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Introduction The causes of unemployment remain under-theorised. It remains the case, as Keynes ( 1973 ) claimed in the 1930s, that economic orthodoxy assumes efficient market ‘clearing’ but is therefore obliged to explain unemployment using a theory that assumes the phenomenon does not exist. Unemployment has to be explained away in terms of market ‘imperfections’. Elements of these orthodox accounts may be useful, and will be discussed below, but as stand-alone explanations they are unconvincing both theoretically and empirically (Sjöberg 2000 ). This
Unemployment and the State in Britain offers an important and original contribution to understandings of the 1930s. This is the first full-length study of the highly controversial household means test introduced by the National Government in 1931. The means test was often at the centre of public and private debates about unemployment, and it generated the largest examples of street protests in the interwar period. The book examines the construction of the image of the means test and claims that it worsened the position of the long-term unemployed. The idea that the test led families to separate, malnutrition and ill health to increase and suicide rates to escalate ensured its lasting significance politically and culturally. How the unemployed responded to the measure and the wider impact of collective action is a central theme of this book. Through a comparative case study of south Wales and the north-east of England the nature of protest movements, the identity of the unemployed and the wider relationship between the working class, local authorities, the police and the government is explored. Based upon extensive primary research, this study will appeal to students and scholars of the depression, social movements, studies of the unemployed, social policy and interwar British society.
2 Employment and unemployment on Merseyside, 1945–98 Throughout the late twentieth century, the presence of mass unemployment was a consistent feature of Merseyside. Indeed, for much of this period the name Liverpool itself became synonymous with joblessness and all the negative images such deprived circumstances suggest. In this chapter, Liverpool’s connection to unemployment in the late twentieth century is charted. Prior to analysing economic trends and their relationship to employment and joblessness on Merseyside, we shall address the complexity of
1 Unemployment and the depression in interwar Britain The man or woman who is in a job to-day may be out of a job tomorrow; and, save at times of exceptional trade prosperity, the fear of the sack is never long absent altogether from the worker’s mind. It means for every worker a constant sense of insecurity, a knowledge that the continuance of the means of livelihood depends on powerful forces which are almost wholly outside his control. Nothing does so much to suppress the worker’s natural instincts of resentment, to check the growth of a spirit of
of digital work within refugee communities in general and women’s rights groups in particular ( Hunt et al. , 2017 ). The case of Jordan is particularly revealing – a country that continues to have one of the highest youth and female unemployment rates in the world ( IFC, 2021 ). Despite the slow transition to digital work, refugees are not commonly perceived to be part of this transition. As demonstrated below, considerable challenges – including
uncertainty of active unemployment becomes the global work norm, the chronically poor and the disaster-affected have blurred. In an unmediated relationship with their environments, they are both subject to permanent emergency. They constantly change place and, at a time when economy and disaster have blurred, from a post-humanitarian perspective, they become indistinguishable. Since resilience is now equally required of the poor and exposed – as well as the ‘first responders’ – the traditional distinction between developmental and humanitarian relief
programme to shift its attention to those few opportunities that the local market could provide. However, under the impact of the recent economic and financial crisis, these opportunities have increasingly faded too. In a span of less than three years, Lebanon went from a country known for its growing middle class to one with an inflation rate of over 240 per cent 8 and a dramatic unemployment rate 50.1 per cent in 2022 (16.2 per cent in 2018–19). 9 As part of ‘Future of Food
households transcend the local level, taking into account the contribution (or lack of contribution) of absent others. Existing NGO reports often focus on Syrian women’s relationships with spouses, who are said to experience unemployment and their wives’ new occupations as emasculating and a loss of ‘traditional’ pre-war lifestyles ( Lokot, 2018 ). By contrast, we zoom in on relationships between younger and older women. Life in exile and humanitarian programming
labour productivity ( ITU, 2019 ). In the Middle East and North Africa, some predict that digitalisation could raise GDP per capita on average by more than 40 per cent, while long-term unemployment rates could drop and female labour force participation could double to more than 40 per cent in some countries ( Cusolito et al. , 2022 ). While these figures are both promising and impressive, limited research explores how individuals as well as specific
recruited. Already in March 2018 when her colleague was sick, UNRWA did not find a ‘daily-paid’ substitute teacher – instead, her class of thirty-five students had to ‘absorb’ the other teacher’s class, leaving her to teach seventy children in her small classroom. Such changes also mean that young Palestinians who had hoped to work for UNRWA – including prospective teachers, doctors, clerical and facilities staff – will face restricted employment possibilities, leading to increased levels of unemployment, underemployment and related long