Unemployment Relief Research Articles

Public unemployment relief and health during the great depression

ABSTRACT This paper uses newly collected data on county-level unemployment relief recipiency in 1933 with an OLS with fixed effects and a cross-sectional border-county research design, to examine the correlation between Depression-era public assistance and contemporaneous mortality. The paper finds that in counties where the government tended to support more unemployed families, mortality was lower, particularly for white families. Overall, the unemployment relief program accounted for around 2.5 percentage points of the mortality decline. This cross-sectional finding, is robust to a range of specifications, including an instrument variable design. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases.

Research on the Influence of Roosevelt's New Deal on American Social Security System

The social security system that ensures the most basic living needs of residents is very important for a country. The Roosevelt administration advocated the establishment of a government led social security system, taking different key and forms of unemployment relief, employment expansion, social security legislation and other measures to solve the problems of employment and poverty in American society, and achieve the goal of national intervention in the economy, regulating social production and easing political contradictions, which had a huge and far-reaching impact on the whole American society. On the basis of summarizing the relationship between Roosevelt's new deal and social security system, according to the applicable background and specific content of Roosevelt's new deal, this paper focuses on the impact of social security policy in the "New Deal" on American economy, society and politics, in order to provide useful reference for establishing and perfecting China's social security system.

Becoming Entitled: Relief, Unemployment and Reform during the Great Depression by Abigail Trollinger

Trollinger analyzes the impact of unemployment in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s and the reaction to it by affected workers, social reformers, and government. During the 1920s, most unemployment was viewed as “voluntary” since work was always available; to encourage the search for work, charitable assistance was kept to a minimum. However, mass unemployment during the Great Depression made the voluntary-unemployment model unsustainable. Trollinger shows how groups of workers agitated for government-funded unemployment relief as well as for the provision of social insurance. Chicago’s extensive network of settlement workers supported these aims, and the New Deal legislation recognized that the unemployed, in distress through no fault of their own, were “entitled” to taxpayer-funded assistance. The fight to achieve worker-entitlement status is the central thesis of this clearly written monograph.New Deal policies went part but not all the way to securing entitlement. The key work-relief agencies—the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (fera) and the Works Progress Administration (wpa)—received public funding that was generous by historical standards but insufficient to provide relief for all applicants. Moreover, eligibility for relief work was not determined by unemployment status alone. Successful applicants had to be assessed by a social worker as “in need,” in other words, destitute. The eligible who were denied a place had to apply for poorly funded local relief. The Social Security Act (1935) included a provision for unemployment insurance, which worker groups and reformers had vigorously championed, but the federal–state funding model adopted, and the exclusions of groups of workers, was a disappointment. By the mid-thirties, the public had come to accept the concept of worker entitlement, and although the legislative attempts to assist the unemployed may have been too conservative, enormous progress had been made in just a few years. The advantage of Trollinger’s local study is that it shows how organized labor, settlement workers, and state officials worked in unison to fight for the acceptance of entitlement. Indeed, Trollinger argues convincingly that the positive role that these “middle ranks” played was crucial in transforming the public perception of the unemployed worker’s rights from skeptical to sympathetic.Trollinger employs overlapping methodologies of social and urban history. Her work is based on carefully selected primary materials, contemporary newspapers and periodicals, and a wide range of secondary sources that she deploys with great sensitivity and imagination. Her conclusions might have been strengthened if she had additionally explored the state files of key New Deal agencies, particularly the fera and the wpa, which are usually revealing at the county level. Since Chicago (Cook County) dominated the state of Illinois, the detailed observations of professionally experienced federal field agents there would have provided a valuable outside perspective on the provision of relief.The unemployed needed relief, but what they wanted even more was work. Persistent unemployment meant that costly relief measures had to be financed for far longer than policy makers had anticipated. Trollinger neglects economics and, as a result, does not include the fiscal tension between care for the unemployed and sustained economic recovery in her analysis. What was the structure of unemployment in the city? Did Chicago settlement workers and labor organizations have clearly articulated ideas about what measures should be taken to restore jobs? What was their view about the level of work-relief wages or, indeed, real wages in the private sector? Did they express any concerns about budget deficits and rising public debt? What were the differences of opinion between blue- and white-collar workers, and how did both groups view the position of women or people of color in the labor market?Trollinger’s admirable study reveals the important role of the middle ranks in New Deal decision making. In doing so, it prompts additional relevant questions that her methodology is unable to address.

IMPACT OF LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES ON LIVELIHOOD: EVIDENCE FROM MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA

Extraordinary levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality perseveres in South Africa, which in itself is a risk for economic development. Initiatives such as Local Economic Development (LED), globally acknowledged, have been adopted to solve the crisis. LED in its simplest practice is about local people uniting to achieve a better quality of life. Nevertheless, effects of LED are still contentious in developing economies and especially South Africa because of the increased level of poverty amongst supposed beneficiaries of LED. This article evaluates the impact of a LED initiative (EPWP) on reducing the triple challenges facing South Africa. A mixed method approach and a paired-sample t-test was performed to determine the effect of LED. Between time 1[M=17.91, SD=2.68] to time 2[M=20.06, SD=3.43, t(44)=5.1429, p<.0005], there was a statistically significant increase in EPWP ratings by participants. The statistic of eta squared (.375) showed a large effect size. EPWP has generated income and increased skills showing a change in some areas, because of the programme. Qualitative findings indicate that LED evidently has a role to play concerning poverty and unemployment relief, but the initiative is not enough. This article recommends the establishment of projects, which will provide sufficient livelihood for local beneficiaries, which will facilitate local participation.Keywords: EPWP, LED, Livelihood, PovertyJEL Classifications: O20, O21, O38DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijefi.11589

A New Era in Labor Market Policies in Turkey: Unemployment Relief

Yurttaşlarını işsizliğin sebep olduğu sorunlar karşısında korumak kendisini sosyal devlet olarak tanımlayan her refah rejiminin temel amaçlarından bir tanesini teşkil etmektedir. Refah rejimleri bu amaç doğrultusunda uyguladığı emek piyasası politikaları ile doğrudan veya dolaylı istihdam olanakları meydana getirmekte veya işsizliğin sebep olduğu gelir kaybını tazmin etmektedir. Günümüz dünyasında etkileri halen devam eden COVİD-19 salgını bahsedilen işsizlik riskini çok daha tehlikeli bir hale getirmiş, salgın sebebiyle tüm dünyada milyonlarca insan işsiz kalmıştır. Liberteryen kapitalizmi benimsemiş liberal refah rejimlerinin süreci yönetmekteki başarısızlıkları korporatist anlayışla kurgulanmış sosyal politika eylemlerinin önemini bir kez daha ortaya koymuştur. Bu kriz ortamında işsiz kalan bireylerin refah düzeylerinin korunmasında ise pasif emek piyasası politikaları olarak tasnif edilen uygulamalar tek çıkış yolu olarak görülmektedir. Bu çalışma ile işsizlik olgusu ile refah rejimleri arasındaki ilişkiden yola çıkılarak dünyada ve Türkiye’de uygulanan emek piyasası politikaları incelenmiş, salgının refah rejimlerinin emek piyasası politikaları ve emek piyasalarına müdahale biçimlerinde meydana getirdiği değişikliler analiz edilmiştir. Gerçekleştirilen analizler çerçevesinde Türkiye’de kısıtlı bir şekilde de olsa ilk defa “işsizlik yardımı” uygulamasına başvurulduğu görülmüştür. Uygulamanın Türkiye’de uygulanan emek piyasası politikaları açısından yeni bir döneme işaret ettiği düşünülmektedir.

We Are All Gig Workers Now: Online Platforms, Freelancers and The Battles Over Employment Status and Rights During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Since the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic, unemployment rates leapt to the highest they have been since 1975. Congress passed the CARES Act in March 2020, a $2 trillion relief package, offering augmented unemployment relief not only to employees but also to the self-employed, including gig workers. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) was passed to provide sick leave in the form of tax credits that also extended to the self-employed. Beyond the governmental responses, Platform companies offered new limited relief to their workers in the form of sick leave, even as they continue to classify them as freelancers. Mass layoffs alongside mass hiring present immense legal challenges even without a health pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis adds the challenges of health and safety, social distancing, risk management, and telecommuting. This essay written for a symposium on Covid-19 and the Law examines employment law and employee classification in relation to the contemporary realities of the labor market during the Coronavirus pandemic. As business models and market structures are constantly changing and shifting, one thing remains the same: how we classify the work relationship carries enormous weight in determining the rights and duties of market actors. This essay presents the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of gig workers and the irrationalities of rigid classification tests that have always been the Achilles heel of the field of employment and labor law. The essay explores pandemic related economic benefits that have been extended to freelancers and considers the ways the pandemic reveals the nature (and future) of the gig economy. Part I explains the federal and state efforts to expand unemployment benefits to freelancers. It describes how the CARES and FFCRA Acts have expanded the emergency unemployment benefits, paid sick leave, and expanded family and medical leave to freelancers, and yet the funding and the operational details of these programs are still contested. Part II describes the continued service of gig workers during the pandemic, especially in the delivery sector, and how classification as freelancers has left many without medical leave rights, health and safety rights, and other protections. Drawing on my recent research, Part III argues that the fight over employee classification is a red herring, as it misses the point about what public protections ought to be provided to all workers in the labor market. I propose that certain employment and labor protections should be extended to non-employees whether they work on the digital platform or offline in more traditional settings. I further argue that our social welfare system should not be so heavily linked to the labor market.

Unemployment and fraud during the Great Depression in New Zealand

Purpose This paper aims to provide a historical understanding of the unemployment context experienced by the New Zealand population during the Great Depression, which might have caused people to commit financial crimes, such as fraud, to survive. Design/methodology/approach The main source of information is narratives from newspaper articles published by 42 newspapers from 1931 to 1950 that explore New Zealanders’ experiences during declined economic conditions. Findings During the period studied, New Zealanders suffered because of various challenges, mainly unemployment. The government’s response was criticised by the people who used the newspapers as a medium to unleash their frustration about the fairness of unemployment relief for the unemployed and taxation of those who were employed. Some people who struggled in between jobs, as well as some who found themselves being disadvantaged, turned to deviant behaviour such as fraud. The fraudsters might be thought of as the victims of the day, committing a crime of survival, not a crime of choice. Research limitations/implications This research promotes more historical studies to enrich fraud-auditing literature. The lack of detailed information reported in the newspapers during this period limits making specific links to individual circumstances. Originality/value Fraudsters have always been perceived as responsible for their destinies, but a wider social and political context is rarely examined in fraud cases. The period chosen for this paper represents the extreme condition in which the elements of motive, opportunity and rationalisation are all interwoven into one.

Taming the East Texas "Black Giant": Ernest O. Thompson and Illusions of Independence, 1930–1935

Taming the East Texas "Black Giant":Ernest O. Thompson and Illusions of Independence, 1930–1935 Matthew Ware Coulter* Click for larger view View full resolution Ernest O. Thompson. Courtesy of Texas State Library and Archives Commission, 1972/115-368B. [End Page 292] Ernest O. Thompson retired from the Texas Railroad Commission (TRC) in 1965 after more than thirty-two years in office. In reporting the event, the Tulsa Daily World called Thompson a "world-recognized oil conservation expert who tamed the wild burst of Texas oil development during the 1930s." The headline for the story identified Thompson as the "Tamer of Texas Oil." The East Texas oil field formed the epicenter of the "wild burst," and it affected the entire nation. A complex and coordinated effort between the national government and oil-producing states eventually established a framework to bring regulation and stability to petroleum operations in East Texas, and in building the new system Thompson probably played a more important role than any other individual.1 In developing the framework, national and state government officials, as well as industry leaders, grappled with questions of federalism. Thompson established himself as a proponent of state authority and challenged those who called for national government controls over the oil industry. In the state of Texas, the legislature had assigned to the Railroad Commission responsibility for the regulation of oil industry operations. The TRC "quickly translated the controversy into one over states' rights," according to historians Diana Davids Hinton and Roger M. Olien, with Thompson serving as the commission's "most eloquent spokesman" and its "dominant [End Page 293] member." The purpose of this study is to consider how Thompson's views on states' rights, and more specifically, Texas's rights, evolved and became more nuanced as he worked to tame the East Texas "Black Giant."2 When Texas Governor Ross Sterling appointed Thompson to the Railroad Commission in June 1932, the East Texas field had 5,800 oil wells, all drilled within the prior twenty-one months, an average of over nine new wells every day. This explosion of activity had begun one year after the 1929 stock market crash when the Daisy Bradford No. 3 well struck oil on the edge of the field in October 1930. Soon after, two other wells struck oil in the region and it quickly became apparent that all were tapping the same pool. With little effective regulation, efforts to extract and sell this valuable resource skyrocketed. There had been oil field booms in Texas before, starting in Corsicana in 1894 and more notably at Spindletop, near Beaumont, in 1901. In the earlier booms, shortages of skilled workers had been a problem, but in East Texas the onset of the Great Depression and rising unemployment meant that tens of thousands of laborers flooded into the area. Towns in the region felt the impact, with Longview's population rising more than 170 percent in the 1930s while Tyler's went up by 65 percent. With little housing available, many of the migrant workers lived in tents and shacks set up in the region's piney woods. The situation quickly drew attention from the national government through President Herbert Hoover's Committee on Unemployment Relief, which noted that the "influx of transients to the East Texas oil area requires immediate attention, otherwise we are liable to have a very serious epidemic this coming winter."3 The prodigious field also drew attention from oil companies and speculators of various kinds who sought leases for drilling rights from landowners. Sinclair Oil Company sent Wesley Gish into the field in February 1931, and the veteran oil man quickly found that "every feature both pleasant and unpleasant ever introduced into an oil play is here in a modified and magnified form." In order to secure drilling rights for his company, Gish found himself paying expenses to bring a "crazy woman from Wichita Falls to Rusk for appointment of guardian to clear the 140 acre lease offsetting our Cherokee County block." Such measures were called for because Gish and Sinclair were competing with the Humble Oil Company, the Texas Company (now better known as Texaco), and the Magnolia Petroleum...

‘Rural’ rhetoric in 1930s unemployment relief schemes

AbstractThis article examines the role of particular ideas of the countryside in unemployment relief schemes. While interwar thinking on the countryside has received attention, it has not been examined in the specific context of unemployment relief. This article uses four case studies from North East England, namely the Team Valley Trading Estate (Gateshead), Hamsterley Forest Instructional Centre (Durham), Swarland model village (Northumberland) and Heartbreak Hill (Cleveland). All four projects took different approaches to the unemployment problem, but all used some form of rural rhetoric. The ways in which the projects deployed images of the countryside creatively recombined a wide range of ideas to suit their needs rather than being rigidly confined by particular schools of thought.

"Coxey's Army": Popular Protest in the Gilded Age by Benjamin F. Alexander

Reviewed by: "Coxey's Army": Popular Protest in the Gilded Age by Benjamin F. Alexander Scott Molloy "Coxey's Army": Popular Protest in the Gilded Age. By Benjamin F. Alexander. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 159 pp. Cloth $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-1620-5. Paper $19.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-1621-2.) The truly Great Depression of the 1930s overshadowed many precursors in the nineteenth century: panics, downturns, recessions—as well as the subject of this volume—the smaller depression of 1893–94. The granddaddy of economic catastrophes also blotted out the substantial social and political protests that accompanied these earlier events. Coxey's Army, an entry in a quirky and valuable book series, Witness to History, reminds scholars and students alike what a notable and fertile time the Gilded Age curtsy was in our past. Almost everything about the "Commonweal of Christ," the army's initial moniker, seemed to embrace the unusual and even the bizarre. It seemed more scientology than theology. The founding father, Jacob Coxey (1854–1951), achieved the classic Gilded Age fortune of pluck and luck for the few, as he graduated from mill operative to entrepreneur. He guided the first wave of several hundred demonstrators from his home and headquarters in Massillon, Ohio, to Washington in the spring of 1894. Incidents of pathos and humor accompanied the various parading tributaries from the compass points of the United States to the nation's capital: greeted as heroes in some places, as hoboes elsewhere. The army itself, with so many deserters and sunshine marchers, never really numbered more than a thousand participants and no contingent arrived simultaneously in D.C. The blistered framework of the times, a marauding zeitgeist, featured a time line of the period's oppositional groups: People's Party, Greenbacks, Single Taxers, Knights of Labor, Socialists, and Farmers Alliance. The army's journey was colorful and entertaining, but overwhelmed the more serious side of the movement until the passage of time uncovered the valuable characteristics beneath the engaging personalities, humorous antics, and bucolic nicknames of the participants. Alexander carefully and surgically separates the two roads the army followed. As the laughable moments wore out, the populist demand for unemployment relief and government jobs during trying economic times made sense to many workers and farmers while scaring the country's authorities along the way. Sadly, it all seemed to distill into whether or not Coxey would read his manifesto from the steps of the capitol building. He lost that battle too and went to jail for twenty days for carrying banners and fined $5.00 for trampling the presidential lawn. [End Page 122] However, the highest blades of grass for Coxey and his proletarian warriors (and most of them appeared to be real workers) was a national infrastructure makeover highlighted by the building of "good roads" by jobless laborers—a seemingly twenty-first century, contemporary call to arms. Simply, Coxey wanted federal grants for state coffers to finance the projects. The author manages to tease the tinsel from off the army's dungaree uniforms to discern a greenback, silver-plate impulse to provide for those who toiled to create goods against those goldbugs who nonchalantly clipped their bonds and stocks to pay for things in flush times or bad. Alexander summed up the producer impulse: "It grew out of the years of economic and social change in which many laboring Americans believed that their lives had passed from their own hands to unresponsive, outside forces" (4). Coxey's theories did trigger congressional debates and his manifesto was read into the chamber's Record. Coxey seemingly stayed involved forever, dying at age ninety-seven in 1951. By the time the Great Depression eclipsed Coxey's dwarf depression, the raw material of his arguments seemed an early curtain call for the New Deal and state and national intervention in the economy. He was accorded a kind of emeritus status and was arguing about the contours of World War II reconstruction more than a half century after his seemingly clownish march into the country's footnotes. Coxey ran for innumerable political positions on a plethora of tickets, winning only a one-term stint as...

戦時失業扶助と「社会都市」 : 第一次大戦期ハンブルクを事例として

戦時失業扶助と「社会都市」 : 第一次大戦期ハンブルクを事例として

Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives

If we are inclined to see the story of depression-era America in the troubled face of a migrant farm-worker mother from Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, Holly Allen's study of cultural narratives of the New Deal and World War II prompts us to reconsider that association. Resonating across the political and cultural landscape explored in Forgotten Men and Fallen Women were narratives that voiced the threats to white male breadwinners and citizen-soldiers posed by unemployment and armies of transient men, dependent women, and people of color. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the “forgotten man” into the American cultural imagination in a 1932 radio address, New Deal policy makers revealed that they had no intention of forgetting about the white male breadwinner. Relief policy privileged white married men above all others, thereby affirming “the ideal of white heterosexual masculine authority in the household and the public square” (p. 4). Criticism of federal unemployment relief was rooted in women-blaming narratives, focusing on the meddling of “pantry-snooping” female social workers who threatened masculine authority in their homes, or job-stealing married women workers who were “taking bread out of the mouths of others” (p. 101). Allen exposes as well the marginalization and blaming of women that undergirded civil defense programs on the wartime home front.

Damming the ‘Flood Evil’ on the Brisbane River

When early in 1893 two severe floods devastated Brisbane, Australia, its citizens demanded flood prevention. This article explores the responses to these floods as engineers sought measures to control the river with technology. I argue that local factors of drought, economics and politics delayed a decision for 40 years. It was not until the 1930s Depression, when the State sought unemployment relief projects and the expanding urban settlement demanded water supply that the benefits finally outweighed the cost of dam construction. In 1935 the government finally sanctioned building Somerset Dam, the first Australian dam to combine water supply and flood mitigation.This article has been peer reviewed.

Public Policy and Informal Institutions: A New Moral Economy of Corruption in Rural India

How does the interaction between formal and informal institutions shape policy out- comes? This paper investigates the ways in which informal institutions distort the formal rules created by a large public works program in a poor, mostly rural, North Indian district. Born out of a legislative agenda that emphasized a universal right to work, and implemented in India since 2005, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (or NREGS) represents a radical democratic experiment. A public works scheme, NREGS delivers benefits through self-selection rather than means-tested targeting – a move that was intended to provide unemployment relief through the promotion of grassroots democracy. Based on 15 months of intensive fieldwork done in Uttar Pradesh, India, this paper shows that the scheme has been implemented in a way that is deeply inimical to NREGS’ emancipatory agenda. I argue that informal institutions have responded – and largely adjusted – to new opportunities and new state rules, building on traditional mechanisms of dealing with state machinery and edicts. The outcome is a moral economy of corruption, a set of norms about the allocation of public resources that has emerged to answer the agency problems created by the new institutional framework, such as the decentralization of welfare benefits.

Before the Roar: U.S. Unemployment Relief after World War I and the Long History of a Paternalist Welfare Policy

Soon after assuming leadership of a federal initiative to encourage unemployment relief in communities across the country, the former U.S. Army colonel Arthur Woods turned to the Saturday Evening Post to exhort his fellow citizens to action. With millions out of work in the fall of 1921 and with winter fast approaching, Woods warned that indifference to the plight of the jobless threatened everything from the country's political institutions to what he characterized as the nation's masculine essence. Through persistent joblessness, he contended, the “useful, employed member of the community is transformed into a frank and virtually unashamed public ward.” While at first “a man who has just lost his job is seldom a burden on his fellows,” with time the unemployed lose “their self-dependence and have admitted to themselves and their neighbors that they are the public's charge.” These types of men, Woods explained, “you see them in bread lines, in municipal lodging houses, and on the bitter cold nights they occupy park benches, surely beds of anarchy. Their coverlets are grim philosophy and old newspapers.”1

О функциях и роли агентства по труду в социальной защите и управлении персоналом в ФРГ (на примере переселенцев)

The paper considers functions of the Labor Agency (Agency), which is an important mechanism for workforce management processes and procedures in the context of socially-oriented German economy. Agency activities are analyzed and how it practically implements social welfare principles (as exemplified by immigrants from CSI, Asian and African countries). The author operates based on his research and personal experience, gained while working in various German universities and companies. Special attention is given to how the Agency’s Center of Employment provide unemployed with unemployment relief and workplaces. Practical measures conducive to unemployment reduction are highlighted. It is emphasized that while Germany has powerful system of social welfare and sufficient unemployment reliefs, payroll taxes are also relatively high. Consequently, many immigrants try their hard to avoid working and prefer to live on the dole. Along with that the author reveals the reasons and ways through which German state officials discriminate immigrants thus favoring natives of Germany.
 Nevertheless, given one million vacancies to be filled throughout the country, many Germans reject the German tax system, emigrate and work successfully abroad (e.g., 65% of doctors in Switzerland are expatriate Germans). The paper specially emphasizes, that the majority of immigrants to Germany are poorly educated, poorly civilized Asians and Africans with extra families, while among native Germans single-child families prevail and highly qualified specialists do prevail among emigrants. Such social discrepancy arose discontent among German burghers which results in annual neo-Nazi anti-German marches in towns and villages. In conclusion the author provides recommendations for immigrants and Russians, willing to work in German, on how to integrate in the German society and adapt to labor market conditions of Germany.

The Graaff-Reinet municipal location: Unemployment and poor relief during the Great Depression of 1929-1933

By focusing on a medium-sized rural town in South Africa during the period of the Great Depression broadly resulted in showing the effects and reactions that were, in general, indicative of worldwide trends but with specific regional and local impact. The core focus of this article then being those effects on a further microcosm of urban life, the residents of the Graaff-Reinet municipal “location” (township); the efforts to assist these residents as occupying the lowest rungs of the economic ladder; and the efforts through welfare charities and unemployment/poor relief schemes to alleviate the situation in town. But many of these charitable organisations themselves felt the pinch of “hard times” and as a consequence had to further curtail their poor relief programmes, which lead to further hardships for the “poorest of the poor” in town. This article further examines the efforts by various official bodies, inter alia the Town and Divisional Councils, to provide unemployment relief work via a number of work schemes. Among the latter were the road building projects in town and district, and the brickmaking scheme (which provided all the bricks for the building of the new power station started in June 1934).

“The Dirty Scruff”: Relief and the Production of the Unemployed in Depression‐era British Columbia

Abstract: In this article, I examine this nexus between the social and political meaning of unemployment and the political responses that follow. I focus on Depression‐era Vancouver and investigate the broad ideologies, representations and practices that contributed to the derision of the unemployed, which in turn, informed the establishment of rural relief camps that aimed to address the unemployment crisis of the 1930s. The social and political meaning of unemployment shaped the contours of the Federal Unemployment Relief Scheme, which housed men in work camps and aimed to both discipline and rehabilitate the unemployed. However, the relief camps were plagued by several contradictions exploited by the Relief Camp Workers Union, which constructed oppositional understandings of unemployment. In discussing the relationship between unemployment and relief I attend to questions of space, highlighting the urbanisation of unemployment and the ideological distinctions between the city and the country.

U.S. labor market policy in the context of welfare state development during the New Frontier and Great Society

The paper deals with changes in labor market policies during one of the stages of welfare state expansion in the U.S.A. The federal New Deal policy on the labor market in the course of the Great Depression is briefly discussed; specifically, its emphasis on direct state involvement in the form of work creation programs together with unemployment relief. In contrast to this policy, active labor market policies are analysed under the Presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. These policies consisted particularly of extension of availability of job training and retraining for the unemployed, the poor, young people, and members of ethnic and racial minorities. Even the passive role of the state was not left out; the minimum wage and unemployment benefits grew and were more accessible to more people. However, reduction of unemployment cannot be ascribed to government measures, since rapid economic growth could have led to this result as well. The study also addresses the relationship between federal spending on welfare and the Vietnam War. While expenditures on both increased in the first two years of Johnson’s administration, in 1967 and 1968 more money was directed to defense, partially at the expense of growth in welfare spending.

The Politics of Preference

ABSTRACTThis article explores relationships between masculinity and welfare in post-First World War Britain through an analysis of unemployment relief. While their service to the nation entitled them to government benefits, veterans of the First World War fit into a context of already-existing unemployment relief schemes and already-established assumptions about who was deserving of state assistance, which privileged married men with children. The politics of preference surrounding unemployment relief reveal competing principles of deservedness connected to different models of masculinity, the breadwinner and the soldier, the married man and the single man. There was general agreement that ex-servicemen had a significant call on the state's resources, but manhood above all meant the ability to provide for wives and children, which resulted in the marginalization of the claims of single men and the endangering of the principle of universal entitlement for ex-soldiers.