1930s Unemployed
Willing Volunteers?

Traditional explanations of interwar British unemployment have emphasized depressed levels of spending and the decline of traditional 'staple' industries such as coal, cotton, and shipbuilding. Recently this has been challenged by a 'revisionist' claim that unemployment was largely voluntary, the result of overgenerous unemployment benefits. Yet a considerable proportion of 1930s unemployment was 'long-term' in nature, lasting one year or more. Many researchers find it difficult to accept that this long term unemployment could be the result of cynical manipulation of the benefits system or of a prolonged and choosy search for an attractive job offer. It is therefore surprising that in this recent controversy relatively little attention has been given to long-term unemployment, although it was the subject of much analysis during the 1930s.

Long-term unemployment was concentrated among elderly workers and those living in northern England, Scotland and Wales. During the 1930s the volume of long-term unemployment rose dramatically. There were nearly 300,000 long-term unemployed insured workers even in a good year such as 1937; the comparable figure in 1929 was probably less than 100,000. In Discussion Paper No. 76, Research Fellow Nicholas Crafts employs techniques developed by modern labour economists to assess more precisely than could contemporary observers the extent and costs of the increased unemployment durations observed during the 1930s. He finds that when rising long-term unemployment is assessed correctly, the achievements of the 1930s economic recovery appear much less impressive than is often supposed.

Crafts notes that studies undertaken during the 1930s can be used to assess modern theories of unemployment in the light of the interwar experience. He draws several interesting conclusions from such a comparison. First, he argues, many of the long-term unemployed were not well-off, either absolutely or relative to the incomes they had enjoyed when working. Second, most long- term unemployed gave up any vigorous search for work; they also became less employable simply by virtue of their unemployment. Third, many workers had very strong attachments to localities where their chances of re-employment were slender. Finally, at the time both government and public opinion saw long-term unemployment as an outcome of industrial problems rather than of personal failings and therefore made unemployment assistance more readily available.

Crafts argues that the long-term unemployment of the 1930s seems to have been a persistent problem, arising from the depression and collapse of export opportunities for the staple industries, rather than one initiated by generous unemployment benefits. Crafts also notes that the deterioration in the skills and attitudes of the long-term unemployed seems likely to have raised permanently the measured level of unemployment at which the labour market could be described as at 'full employment'. This created serious and perhaps intractable problems in an economy where the staple industries did not fully recover and where the deterrent effect of the Poor Law was not only inoperative but also politically unacceptable. Crafts describes the long-term unemployed not as 'willing volunteers', as the recent revisionists would have it, but rather as 'reluctant recruits' to the army of those without work.


Long Term Unemployment in Britain in the 1930s
N F R Crafts

Discussion Paper No. 76, October 1985 (HR)