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Experience Counts: British Workers, Accident Prevention and Compensation, and the Origins of the Welfare State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Robert Asher
Robert Asher
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Extract

This article examines the views of Britain's organized railway, mining, and engineering workers (machinists) and their union leaders about state involvement in workplace accident prevention (1876–97), accident compensation (1876–1911), and the 1911 National Insurance Act. The miners and the railwaymen left numerous comments on these topics because they labored in unusually hazardous trades. (Their unions were large and were relatively democratic.) After 1880, leaders of the miners and railwaymen concluded that it was problematic to rely solely on trade union workplace bargaining power to protect worker life and limb and to compensate injured workers for their economic losses. Faced with what was initially seen as a Hobson's choice between employer compulsion and state compulsion, after the mid-1880s these trade unionists began to lean toward the latter. Historical experience led the trade union leaders whose views are discussed in this article to trust increasingly the Labor Department of the Board of Trade and to endorse Liberal welfare-state programs proposed in 1908 and thereafter. In 1911 the rank-and-file machinists who expressed their views about National Insurance in letters to the labor press were suspicious of augmenting the power of the state, but they were unwilling to scuttle National Insurance, preferring to agitate to expand union rights of participation. Worker opposition to some features of state-mandated income maintenance programs, especially those with compulsory payroll deductions, should not be interpreted as rejection of the welfare state in principle.

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Articles
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 2003 , pp. 359 - 388
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Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2003

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References

Notes

1. Sykes, Alan, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism 1776–1988 (London, 1997), 166Google Scholar, concludes that the Liberals lost a great deal of electoral popularity because of adverse worker reaction to the contributory features of National Insurance. I believe this outcome must be separated from the evolution in the statist direction that was so evident in the thinking of many organized workers and their elected leaders between 1876 and 1911. Powell, David, British Politics and the Labour Question, 1868–1990 (New York, 1992), 45–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, challenges the view that the Labor Party stagnated and the Liberals lost ground in the 1911 general elections largely because of working-class discontent with the new Liberal state welfare programs. Powell points to the intangible element of a backlash because of raised expectations and the fact that lack of funds for campaigning forced the Labour Party to enter into an electoral pact with the Liberals for the December 1910 General Election.

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3. Pat Thane has demonstrated that subgroups of British workers who anticipated benefiting from a particular welfare state program did not automatically endorse all other welfare state programs. Thus skilled workers did not want expanded poor law benefits for the bottom segments of the labor force. “Non-Contributory Versus Insurance Pensions, 1878–1908,” in , Thane, ed., The Origins of British Social Policy (London, 1978), 90–104Google Scholar.

4. Pelling's classic essay rightly cites worker opposition to the Poor Law and to compulsory education legislation. But he does not adduce any opposition to the Salisbury factory act, which reduced hours for women and children, or to the 1906 law that provided free school meals to low-income children. This article contradicts Pelling's broad-stroke statement that “there is no evidence that social reform was in fact popular with the electorate until after it had been carried out.” Pelling, Henry, “The Working Class and the Origins of the Welfare State,” in Pelling, Henry, ed., Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London, 1968), 15Google Scholar; Fox, Alan, History and Heritage: The Social Origins of the British Industrial Relations System (London, 1985), 232Google Scholar.

5. Regularly employed and unionized workers favored the expansion of social insurance programs, while a minority of syndicalists and a bloc of nonsyndicalists among the employed stratum of manual workers opposed welfare state programs. Thane, Pat, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain 1880–1914,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 877–900CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thane, , “Introduction,” in , Thane, ed., The Origins of British Social Policy, 17Google Scholar. Norman McCord, “Ratepayers and Social Policy,” in ibid., 21–35, points out that skilled workers and regularly employed factory operatives probably opposed poor relief for the “residuum” because such programs were financed by local taxes and because the workers in the “residuum” were judged to be unwilling to help themselves. On the numerical weakness of British syndicalist trade unionists before 1914, see Powell, , British Politics and the Labour Question, 1868–1990, 53Google Scholar. See also the 1939 assessment that the “majority of the Trade Union leaders” were attracted to National Insurance by the “powers accorded to the Trade Unions to administer both health and unemployment insurance” and that the principal working-class opponents of state welfare were “a small minority of socialists.” Cole, G. D. H. and Postgate, Raymond, The British Common People, 1746–1938 (New York, 1939, 1961), 327Google Scholar.

6. The author was not able to investigate systematically the views of unionized factory workers on this issue.

7. Report from the select committee on employers' liability for injuries to their servants, with minutes of evidence, 1877, 9, 129.

8. The Liberal leadership rejected the far weaker bill passed by the Lords and prevailed upon the latter to accept the Commons' version. Bartrip, P. W. J. and Burman, S. B., The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: Industrial Compensation Policy, 1833–1897 (Oxford, 1983), 150–156Google Scholar.

9. Some employers used contracting out to minimize their financial liability for accidents. Others wanted predictable costs. Report of the select committee on the employers' liability act (1880), together with the proceedings of the committee, minutes of evidence and appendix, 1886, 3, 24 (hereafter Report, 1886).

10. Ibid., 154–55.

11. Bartrip and Burman, Wounded Soldiers of Industry, 151.

12. Ibid., 168. Herbert Asquith made the same argument in 1893. 4 Hansard VIII (20 February 1893), 1957–58.

13. Report, 1886, 3. Home office estimates in 1889 put the range at 10–25 percent. Bartrip and Burman, Wounded Soldiers of Industry, 159. Those employers who paid the administrative costs of their relief funds would incur minimal additional outlays for the processing of payments to more injured workers.

14. Report, 1886, 3, 24.

15. Ibid., 313.

16. Tishler, Hace Sorel, Self Reliance and Social Security, 1870–1917 (Port Washington, N.Y, 1971)Google Scholar. Cordery, Simon, “Friendly societies and the discourse of respectability in Britain, 1825–1875,” Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 35–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses the voluntary collectivism of the Friendly Societies, which insured the more prosperous wage-earners against loss of income. Throughout the nineteenth century the Friendly Societies opposed any proposed private or government-mandated pension scheme that compelled the customers of the societies to make contributions to other plans. Collins, Doreen, “The Introduction of Old Age Pensions in Great Britain,” Historical Journal 8 (1965): 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Report, 1886, 3.

18. Bartrip and Burman, Wounded Soldiers of Industry, 160–62; 4 Hansard X (24 March 1893), 1060.

19. The 1880 law led many employers to establish mutual benefit plans for the first time and motivated some who had already created benefit plans to increase their contributions to the plans. Report, 1886, 4, 5, 79–86, 134–40, 251. In some venues employers who had been contributing 15 percent of the cost of existing joint relief funds promised to raise their contribution to 25 percent if the employee waived the right to sue if injured in a workplace accident. Great Britain, Minutes of evidence taken before the royal commission on labor, Group A, 1891, 431–33; Charles Fenwick, M.P., who was very pro-labor, charged that some employer-mandated contracting- out schemes had such high levels of worker contributions that all the employers' liabilities under the 1880 law were covered, removing any financial incentive for the employer to promote workplace safety. Royal Commission on Labor, Minutes of evidence taken before the royal commission on labor sitting as a whole, 1892, 507.

20. Report, 1886, 3.

21. TUC, Report, 1886, 28, 1891, 23.

22. Ibid., 1887, 47.

23. During the 1897 parliamentary debate over his workmen's compensation bill, Joseph Chamberlain would claim that employer contributions to joint accident funds were not usually as generous as had been thought. Bartrip and Burman, Wounded Soldiers of Industry, 159.

24. TUC, Report, 1891, 64.

25. Asquith personally favored contracting out because he felt that the typical worker would gain far more from a guaranteed relief payment than from unpredictable litigation. 4 Hansard XVIII (10 November 1893), 662–65, 684, 693; 4 Hansard X (24 March 1893), 1060. On mass meetings of railway workers, see Railway Review, 20 October 1893, 5, 17 November 1893, 4–5, 24 November 1893, 5. On the political relationship between the TUC and the Liberal leadership on this bill, see Bartrip and Burman, Wounded Soldiers of Industry, 192–98.

26. 4 Hansard XVIII (10 November 1893), 684, 735.

27. Railway Review, 24 November 1893, 5. See lengthy reports (mostly paraphrased) from the parliamentary debates on the Asquith bill in ibid., 17 November 1893, 4–5.

28. For exceptions, see statements of Dr. Hunter, MP, to the effect that workers “fear that if the employer is insured he will be careless.” Railway Review, 8 January 1892, 3.

29. Report, 1886, 5, 111.

30. 4 Hansard XVIII (10 November 1893), 690. See also Hennock, E. P., British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance, 1880–1914 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

31. Railway Review, 14 May 1897, 4 (editorial).

32. Report, 1886, 320.

33. 4 Hansard XVIII (10 November 1893), 851.

34. 4 Hansard X (24 March 1893), 1066, (30 March 1893), 1582; 4 Hansard XI (25 Apri1 1893), 1177, 4 Hansard XI (25 April 1893), 1194–99, 1202, 1206; 4 Hansard XVIII (14 November 1893), 926–33, (23 November 1893), 1617. Casualty insurance companies backed workmen's compensation because it would expand greatly the volume of insurance premiums they could collect and invest.

35. Asquith hedged: he was not opposed to workmen's compensation but claimed there was not yet a strong public demand for this approach. Ibid., 4 Hansard XVIII (14 November 1893), 923.

36. Railway Review, 20 October 1893, 5.

37. The next day the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC and the London Trades Council organized a massive public rally in Hyde Park to protest the decision of the Lords. The rally was one of the largest ever held at that site. Railway Review, 15 December 1893, 4; TUC, Minutes of Parliamentary Committee, 22 December 1893, 18 March 1894, microfilm, North London University Library; The Trades Union Congress Parliamentary Committee, To the officers of trades societies and trades councils, 28 02 1894, leaflet, North London University LibraryGoogle Scholar; The Times, 18 March 1894.

38. Pelling, Henry, Origins of the Labor Party, 2d ed. (New York, 1965), 196Google Scholar; Price, Richard, “The New Unionism and the Labor Process,” in Mommsen, Wolfgang J. and Husung, Hans Gerhard, eds., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914 (London, 1985), 133–140Google Scholar; Belchem, John, Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750–1900 (Portland, Ore., 1990), 235–236Google Scholar. Many Liberal MPs were also moving in the same direction, with a majority backing the eight-hours bill of the Miners' Federation between 1892 and 1895. Powell, British Politics and the Labour Question, 20.

39. Members of the ASRS and the miners of South Wales turned to independent labor political action after the failure of the 1897 All-Grades Movement among the railwaymen and the bitter defeat striking miners sustained in 1898. After the ASRS adopted direct election of delegates to the TUC (1897), the officials elected were more likely to favor independent labor action. Bagwell, Philip S., The Railwaymen: The History of the National Union of Railwaymen (London, 1963), 200–208Google Scholar; Pelling, Origins of the Labor Party, 194. On the Board of Trade, see Davidson, Roger, Whitehall and the Labour Problem in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain: A Study in Official Statistics and Social Control (London, 1985)Google Scholar. Thane notes the growing financial pressures in the 1890s that led some but not all Friendly Societies, patronized by regularly employed workers, to favor state welfare programs. Officials of the “new unions” formed during the 1890s often supported welfare state programs because their members could not afford payments to union or Friendly Society benefit plans. Pat Thane, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare,’” 878–79, 884, 886.

40. Asher, Robert, “The Ignored Precedent: Samuel Gompers and Workmen's Compensation,” New Labor Review 4 (Fall 1982): 51–77Google Scholar.

41. Railway Review, 15 July 1892, 5; 22 July 1892, 4. The annual reports of the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission included only compilations of railway accidents. United States, Interstate Commerce Commission, Annual Report, 1888–1910.

42. Railway Review, 29 September 1993, 4.

43. Ibid., 12 January 1894, 4.

44. Ibid., 22 February 1995, 4. The committee included Hubert Llewellyn Smith, who would play a crucial role in the formulation of state welfare policies in the twentieth century.

45. Ibid., 30 August 1895, 4.

46. Ibid., 14 August 1896, 4.

47. Ibid., 15 November 1896, 4.

48. Bagwell, The Railwaymen, 100–109.

49. Railway Review, 24 March 1899, 8; 7 April 1899, 8.

50. Bagwell, The Railwaymen, 100–113.

51. Bartrip, P. W. J. and Fenn, T., “The Measurement of Safety: Factory Accident Statistics in Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Historical Research 63 (1990): 58–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. TUC, Minutes of the Parliamentary Committee, 13 May 1897.

53. Railway Review, 14 May 1897 4; 21 May 1897, 4; The Amalgamated Engineers' Monthly Journal I (02 1897): 3Google Scholar.

54. Ibid., June 1987, 2–3.

55. The Labor Leader, 22 May 1897. Powell, David, “The New Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, 1886–1906,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 376 n 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. John Burns spoke for other members of the TUC's Parliamentary Committee when he termed the 1897 compensation law an “experiment of a tentative character, in the right direction.” 4 Hansard XLIX (18 May 1897), 1194.

56. Young, Kenneth, Arthur James Balfour (London, 1963), 180Google Scholar.

57. United States Employers' Liability and Workmen's Compensation Commission, Report, II (Washington, 1912), 981 (hereafter USELWCC, Report). This was a joint Senate/House commissionGoogle Scholar.

58. Viz. Did it refer to the main frame of the building or to steeples? Was a building that would eventually be more than thirty feet high covered before it reached that height?

59. Newman, T. S., Handbook to the Workmen's Compensation Acts, 1906–1993 (1923), University of North London LibraryGoogle Scholar.

60. Hennock, British Social Reform and German Precedents, 88.

61. USELWCC, Report, II, 944; TUC, Report, 1911.

62. Union leaders believed state administration would prevent unethical insurance company claims agents from swindling injured workers. USELWCC, Report, II, 943–944, 1391.

63. 4 Hansard L (1 June 1897), 245.

64. Minutes of evidence taken before the departmental committee on workmen's compensation, 1904, 349–50 (hereafter Minutes, 1904.

65. Railway Review, 16 June 1899, 1.

66. Marks, Gary, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany, and the United States in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Princeton, 1989), 84–86Google Scholar; USELWCC, Report, II, 935. Union officials would also provide free advice to members on the best way to secure their benefits under the National Insurance law of 1911. See also Minutes, 1904, 15–17, 90, 95, 263–64.

67. Ibid., 89–98, 263, 374, 380.

68. Gompers, Samuel, remarks at annual meeting of the American Social Science Association, reported in Journal of Politics 40 (1902): 49–51Google Scholar.

69. Between 1915 and 1917, social progressives in the United States pressed for the enactment of unemployment and sickness insurance. Asher, “The Ignored Precedent,” 51–77; Dubofsky, Melvyn, “Abortive Reform: The Wilson Administration and Organized Labor, 1913–1920,” in Sirrani, Carmen and Cronin, James E., eds., Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 (Philadelphia, 1983), 197–220Google Scholar.

70. Alan Fox, History and Heritage, 232. Fox's main citation on this point is a finding by José Harris that during World War I “a substantial section of the labor movement” viewed “government social welfare as a thinly disguised form of coercion by a repressive state.” Harris, José, “Some Aspects of Social Policy in Britain during the Second World War,” in Mommsen, Wolfgang J., ed., The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany, 1850–1950 (London, 1981), 260Google Scholar. Harris's basis for this conclusion is her 1977 account of the 1916 opposition of a select group of unions to the extension of unemployment insurance coverage (payroll deductions would have reduced workers' current income) to their members. Harris notes that these unions were concentrated in trades that did not view themselves as likely to experience postwar unemployment. This evidence does not indicate principled hostility to welfare state programs. Harris, José, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, 1977), 255Google Scholar.

71. Wilson, Arnold and Levy, Hermann, Workmen's Compensation (London, 1939), 1:73–120Google Scholar; USELWCC, Report, II, 1272.

72. Ibid., 934, 940–42, 1391.

73. Ibid., 940–42.

74. Ibid., 942.

75. There is no space here to discuss the 1906 law improving safety on oceangoing vessels and the Mines Eight Hours Act of 1908. Consider also the 1912 government intervention in the mine strike, which forced employers to accept a minimum-wage system in which unions had significant input. Powell, , British Politics and the Labour Question, 18, 38–40Google Scholar.

76. Freeden, Michael, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Powell, “The New Liberalism and the Rise of Labour,” 369–93, analyzes the tensions between the class-conscious labor politicians and the middleand upper-class Liberals.

77. Brown, Kenneth D., Labor and Unemployment, 1900–1914 (Totowa, N.J., 1971)Google Scholar; Harris, William Beveridge, 147; idem, Unemployment and Politics (Oxford, 1972), 273–274Google Scholar.

78. Some scholars combine these two totals and argue that fifty-three Labor MPs were elected in 1906. Rempel, Richard A., Unionists Divided (London, 1972), 151Google Scholar.

79. Marks, Unions in Politics, 84–86; Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 180; Church, Roy, “Edwardian Labour Unrest and Coalfield Militancy, 1890–1914,” Historical Journal 30 (1987): 841–857CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80. Powell, “The New Liberalism and the Rise of Labour,” 388–93.

81. Thane, “Non-Contributory versus Insurance Pensions 1878–1908,” 99. Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 182, concludes that trade union leaders increasingly “thought in class and confrontational terms, seeking to use the power of the state to reinforce their own bargaining position against recalcitrant employers, not because they had become servants of a putative classless state.” The same consciousness informed trade union leaders' approach to state welfare programs.

82. Marshall, T. H., Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950)Google Scholar.

83. Addison, Paul, “Winston Churchill and the Working Class, 1900–1914,” in Winter, Jay, ed., The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge, 1983), 48Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., 48.

85. Gilbert, Martin, Churchill: A Life (New York, 1991), 203Google Scholar. See also Gilbert, , Churchill's Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.

86. Individually and at union conferences, he met especially the leaders of the TUC, the machinists, and the shipbuilders. Harris, William Beveridge, 153–54.

87. No unemployed worker could be denied benefits if he refused a job at a firm being struck by a union or if he refused a job that paid wages lower than the prevailing wages in his trade or district. Ibid., 155. Britain's 1908 old-age pension legislation contained a character test that could have been manipulated to coerce workers and deny them pensions. But by 1911 the pauper disqualification had been removed. Thane concludes that the “Pensions Act was less harshly administered than other legislation.” It appears that the “habitual failure to work” clause was never implemented. Any worker who regularly contributed to a friendly society plan was, prima facie, eligible for a pension. Thane, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain,” 899, and “Non-Contributory Versus Insurance Pensions,” 104.

88. Martin, Ross M., T.U.C.: The Growth of a Pressure Group, 1868–1976 (Oxford, 1980), 98.Google Scholar

89. Amalgamated Engineers' Monthly Journal VII (June 1911): 4–5.

90. James criticized those delegates at the July 1911 TUC/Labor Party summit on National Insurance who insisted on opposing any employee contributions to National Insurance. The Liberals would never budge on the issue, James warned. It would be more productive to focus on feasible amendments. After the enactment of National Insurance, the editor of the Amalgamated Engineers' Monthly Journal warned unions to “be careful” to ensure their participation in the new scheme. But he flatly stated that National Insurance was “not inimical to the real purposes of Trade Unionism.” Ibid., VII (July 1911): 6; VIII (June 1912): 4–5.

91. Ibid., V (July 1909): 3–7. Three years later the editor noted that the unemployment insurance system would be administered by independent industrial commissioners, not the courts, which the ASE distrusted. Ibid., VIII (June 1912): 4–5.

92. Harris, William Beveridge, 154, reports that in June 1909 conferences with Board of Trade officials, union leaders voiced no theoretical objections to the board's proposed scheme of labor exchanges but reacted adversely to the role of impartial administrators in the labor exchanges, preferring “men who have come through the rough and tumble of life … men who have come through the thick of battle.”

93. Martin, TUC, 30–33.

94. Ibid., 102.

95. Ibid., 105–7. Dubofsky, “Abortive Reform,”197–220.

96. Railway Review, 4 June 1909, 1.

97. Ibid., 13 January 1911, 1.

98. Railway Review, 6 October 1911, 3 (editorial), 9, 23 February 1912, 1, 22 March 1912, 1, 17 May 1912, 1, 28 June 1912, 1, 14 July 1912, 1.

99. Railway Review, 18 October 1912, 1.

100. TUC, Report, 1912, 1915, 1916, 360–64.

101. Railway Review, 1911–12; Amalgamated Engineers' Monthly Journal, 1911–12.

102. Amalgamated Engineers' Monthly Journal VIII (06 1912) 42–50.Google Scholar

103. Ibid., 45.

104. Ibid., 43.

105. Ibid., 43–45.

106. Ibid., 49–51.

107. Ibid., 13–25.

108. Ibid., 47–49.

109. Ibid., 45–47.

110. Harris, William Beveridge, 157–59, reports that many skilled workers did not trust the Labour Exchanges at first and were reluctant to associate with lessskilled workers (and scab labor) at the exchanges. But the linkage of the exchanges with the administration of unemployment insurance induced the skilled workers to use the services of the exchanges. Thane, “The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain,” 882, 887, notes that some working-class pressure groups (1900–1910) would have preferred noncontributory welfare state programs. She also notes (897) that by 1912 “unwillingness to compromise with the Liberal [social insurance] reforms … characterized only the most radical Socialists and the most radical individualist Liberals.”

111. Significant union participation was offered in the initial insurance schemes proposed by the Liberals and was augmented in response to subsequent union pressure. The analysis offered here suggests that Powell, British Politics and the Labour Question, 54, somewhat overstated his case: “The Unions saw themselves upholding their voluntarist, self-help principles … against an encroaching, welfarist state.”