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employment conditions during his working life. He started in the Navy as a ‘marine engineer’, repairing and refitting engines, but when the shipyards started closing he switched to decommissioning in the nuclear industry, heavy work, handling the material in protective suits. He was made redundant from that due to technological change and was shaken by the unemployment he experienced afterwards. Unfortunately, from 1972 onwards I was in and out of work. One time I could pack in a job one day, walk to another company and get another job the same afternoon to restart
if Europeans do not have more children, bring in more immigrants, work a few more years before retiring, accept less generous unemployment benefits, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. But none of this is a criticism of the European welfare state or of social democracy as such, or an insinuation of deep structural failings; it is an acknowledgement that adjustments must be made because people are living longer, and there are more retired people as a percentage of the entire population.3 Critics of social democracy and the social welfare state
a wider story. By 1932, few policy makers believed that unemployment was only a temporary hiccup. The scale, and duration, of the crisis placed enormous strains on Britain’s system of unemployment benefits, based in theory, if no longer in practice, on the insurance principle. Harold Butler, director of the International Labour Organisation, voiced the thoughts of many when he wrote that ‘Unemployment insurance was never conceived as being needed to ensure a quarter or a third of the industrial population against destitution’.4 In his history of the Ministry of
-term unemployment both on the individual and their families and recognised the great difference a few extra pennies could make to the weekly budget. Moreover, local officials were sensitive of cultural hierarchies in working-class communities.3 Within the depressed regions, many of those facing the means test were considered to be from the respectable working class – a group who expected state maintenance through insurance benefits. The means test, once it began operation, accentuated many of the worst effects of long-term unemployment for this group. Families shared the impact
highlighted how spontaneous action in January and February was provoked by the drastic benefit cuts introduced by the newly formed UABs. Established under Part II of the 1934 Unemployment Act, the primary function of the autonomous UABs was to remove vagaries which had existed in the PACs’ administration of means-tested benefit. W. R. Garside and Frederic Miller’s analyses remain the best accounts of the chaos surrounding the transition to the new scheme.5 They argue that heavy reductions were a consequence of the Cabinet’s and the central UAB’s blind faith in the power of
the rest of the Kingdom in the benefits of a prosperous and progressive peace … Our people, especially our men and women from the fighting forces, are entitled to this and it is the one goal to which they now aim. 3 Despite the tactical deployment of these ‘rhetorical sorties’, hopes were soon dashed. Chronic unemployment – on a similar par to that experienced in the aftermath of the First World War – quickly transpired to become a monumental feature of everyday life until its peak in the late 1950s. Moreover, an intensification of industrial militancy among the
2 Temporalities of austerity ‘You have to keep moving in spite of everything’1 It was an early morning in October 2011, and I was walking through the Central Market to Riga’s unemployment office. The market was bustling as always, despite the fact that Latvians were still coping with the aftermath of the economic crisis. The effects of the crisis were visible in the public space: there were fewer people and cars on the streets and more closed-down shops and restaurants. Instead, little cafes were popping up one after another in the centre of the city where
in 2013, the youth unemployment rate had just reached a staggering high of 56%, a rate second only to Greece. The social conditions of the 1970s and 1980s in Spain have more recently been re-evaluated in the documentary Quinqui Stars, which was directed by Juan Vicente Córdoba in 2018. Significantly, in its collaboration with the rap artist el Coleta, the documentary interrogates cine quinqui and the historical period in which it was produced through sound. Presented and narrated by el Coleta himself, the documentary combines original scenes
College on local activists and politicians. This chapter explores Sheffield's working-class institutions and details the role of certain political families in maintaining the close relationship between industry and politics. It examines the extent to which these institutions embraced new left ideas to meet the challenge of mass and youth unemployment, and describes the fate of Militant and other left-wing factions in Sheffield. The chapter ends by delving further into the 1984–85 miners’ strike to demonstrate how class politics and the labour movement remained important
century. Radicals took a particularly active interest in land reform, and debates over the rights and wrongs of landlordism reached a peak in the 1870s and 1880s.4 Given increasing public criticism of the Poor Laws, and growing recognition of its inability to deal with unemployment, it is not surprising that these two concerns came together. In his account of public responses to unemployment, underemployment and poverty in Victorian London, Gareth Stedman Jones has explored the unstable balance between belief in civic progress and moral anxiety over urban degeneration