The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain: 77 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) - Hardcover

Boyer, George R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691178739 ISBN 13: 9780691178738

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

How did Britain transform itself from a nation of workhouses to one that became a model for the modern welfare state? The Winding Road to the Welfare State investigates the evolution of living standards and welfare policies in Britain from the 1830s to 1950 and provides insights into how British working-class households coped with economic insecurity. George Boyer examines the retrenchment in Victorian poor relief, the Liberal Welfare Reforms, and the beginnings of the postwar welfare state, and he describes how workers altered spending and saving methods based on changing government policies.

From the cutting back of the Poor Law after 1834 to Parliament’s abrupt about-face in 1906 with the adoption of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, Boyer offers new explanations for oscillations in Britain’s social policies and how these shaped worker well-being. The Poor Law’s increasing stinginess led skilled manual workers to adopt self-help strategies, but this was not a feasible option for low-skilled workers, many of whom continued to rely on the Poor Law into old age. In contrast, the Liberal Welfare Reforms were a major watershed, marking the end of seven decades of declining support for the needy. Concluding with the Beveridge Report and Labour’s social policies in the late 1940s, Boyer shows how the Liberal Welfare Reforms laid the foundations for a national social safety net.

A sweeping look at economic pressures after the Industrial Revolution, The Winding Road to the Welfare State illustrates how British welfare policy waxed and waned over the course of a century.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George R. Boyer is professor of economics and international and comparative labor at Cornell University. He is the author of An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Winding Road to the Welfare State

Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain

By George R. Boyer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17873-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, xi, 
1 Economic Insecurity and Social Policy, 1, 
PART I. SOCIAL POLICY AND SELF-HELP IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN, 
2 Poor Relief, Charity, and Self-Help in Crisis Times, 1834–69, 37, 
3 Social Welfare Policy, Living Standards, and Self-Help, 1861–1908, 75, 
4 Unemployment and Unemployment Relief, 106, 
5 Old Age Poverty and Pauperism, 134, 
PART II. CONSTRUCTING THE WELFARE STATE, 
6 Living Standards in Edwardian England and the Liberal Welfare Reforms, 169, 
7 Social Welfare Policy and Living Standards between the Wars, 217, 
8 The Beveridge Report and the Implementation of the Welfare State, 260, 
9 What Was Gained, 286, 
References, 311, 
Index, 335, 

CHAPTER 1

Economic Insecurity and Social Policy

However steady a man may be, however good a worker, he is never exempt from the fear of losing his job from illhealth or from other causes which are out of his control. ... To the insufficiency of a low wage is added the horror that it is never secure.

— PEMBER REEVES, ROUND ABOUT A POUND A WEEK

We forget how terribly near the margin of disaster the man, even the thrifty man, walks, who has, in ordinary normal conditions, but just enough to keep himself on. ... The possibility of being from one day to the other plunged into actual want is always confronting his family.

— LADY BELL, AT THE WORKS

One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1902, Frank Goss's father arrived home from work early. Giving some coins to his wife, he announced, "That's the last wages you'll get for a bit." He had unexpectedly gotten "the sack." When his wife said that they had always managed when he was out of work in the past, Frank's father replied that things were different this time. Too many people were already without work, some for several months. "Before, there was always a chance of getting in somewhere. ... But it's not like that now. ... Once out now, you can't get in anywhere." He then added, "If there's no work in our trade in the winter, Gawd help us." As Goss recalled, "this was the beginning of our second period of dire poverty." With his father unable to find work, "gradually every bit of furniture that would fetch a few coppers went to the pawnshop." Frank's mother took in washing and occasionally did some dressmaking "at the lowest rates that she could possibly accept," and the boys did errands for their better-off neighbors. The family received a bit of help from relatives and friends, and the grocer and milkman allowed them to purchase "small quantities of the bare necessities on tick." They lived on "crusts and scraps"; the rent went unpaid and accumulated into "a formidable sum." Finally, after several weeks without work, Frank's father went on the tramp with another man, but returned home two weeks later penniless. Reminiscing years afterward about that summer, Goss wrote of how the despair of dire poverty "destroys the fibre of a man," and added: "to feel the patterns and habits of living, in which the future has been envisaged as a procession of normalities, destroyed and replaced by a living fear of greater and greater destitution and want becomes an intermidable [sic] progress into a greater hopelessness that surely breaks the spirit."

Another example of how a household could fall from relative comfort into poverty in a short time is given by the condition of a Preston family in 1862, during the Lancashire cotton famine. The husband was a middle-aged cotton spinner, and at least one of the five children also worked in a factory. The "thrifty" wife ran a "little provision shop." Sometime before the downturn began, one of the sons lost two fingers in an industrial accident and was temporarily disabled, and four of the children had been sick for several months. All lost their jobs when the factories shut down. After a few months without earnings and with their shop's little stock "oozing away — partly on credit to poor neighbours, and partly to live upon themselves," the family was destitute. They were forced to turn to the Poor Law for assistance; at the time they were interviewed the family was "receiving from all sources, work and relief, about 13s. a week."

Mrs. Hart was a widow in her sixties when she was admitted to the Bromley workhouse in 1882. She had done "canvas work," but had been without work for seven or eight weeks and been forced to sell most of her furniture. She had two grown children, but her son had lost a leg and was receiving poor relief, and her daughter offered her no assistance. After less than a year in the workhouse, she left and moved in with her sister, also a widow. Two years later Mrs. Hart was injured carrying some canvas, and after some time in the Bromley Sick Asylum was readmitted to the workhouse, being no longer able to work. Some years later her sister, then 71, applied for relief. She was destitute; her furniture had been sold and she could not pay her rent.

Frank Goss blamed the industrial revolution for his family's plight. In his words, over the past century and a half "it had come upon an unnumbered host like a visitation of a plague destroying their wellbeing, ruining and starving them, and leaving them destitute, crippled and dying in its wake." Goss could have benefited from a course in early modern economic history. Economic insecurity was not a new phenomenon in the nineteenth century, nor was it a product of capitalism. Workers in pre-industrial Europe were subject "to a myriad of uncertainties and insecurities which could temporarily or permanently undermine the precarious viability of their household economies." Not the least of these was the availability and price of grain, which fluctuated with the state of the harvest. However, the rise of an urban industrial economy in the nineteenth century led to new forms of insecurity and to a decline of the traditional safety net based on church, kin, and neighbors. In the words of R.H. Tawney, "the peasant is insecure, but he curses the weather, not social institutions."

Industrialization also led to a widespread discussion of the problems associated with having an uncertain income. The conclusions reached by Pember Reeves and Lady Bell regarding British workers' income insecurity on the eve of the First World War were based on their investigations of working-class households in south London and Middlesbrough, and they were echoed by other commentators. Seebohm Rowntree, the Webbs, William Beveridge, Arthur Bowley, and Llewellyn Smith, among others, wrote about the problem of economic insecurity and how it could be alleviated, and Robert Tressell brilliantly portrayed the extent of insecurity among building trades workers in turn-of-the-century Hastings (Mugsborough) in his novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Winston Churchill, soon to become President of the Board of Trade, wrote to the editor of the Westminster Review in 1907 that "the working classes ... will not continue to bear, they cannot, the awful uncertainties of their lives." In a speech the following year Churchill called insecurity "that great and hideous evil ... by which our industrial population are harassed." Insecurity was a major topic examined by the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress of 1905–9.

Why is it important to study economic insecurity? The material living standards of British manual workers, as measured by average full-time earnings, nearly doubled from 1850 to 1913 — those fully employed in 1913 were far better off, in terms of the ability to purchase goods and services, than their fully employed grandfathers. However, long-term trends in full-time earnings tell us nothing about the amount of time lost due to unemployment or illness, or about workers' ability to cope with these periodic losses of income. By focusing on trends in fulltime earnings, historians often miss what happened to those in households where the prime-age male breadwinner was unemployed or too sick to work, households headed by female workers due to the death or absence of an adult male, and households where the breadwinner, whether male or female, was too old to work or at least to work full-time.

How did working-class households deal with income insecurity? What role did public and private safety nets play in alleviating insecurity? How did government social policy and workers' coping strategies change from 1834 to 1940? This book addresses these questions, focusing on workers' methods for coping with income insecurity and the evolution of social welfare policy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Defining Terms

It is useful to begin with a few definitions. Western et al. define economic insecurity as "the risk of economic loss faced by workers and households as they encounter the unpredictable events of life." Insecurity is associated with income loss caused by "adverse events" such as unemployment and poor health; the negative impact of these shocks on households depends "on the surrounding institutions that regulate risk." Recent attempts to measure insecurity have been undertaken by Osberg and Sharpe and by Hacker et al. Osberg and Sharpe's index of economic security is based on "four key objective economic risks" — income loss associated with unemployment, the "risk of health care costs," and the "prevalence of poverty" among single-parent families and the aged. Hacker et al. construct an economic security index measuring "the share of individuals who experience at least a 25 percent decline in their inflation-adjusted 'available household income' from one year to the next (except when entering retirement) and who lack an adequate financial safety net to replace this lost income until it returns to its original level."

Data constraints preclude the construction of such an index for Victorian Britain. However, the notion of economic insecurity that I use throughout this book is similar to that of Hacker, Osberg, and Western. Insecurity refers to a household's exposure to declines in income of a magnitude large enough to create acute financial hardship. The extent of working-class insecurity in Victorian Britain was determined by the interaction of three factors: the probability of large negative income shocks; the ability of households to buffer income shocks with savings or insurance benefits from friendly societies or trade unions, or assistance from kin; and the existence and generosity of government social policies (or charitable institutions) that provided benefits to partially offset income loss.

Any discussion of insecurity has to confront the issue of whether income fluctuations were predictable. Workingclass households experienced negative income shocks as a result of unemployment, reductions in wages or work hours, prolonged periods of illness, death, or disability of the chief wage earner, and old age. If most income shocks could be anticipated, why didn't households protect themselves from financial distress by increasing their savings, joining mutual insurance organizations providing unemployment, sickness, old age, and disability benefits, or, at the least, obtaining a stock of pawnable goods that could be used to raise enough cash to live on for a few weeks? Critics of government social welfare programs have raised this issue repeatedly for the past two centuries.

The evidence presented in this book shows that Victorian working-class households did save and join friendly societies, but, despite their attempts at income smoothing, many periodically fell into financial distress. Why? First, while the occurrence of income shocks was to some extent predictable, their precise timing and magnitude were not. It is easier to anticipate that a business cycle downturn will occur every six or eight years than to estimate the amount of time one will be out of work during the next downturn. Severe recessions forced many who had not done so during milder downturns to turn to the Poor Law for help. Moreover, the rise of a globalized economy created additional uncertainty that was difficult to predict. The Lancashire cotton famine, which threw thousands of factory workers out of employment for months, was caused by the sharp decline in raw cotton imports during the American Civil War, an event factory workers could not have anticipated. The great expansion in international trade after 1870 led to a corresponding increase in workers' insecurity; in the words of Michael Huberman, "instability rose everywhere as economies became more open." Workers tried to cope with the additional risk, but many, especially among the low-skilled, were fighting a losing battle.

A household's ability to weather income shocks on its own depended on the size of its "financial safety net," determined by how much it saved and whether the head was eligible for insurance benefits from a mutual insurance organization. Some Victorians, such as Samuel Smiles, asserted that virtually all working-class households could put aside enough money to provide against income loss due to unemployment or illness, but available evidence suggests otherwise. Households headed by well-paid skilled artisans often were able to protect themselves against all but the most catastrophic income shocks. However, as late as 1901 the poorest third of working-class households had little savings and were not members of societies providing sickness benefits, and only one in eight adult male workers was eligible for unemployment benefits through a trade union. The desire to protect oneself against income loss is not the same as the ability to protect oneself. Each of the families described at the beginning of this chapter appeared to be responsible and hardworking, and yet each was plunged into distress by a negative income shock. Low-skilled workers simply did not make enough money to provide against income loss, and many continued to experience acute financial distress at some points in their lives.

While the extent of insecurity in Victorian Britain cannot be precisely measured, rough estimates of the number of insecure households can be constructed. I define a household as economically insecure if it faced a substantial risk of falling temporarily or permanently into poverty in response to negative income shocks. In current terminology, the insecure include both the poor and the "near poor." In turn, I define a household as being in poverty if its total earnings were "insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency." This is Rowntree's "primary poverty" line. Like all poverty lines, it is to some degree "an arbitrarily defined standard," but it was the basis of nearly all poverty standards constructed from 1899 to 1939, and historians have used modified versions of Rowntree's standard to estimate poverty lines for Victorian towns.

The number of households that were economically insecure at a point in time included not only those with incomes below the poverty line but also those with incomes above the poverty line but at risk of falling below it. This risk was quite real. In Victorian Britain as in present-day America, households were constantly moving into and out of poverty, and many households experienced multiple spells in poverty. Because of the dynamic nature or fluidity of poverty, the number of households experiencing at least one spell in poverty over a period of, say, ten years was far larger than the share living in poverty at any point in time. The town surveys undertaken in early twentieth-century Britain counted the number in poverty at a precise moment and therefore missed poverty's dynamic nature. They greatly understate the extent of temporary spells of financial distress caused by the head or other family members being out of work for more than a few weeks. They also greatly understate the extent of insecurity.

Rowntree understood that "the proportion of the community who at one period or other of their lives suffer from poverty to the point of physical privation" was "much greater ... than would appear from a consideration of the number who can be shown to be below the poverty line at any given moment." Besides the households that fell into temporary distress as a result of income shocks caused by unemployment or illness, Rowntree also identified lifecycle periods of poverty. The life of a low-skilled worker was "marked by five alternating periods of want and comparative plenty," as shown in Figure 1.1. The laborer typically lived in poverty for part of his childhood, until he or some of his older siblings were able to work and augment the family income. He again lived in poverty during the period from when his second or third child was born until the oldest child reached 14 and began to work, and finally in old age. A laborer who lived to age 70 could expect to spend upward of 25 years in poverty.

Two other terms that occur at various points in the text, destitution and pauperism, should be defined. Victorian commentators used the term "destitution" to denote deep or extreme poverty; destitute households had incomes well below the poverty line. While anyone who was destitute would be in poverty, many of those who were poor would not be considered destitute. A pauper is a person in receipt of Poor Law relief. The number of persons receiving poor relief cannot be used as a proxy for the number in poverty, because the standards used by Poor Law guardians in administering relief varied both across locations and over time, and many of those in poverty did not receive poor relief. Some contemporaries quoted in the text used the term "pauper" in a pejorative sense, to denote someone who was irresponsible and dependent on public welfare. This use of the term often was associated with criticism of public or private assistance — it was claimed that generous poor relief or charity "pauperized" a segment of the population.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Winding Road to the Welfare State by George R. Boyer. Copyright © 2019 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691178739
• ISBN 13: 9780691178738
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar