two - Slaying idleness without killing care: a challenge for the British welfare state

Summary

Destruction of Idleness means ensuring for every citizen a reasonable opportunity of productive service and of earning according to his [sic] service. It means maintenance of employment of labour and our other resources. Idleness is the largest and fiercest of the five giants and the most important to attack. If the giant Idleness can be destroyed, all the other aims of reconstruction come within reach. (Beveridge, 1943, p 43, emphasis added)

The importance that William Beveridge attached to the maintenance of full employment is not surprising. Unemployment had been a major focus of his work both as an academic economist and as a policy adviser since the beginning of the 20th century (see, for example, Beveridge, 1909). The labour exchanges together with unemployment insurance, which, along with other economists, he advocated to facilitate the matching of jobs with those seeking employment, were introduced before the First World War. He was heavily involved in the work of the Unemployment Assistance Board in the 1930s and was all too aware of the problems created by a wages system that took no account of family size and a benefit system that did. (Eleanor Rathbone had converted him to the need for family allowances in the 1920s.) By the 1940s, he had been much influenced by Keynes and governments’ crucial role in managing demand to avoid mass unemployment (see Harris, 1977). The experience of two world wars demonstrated that governments did have the capacity to support mass employment. While few argued for continuing such a high level of government intervention in the economy in peace time, there was greater acceptance that governments should and could plan the economy in order to minimise unemployment levels. The coalition government's White Paper Employment Policy published in 1944 stated: ‘The government accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war’ (White Paper, 1944).

Over the following decades, the balance of responsibility for both the problem and the solution to unemployment shifted between the government and the individual, with more emphasis placed on the actions of unemployed individuals themselves. In this chapter, first, the resulting changes in the meanings of ‘idleness’ and ‘unemployment’ will be briefly described. Second, the huge shift in the responsibilities of wives and mothers in relation to the labour market, both ideologically and in practice, will be discussed.