidence, qq. 98912–39. Although board officials were not so enthusiastic about the reform of casual labor in 1908, their attitudes toward that problem turned radical after 1909, when Beveridge was promoted to the head of the newly established Labour Exchanges Department. Whiteside indicates that Llewellyn Smith, who was originally opposed to a compulsory measure, changed his attitude and became a supporter of compulsory decasualization by 1913. See Whiteside, “Welfare Insurance,” 512–13. This was likely a result of the labor situation at that time. During 1911 and 1912, large-scale strikes frequently occurred at the main ports in Britain, and in 1911 freight rates jumped to the highest figures since 1889, the year of the Great Dock Strike. See Clegg, H. A., A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1985), 33–41Google Scholar; Redman, Lydia, “State Intervention in Industrial Disputes in the Age of the New Liberalism: The London Docks Strikes of 1911–12,” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 34 (2013)Google Scholar. It is highly probable that the dock industry’s critical situation caused the radicalization of board officials’ attitudes toward the reform of casual labor.

61. Parliamentary Papers 1910, xlix, Minutes of Evidence, q. 98844.

62. Ibid., qq. 98956–57.

63. Ibid., qq. 99080–81

64. Ibid., qq. 99138–39.

65. NA, T1/11093/6763/19536, 29 July 1908.

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70. Harris, , Unemployment, 306Google Scholar; Toye, Richard, Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (London, 2007), 57Google Scholar. See also Brown, K. D., Labour and Unemployment, 1900–1914 (Newton Abbot, 1971), 144Google Scholar.

71. BLPES (British Library of Political and Economic Science), Beveridge Papers, III 37/A.4., 11 January 1909.

72. Beveridge Papers, III 37/A.4., 22 February 1909.

73. NA, CAB 37/99/69.

74. NA, LAB 2/211/LE500/1909, Minutes of Conference with the Engineering Employers’ Association and the Shipbuilding Employers’ Federation, 18 August 1909, 29.

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77. Beveridge Papers, III 37/A.2.

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79. Ibid., 526.

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81. Ibid., 234.

82. Ibid., 236.

83. Ibid., 227.

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87. Beveridge Papers, III 39/11, “Note on Malingering.”

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94. This argument does not contradict Robert Asher’s thesis that British workers generally preferred state welfare policies to employers’ dominance. He also observes that “National Insurance accomplished by legal fiat what British unions could not achieve through economic action: reduction of the employer’s role in private income-maintenance programs, hitherto dominated by employers.” Asher, Robert, “Experience Counts: British Workers, Accident Prevention and Compensation, and the Origins of the Welfare State,” Journal of Policy History 15, no. 4 (2003): 377–78Google Scholar.

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102. Compare the sickness insurance (1883) and pension insurance (1889) in Germany, the sickness insurance (1888) in Austria, the pension insurance (1910) in France, with the state-funded pension (1908) and the sickness and unemployment insurance contributed by the state (1911) in Britain.