Welfare Insurance and Casual Labour: A Study of Administrative Intervention in Industrial Employment, 1906–26
A THOUGH much historical study has been directed recently to tracing the origins and development ofa national policy for the unemployed, relatively little attention has been given to what many contemporaries saw as the root of the problem, namely the prevalence of underemployment in major towns and cities.' Sociological inquiry around the turn of the century established a positive correlation between the incidence of poverty and irregularity of employment. Casual work-as well as low-paid work-was a major source of pauperism and social distress. Casuals were an economic burden on the communities in which they lived. Industries using casual labour were condemned as being highly wasteful of manpower resources. They covertly encouraged irregular work habits, thereby perpetuating the existence of a degenerate and inefficient work-force. The movement to eliminate the use of casual labour became almost a moral crusade; in the early years of the twentieth century this particular reform was advocated repeatedly in discussions over unemployment. Casual workers were a problem because they were not amenable to many contemporary schemes for those without work; they could not be sent to labour colonies, be retrained, or be given assisted passages to the less inhabited parts ofthe empire. Equally obviously, the underemployed and the unemployed could not be divided into two mutually exclusive groups. The elimination of casual labour was widely regarded as necessary to help mitigate the problems of unemployment and poverty. Whether, and if so how, the state should aid this process was a more controversial point. Determining the size of the casual-labour market during this period has proved very difficult. Reasons why this is so have been well explained elsewhere and will not be repeated here.2 This article makes no attempt to tackle this thorny problem. Instead it re-examines the underlying implications of state welfare insurance, and demonstrates how responsibility for the unemployed of necessity involved government in defining the work habits of the individual-a point nicely illustrated in the genesis of official efforts to promote decasualization. In spite of subsequent attempts to extricate the state from problems involved in the supply and distribution of labour, it is apparent that postwar governments continued