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...