British Unemployment Research Articles

Industrial, regional, and gender divides in British unemployment between the wars

Abstract Despite a substantial body of literature on the severe unemployment crisis in interwar Britain, our understanding of its distributional impacts remains limited. Using newly digitized government data, this paper analyzes the gender, industrial, and regional composition of unemployment 1923–1936. I find that the unemployment rate was higher for men owing in part to a strongly gender-segmented labor market, that unemployment was widespread across industries and not just a product of the declining staple industries, that unemployment exhibited strong seasonality, and that regional unemployment differentials cannot be primarily attributed to regions’ varying industrial compositions. These results offer a more granular view of this mass unemployment episode.

Industrial, Regional, and Gender Divides in British Unemployment Between the Wars

Industrial, Regional, and Gender Divides in British Unemployment Between the Wars

Whiteness, Imperial Anxiety, and the “Global 1930s”: The White British League Debate in Hong Kong

AbstractWhat is a British colony for, and who is it for? These were the questions at the crux of a public debate in 1933 in Hong Kong sparked by a British resident claiming to have formed an organization for the “protection and advancement” of the “British white race.” This article explores how anxieties about fascism, white privilege, and “others” in the empire allowed the very idea of such a political movement to be elevated to the subject of heated debate. The discussion on British unemployment, poor whites, and European “intruders” in the colony tells us less about the actual socioeconomic conditions that Hong Kong Britons faced than about their subjective experience of being “British” in an imperial context. The articulation of imperial anxiety also shows us how the fluid, ambiguous borders of whiteness and Britishness were negotiated at the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, class, and race. Highlighting the global perspectives demonstrated in the debate and the various transnational networks across Hong Kong, this article argues that the debate was as much about global sociopolitical circumstances as about what was happening in Hong Kong. It therefore offers a timely opportunity to rethink how the local, “national,” regional, and global were interwoven in the “global 1930s,” even among the English reading public in the British colony of Hong Kong.

‘The Ill-name of the Old Country’: London’s Assisted Emigrants, British Unemployment Policy, and Canadian Immigration Restriction, 1905-1910

Between 1906 and 1910, Canada passed two increasingly restrictive Immigration Acts to, among other reasons, reduce charitable assisted emigration from London. These acts were passed in response to Britain’s Unemployed Workmen Act in 1905, which contained an emigration clause designed to move London’s unemployed to Canada. Canada deemed these emigrants to be unsuitable largely because they hailed from the impoverished East End of London. Emigration charities felt an imperial betrayal in the wake of the restrictions. Although an exception allowed for a limited degree of charitable emigration to continue, assisted English emigrants were now unreservedly lumped together with other undesirables in the British World. Despite Canadian displeasure, charities continued to send London’s unemployed to Canada until World War I. A more direct relationship between British unemployment policy and Canadian immigration policy is emphasized, opening a space wherein to examine transnational and imperial legal tensions in the early twentieth century British World. This space reveals a nexus of poverty, migration, and restriction that pitted Britain’s needs against Canada’s; it also complicates the concept of loyal nations belonging to a cooperative British World, becoming particularly relevant to the evolution of restrictive Canadian attitudes towards British immigrants after 1905.

David Cameron’s ‘Huge Mistake’. Closing of the United Kingdom Labour Market for Eastern European Immigrants from Polish and British Perspective

Eastern European immigrants coming to the UK since 2004 (in 2/3 from Poland) by their amount of work have concurred to serious growth of the GDP. But simultaneously they have been burden for British welfare system (among others by taking benefits for family members living outside the UK) and taking job even for minimum salary what have caused growth of native British unemployment. In this situation Conservative-Liberal Government leading by David Cameron have decided to limit an access to the UK labour market by language knowledge tests and tightening social benefits policy to job seekers. With informal support of main opposition parties (i.e. the Labour Party and the UKIP) D. Cameron have taken risky game showing he has been able to fight for his nation’s interests even in spite of huge protests of Polish and other Eastern European countries politicians and against the European Parliament resolution of 16 January 2014. But when turning out into a defender of Britons’ rights he also has showed that there have been deep divisions between “old” and “new” Europe still after 10 years of the EU’s biggest enlargement in 2004.

The Great Recession in the UK Labour Market: A Transatlantic Perspective

The increase in unemployment in the United Kingdom that accompanied the Great Recession has been conspicuous by its moderation. The rise in joblessness is dwarfed by the recent experience of the United States, by past recessionary episodes in the UK and by the contraction in GDP in the UK. Increased rates of job loss have played a dominant role in shaping the rise in British unemployment. Unemployment duration has not increased to the levels seen in previous recessions, in contrast to the US where duration substantially exceeds previous peaks. Looking forward, the UK labour market appears to have adjusted fully to the shocks that prompted the recession. Signs of reductions in match efficiency witnessed recently in the US are not mirrored in the UK. In contrast, while long-term unemployment currently remains well below historical levels, recent estimates of job finding rates suggest that it has the potential to rise much further. Thus, a timely recovery in aggregate demand will play an important role in averting persistently high unemployment in the future.

Subsidy and Treasury: the Trade Facilities Act and the UK Shipbuilding Industry in the 1920s

This article analyses the impact of government policy towards British unemployment in the post First World War period. It attempts to do this through the prism of the Trades Facilities Act and the impact on British shipbuilding. The treasury, however, were opposed given other priorities and the effect of the scheme remains, at best, contentious.

Anti-Alienism and the Primrose League: The Externalization of the Postwar Crisis in Great Britain 1918-32

Anti-alienism has frequently been the dark underside of organized patriotic movements in twentieth-century Britain. Love of nation has all too frequently been accompanied by an abstract fear of foreigners or a concrete dislike of alien immigrants residing in Britain. Numerous patriotic leagues have used xenophobia and the supposed threat posed by aliens to define themselves and their Conservative creed. Aliens symbolized “the other,” which held values antithetical to members of the patriotic leagues. These currents have usually become even more pronounced in times of tension and crisis. From the end of the First World War through the 1920s, Britain suffered an enormous economic, social, and political crisis. British unemployment never fell below one million as traditional industries such as coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, and textiles declined. Electoral reform in 1918 and 1928 quadrupled the size of the electorate, and the British party system fractured with the Liberals divided and Labour becoming the alternative party of government. Industrial unrest was rampant, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. The example of the Russian Revolution inspired many on the Left and appalled their opponents on the Right, while many British Conservatives felt that fundamental aspects of the existing system of capitalism and parliamentary democracy were under challenge.

Anti-Alienism and the Primrose League: The Externalization of the Postwar Crisis in Great Britain 1918-32

Anti-alienism has frequently been the dark underside of organized patriotic movements in twentieth-century Britain. Love of nation has all too frequently been accompanied by an abstract fear of foreigners or a concrete dislike of alien immigrants residing in Britain. Numerous patriotic leagues have used xenophobia and the supposed threat posed by aliens to define themselves and their Conservative creed. Aliens symbolized “the other,” which held values antithetical to members of the patriotic leagues. These currents have usually become even more pronounced in times of tension and crisis. From the end of the First World War through the 1920s, Britain suffered an enormous economic, social, and political crisis. British unemployment never fell below one million as traditional industries such as coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, and textiles declined. Electoral reform in 1918 and 1928 quadrupled the size of the electorate, and the British party system fractured with the Liberals divided and Labour becoming the alternative party of government. Industrial unrest was rampant, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. The example of the Russian Revolution inspired many on the Left and appalled their opponents on the Right, while many British Conservatives felt that fundamental aspects of the existing system of capitalism and parliamentary democracy were under challenge.

Transitory shock or structural shift? The impact of the early 1980s recession on British regional unemployment

This paper examines the impact of the early 1980s recession on regional unemployment in Britain. More specifically, it seeks to evaluate the hypothesis that this recessionary shock was so severe that it caused an upward structural shift in the underlying mean unemployment rates of the regions. This proposition is analysed using Dickey — Fuller tests for difference versus trend stationarity, and the augmented structural shift and trend break time-series models developed by Perron. The results suggest that the apparent stochastic non-stationarity in regional unemployment over the period 1965 – 95 is in fact due to an upward structural shift in regional mean unemployment rates in 1980. Furthermore, the nature of this shift appears to have differed as between the northern and southern regions of the country.

British inflation and unemployment in the 1970s: a model-based decomposition

The UKs stagflation in the 1970s is decomposed into its causative factors, using the Liverpool rational expectations model. It is found that there was a large rise in the natural rate of unemployment, mainly due to rising union density; that fiscal and monetary shocks had little effect on the resulting rise in unemployment; and the high inflation of the period was due to persistent and large fiscal deficits, with their accompanying monetization. Mrs Thatcher inherited an inflation induced by an ongoing deficit and a natural rate of over 2 million unemployed.

British Unemployment: Letter from America

This paper asks whether there are any lessons to be learned about unemployment in Britain from the United States experience. The fundamental issues to be addressed are embodied in data showing that the relative unemployment performance of Britain and the United States reversed itself between the I9G6os and the I98os. In the early i960s, the unemployment rate in Britain averaged I *9 %, about one-third that in the United States. In the late I 980s the unemployment rate in Britain at 9-5 % was more than one-and-a-half times higher than that in the United States. The paper examines reasons for this. The immediate candidates as explanations for these facts are the changing priorities of government macroeconomic policies. Governments in the past fifteen years have placed greater weight on minimising price inflation and considerably less weight on reducing unemployment than they did four decades ago. This is because governments have been persuaded that their unemployment goals entailed not a constant, but an accelerating rate of price inflation. Hence they have pursued policies that have been aimed first at reducing the rate of price inflation and then at maintaining a constant, low, rate of inflation. However, government macroeconomic policies appear more relevant as an explanation for movements in unemployment over the business cycle than as an explanation for the upward trend in unemployment over four decades. And the distinctive feature of Britain's unemployment is that it increased continually over each five year interval from the first half of the I 950S to the first half of the I98os. What is needed are explanations directed not toward cyclical factors, but toward the trend.

Keynes Versus Churchill: Revaluation and British Unemployment in the 1920s

The textbook explanation for Britain's high unemployment in the 1920s is that the return to gold at $4.86 left the currency overvalued. Recent estimates suggest that an 11 percent devaluation would have eliminated roughly half the unemployment in 1925. This article questions the validity of that conclusion. It measures the power of exchange rate devaluations to decrease unemployment in the context of sectorally distinct labor markets. The results suggest that though a devaluation would have been helpful, eliminating half of 1925's unemployment would have required one much greater than 11 percent and would have caused significant price pressures.

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy.

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy.

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy

British Unemployment 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy.

Journal Article British Unemployment 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy Get access British Unemployment 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy. By W. R. GARSIDE. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 414. £40.00 hardback, US $69.50 hardback. ISBN 0 521 36443 4.) N. H. Dimsdale N. H. Dimsdale The Queen's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 101, Issue 409, 1 November 1991, Pages 1582–1584, https://doi.org/10.2307/2234907 Published: 01 November 1991

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy.

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy.

Book Review: Historical Studies: British Unemployment, 1919–1939: A Study in Public Policy

Book Review: Historical Studies: British Unemployment, 1919–1939: A Study in Public Policy

British unemployment, 1919-1939: a study in public policy

List of tables Preface Acknowledgements Part I. Introduction: 1. The nature, causes and dimensions of interwar unemployment Part II. The Labour Market under Strain: 2. Defensive action: unemployment relief and public assistance 1919-32 3. Means to an end: insurance, assistance and the categorization of the unemployed, 1932-9 4. In and out of the labour market: hours of work, pensions and the school-leaving age Part III. The International Context: 5. On and off gold: unemployment, monetary policy and the exchange rate 6. Trade, tariffs and the stimulation of exports 7. Men, money and markets: the 'Empire solution' to unemployment, 1919-31 Part IV. Structural Unemployment, Industry and the Regions: 8. Industrial revival and reconstruction 9. Uneven development: regional policy, labour transference and industrial diversification Part V. Macroeconomic Policy Options: Theory and Practice: 10. Pricing jobs: the real wage debate and interwar unemployment 11. Relief or remedy? The development of public works policy, 1920-32 12. The limits of intervention: budgetary orthodoxy and the reduction of unemployment in the 1920s 13. New deal or no deal? Fiscal policy and the search for stability, 1930-9 14. Conclusion Bibliography Index.

British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy, by W.R. Garside

"British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study in Public Policy, by W.R. Garside." Canadian Journal of History, 26(1), pp. 109–110