Introduction

In 2011 the UK government introduced Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) which forced claimants of unemployment benefit to undertake month long unpaid work placements in order to continue to receive payment. This imposition of enforced labour represented a more punitive treatment of the UK’s unemployed. It also represented a return to practices from another era of welfare.

In advocating for these ‘welfare reforms’ governments have sought to project an image of modernisation and novelty. ‘Welfare reform’ has been described as the biggest change in the UK’s social security system since Beveridge ‘a vision for a new welfare settlement; a welfare state fit for the 21st century’ (DWP, 2014). It was as marketed as a novel project informed by the behavioural sciences and implemented through modern digital technology.

An impression of novelty in the government’s justifications for enforced work (DWP, 2010b: 15) was misleading in several ways. Far from being new, ‘welfare reforms’ have tended to resemble pre-welfare state practices (Cooper, 2020). This article focuses in detail on enforced work regimes in the last days of the Poor Law in the 1930s, in order better to assess the status and claims made for the introduction (or re-introduction) of enforced work by post 2010 governments. The comparison is developed through an examination of the 1930s Public Assistance system. Public Assistance existed parallel to the newly developed Unemployment Insurance system; the former was the reformed Poor Law and represented the survival of its tradition of deterrent administration. This system has strong and significant parallels with the present day. Public Assistance was the final incarnation of the nineteenth century Poor Laws and attempted to bring poor law principles into the modern era of social insurance.

The 1930s represent a valuable comparison point for the present. Both periods were times when economic collapse and rising unemployment presented challenges to policymakers and when governments were committed to liberal social and economic orthodoxies amid high unemployment (Eichengreen, 2015). While post 2008 unemployment never reached the levels seen in the depression, or even during the subsequent recessions of the 1980s it still represented a significant social problem alongside widespread in-work poverty. UK unemployment rose from 5.2 per cent at the end of 2007 rising to 8 per cent in January 2010, peaking at 8.5 per cent in September–October 2011, down to 3.8 per cent in late 2019 (ONS, 2019). Governments both now and then feared that the unemployed were vulnerable to ‘demoralisation’ and ‘dependency’ upon the state if left alone, thus they were an object for disciplinary interventions. The behaviour and character of claimants were seen as determinant of their right to support. The deployment of empirical evidence from the 1930s can thus be valuable in illuminating and problematising assumptions which underlie recent welfare reform, and some of the claims made for it. The comparison shows that the problems of unemployment and social dependency were framed in similar ways in both periods. Comparison enables the identification of enduring discourses, as well as similar practices within enforced activity schemes themselves. However, it reveals some important contrasts: in particular it finds differences in status institutionalised in policy in the 1930s which provided very different forms of treatment to different claimant groups. A more differentiated view of the unemployed predominated than that which informs welfare reform today.

Studies of policy can provide insights into the wider political economic regime. Examining the reasoning behind policy as set out by policymakers and the justificatory discourses they use to gain support for action can show how these functioned in the neoliberalism of post 2010 and in the liberalism of the 1930s. Specifically, the comparison with the 1930s enables questioning of the moralistic discourses surrounding work and welfare today as well as the view held by proponents of MWA that it represented a novel and modern policy solution.

The article continues with a brief description of literature on workfare and an explanation of the methods and sources used. It then provides a brief overview of enforced work in the British benefit system since 2010. With this established, the article then examines the conduct and organisation of enforced labour in the 1930s before discussing the similarities and differences between the two periods of enforced work.

The article concludes with a consideration of the historical and sociological significance of the findings.

History in debates on mandatory work

Sociologists have examined the development of enforced work as a move from the Keynesian welfare state to a workfare state (Deeming, 2015) which reconceptualises support as a source of ‘passive’ ‘dependency’. The term ‘workfare’ has often been used to denote a policy regime, usually in contrast to a more traditional ‘welfare’ model (Peck, 2001); however, in recent debates the term has been used by activists and commentators to refer more specifically to the use of enforced work for benefits.

Fletcher (2015) has noted a tendency both from advocates and critics of policy uncritically to accept ‘the notion that there has been an historical rupture in the approach taken by the state to the long-term unemployed’ (Fletcher, 2015: 239). Consequently, less attention has been paid to the possibility of making longer-term comparisons. Fletcher’s own work on resemblances between workfare and the treatment of the unemployed in the 1930s provides an exception. It undertook a review of historical literature on the operation of residential camps, established to rehabilitate long-term unemployed young men who had become ‘demoralised’ through their time out of work. Camps aimed to restore lost disciplines in their appearance and timekeeping as well as the physical condition of unemployed (Fletcher, 2015). Attendance was mostly voluntary in a formal sense, although 1,800 men were forced to attend in a nine-month period before the power to coerce them was removed from legislation. Fletcher also finds some evidence that claimants were coerced into attendance by officials who mislead them on the nature of their powers in incidents reminiscent of the Reilly Wilson legal challenge of 2013 (Court of Appeal Judgment, 2013) in which officials were found to have misled claimants as to their legal rights to refuse to participate. This case became a focus for public debate over the claimant’s arguments that the scheme constituted a form of forced labour. This argument was eventually rejected, showing that there were some limits to the ability of legal activism to challenge the punitive turn in policy.

This article seeks to further develop the similarities identified by Fletcher by looking at the same time periods but different empirical data: it uses national and local archival data to show that there were a number of widespread local practices, not restricted to labour camps, which bore a still stronger resemblance to the present.

Documentary sources and methods

The article is based on several primary documentary sources. A picture of national policy can be found in the files of the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labour and the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB) from The National Archives of the UK. For the city of Birmingham, the files of its Public Assistance Committee provide the main sources of information on ‘workfare’ in the city. These are held at the Library of Birmingham. A picture of the conduct of other local authorities has been derived from files of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

These documents were sampled purposively to facilitate comparisons with the present day. An investigation was launched into policies and practices in the 1930s that related to broad issues of benefit conditionality for unemployed people nationally and in Birmingham (this article comprises the findings which relate to enforced work for benefit). Archive catalogue entries were used to determine the relevance of documents to the research. Initial searches were exploratory in nature due to the researcher’s need to become familiar with the bureaucratic structure and language of the 1930s. Within the files identified, documents were searched for key topics of interest in line with the research questions of the project. This method is appropriate as the article is concerned with examining and comparing the rationales behind policy. It asks what policymakers were trying to achieve, what they saw as the nature of the unemployment problem and how this related to the general governing philosophy of the day. The object of investigation is how policy was designed and how these designs reflected prevalent ideas about the labour market and virtuous working life. Of particular interest were statements of senior civil servants which contain justifications for policy, and descriptions of claimants which referenced their character or their nature as subjects.

Public Assistance was a locally administered system run by local authorities under the control of the Ministry of Health. Its practices varied between local authorities but within limits controlled by the Ministry. Accordingly, this article uses a case study of the city of Birmingham, as well as using files from the ministry to gain a picture of national policy. Birmingham makes an analytically significant case study given the article’s concern with disciplinary mechanisms and justificatory discourses. The city was governed by principles of liberal deterrence recognisable today, but also its local authorities and their administrative traditions had a degree of influence on national policymaking. Neville Chamberlain, a Birmingham MP, occupied the posts of Minister of Health, Chancellor and then Prime Minister as the decade progressed. Chamberlain was a supporter of the ‘test and task’ work and harsh administration of the Birmingham Public Assistance system. He saw unemployment ‘not as an industrial, but as a poor law problem’ (Lowe, 1986: 159). In Birmingham can be seen both the translation of policy objectives into practice, and the ways in which local practices were justified to central authority.

The focus of study on Birmingham in the 1930s is also novel as most studies of unemployment have been concerned with the ‘depressed areas’ rather than the relatively prosperous West Midlands, choosing to examine the problem where it was at its worst and to examine conflicts between central government and defiant local authorities (see for example Pilgrim Trust, 1938; Merseyside Socialist Research Group, 1992). Birmingham’s level of unemployment was more comparable to that seen in the post 2008 recession; the West Midlands as a region had unemployment below the national average, and significantly below the mass unemployment of the ‘depressed areas’ (Crafts, 1987; Garside, 1990). Its politics in the 1930s also make it more comparable with the present, indeed Birmingham to some extent provides an exemplar of how policy was supposed to work and, as a case study, shows the translation of policy objectives into practice. The city was widely praised in government for its implementation of policy without unrest or defiance.

The next section sets out enforced work in policy since 2010 and considers how it can be understood in sociological and political terms.

Mandatory Work Activity as disciplinary welfare post 2010

MWA placements usually involved a 30-hour work week. They were concerned with teaching the experience of a full-time working week and associated ‘soft’ skills and dispositions; obeying orders, standards of personal appearance, norms of language and conduct which the claimants had been deemed to lack. The Work Programme was framed as being particularly aimed at young people. Claimants aged between 18 and 24 would be referred to (and mandated to join) the programme after nine months on Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) as opposed to 12 months for older claimants.

In the West Midlands up until March 2013 there were fewer than 100 monthly referrals to the work programme (which constituted the pool from which claimants could be made to perform MWA) rising to 5,500 in May 2015, and 12,000 in June. Until March 2014 there were approximately 7,000 referrals per month in the region and by August 2015 below 3,000 ending at 824 in November 2017 (the last point for which statistics are available). Of these it is not possible to know how many were made to undertake unpaid work. Nationally there were 334,350 referrals (of which 144,390 were actually taken up) from 2011 to 2016 (Gov.uk, 2019).

These measures can be seen as part of the ‘ubiquitous conditionality’ described by Dwyer and Wright (2014) which survives MWA itself into the present. WMA formed part of an increasingly harsh treatment of benefit claimants as documented by much literature on the disciplinary turn in welfare benefits (Watts et al, 2014; Fletcher and Wright, 2017). This agenda has entailed numerous restrictions on benefit availability but also great increases in the behavioural requirements placed on claimants. Claimants were required to demonstrate more intensive job searches, and to submit to greater surveillance in an escalation of the activation based approach which has predominated since the introduction of Jobseekers Allowance in the late 1990s. MWA could be seen as operating in tandem with a new regime of sanctions and surveillance to end long-term claims (Wiggan, 2015), it operates on a deficit model of unemployment assuming that claimants who remain unemployed are deficient and in need of training, or are resistant to employment.

Criteria for MWA referral were subjective in that they derived from ‘the advisor’s perception of the claimant’s attitude and capabilities – including whether the client lacks recent work experience, enthusiasm for speculative job search, has unrealistic employment expectations, poor punctuality and weak understanding of job search support’ (Wiggan, 2015: 380). The placements functioned as a ‘test of work’, to test that the claimant was really desperate. This can be seen in the desire expressed to use the placements for those ‘doing the bare minimum’ (House of Lords, 2011), in other words those who were in full compliance with the rules but of whom officials were suspicious.

The Work Programme was seen as having wide-ranging benefits by its proponents. Imposed work was regarded as of benefit to the claimant by boosting employability. Wage labour was not only argued to be a civic obligation but also as having psychological and general wellbeing benefits for claimants (Friedli and Stern, 2015). The view of work as inherently beneficial has underlined much debate about activation (Cole, 2008) and conditionality, and has been used to support mandatory labour (Friedli and Stern, 2015). In this context narratives about cultures of worklessness, including of intergenerational worklessness (Shildrick et al, 2012), have been highly influential. The Work Programme’s ‘work first’ approach existed in the context of discourses on the psychological benefits of employment which were utilised to provide paternalistic justifications for enforced work by policymakers (Cole, 2008; Friedli and Stern, 2015).

This paternalism intersects with debates on labour market flexibility. Semi-skilled work has been reducing and low-paid unskilled work expanding in twenty-first century Britain. Policy responses to this can be seen in the Taylor Report 2017 into new forms of insecurity. The government commissioned the review which continued to support a highly flexible/insecure labour market. This placed an emphasis on choice as justification for flexibility with even zero hours contracts seen as offering opportunities for workers to determine their own schedules.

With this framework in place, dominant policy discourses have perceived no moral difficulty with coercing claimants. Enforced work attempts to instil desirable neoliberal subjectivities upon claimants, to transform them via activation and discipline into an active welfare subject. There was also some contradiction, in that claimants were problematised as both rational exploiters of the system, but also as incapable of rational behaviour, into which they needed to be coerced (Fletcher and Flint, 2016). This contradiction perhaps accounts for ‘the lack of clarity about whether the scheme is intended as training or punishment’ (House of Lords, 2011) on the part of its advocates.

Much academic research into the experiences of participants seems to indicate that it was seen by many claimants as a form of punishment designed to force them to end their claims and something to be resisted (Redman, 2021). This contradicted official narratives which asserted that the majority of claimants appreciated these unpaid placements as a means of support which might enable them to move towards the workplace. Claimants saw the schemes as of little value in employability terms (Stewart and Wright, 2016). Work Programme staff at times shared elements of this view of the schemes which did not provide them with the resources needed to help claimants into work (Jordan, 2018). Failure to participate in the programme when instructed was established as a sanctionable offence, claimants would face an initial 13 weeks for a first failure to participate with additional penalties of up to three years for repeated ‘failures’ (DWP, 2016). Indeed, the Work Programme (of which MWA was a part) was a significant cause of benefit sanctions between 2013 and its abolition (Adler, 2018). There is evidence that large numbers of claimants resented the placements which they perceived as not only of little value, but as an attempt to force them to end their claims (Fletcher and Wright, 2017).

With this established, the article moves to a detailed consideration of enforced work practices in the 1930s.

Workfare in the 1930s: the rationale

The problem of unemployment has been conceptualised differently, in varying social and political circumstances (Whiteside, 2015).

Observers of contemporary austerity policy may recognise the climate of the 1930s wherein expenditure on social services was seen as ‘the prime cause of the present crisis in the national finances’ (May Commission, 1931: 145).  Large reductions in Exchequer costs were seen as necessary to restore national prosperity and liberal policy orthodoxies demanded spending restraint. State interventions to combat unemployment such as public works were rejected in favour of policies of minimal intervention throughout the decade (Constantine, 1980).

Continuities have been observed in how the problem of benefit receipt was framed. The next section looks at how this view was translated into policy.

The structure of state support in the 1930s

The first thing to consider when looking at workfare in the 1930s is to whom was it applied? Support for the ‘able-bodied’ unemployed was divided between three systems. First, Unemployment Insurance, paid for a fixed period to those with the required contribution records, as a right. The mechanisms of fixed benefit in return for fixed numbers of contributions had been designed to limit eligibility. There was no compulsory work for this group.

The extended group were subject to ever changing forms of conditionality. These means of treatment often involved a mix of methods between those typical of the insurance scheme and of the Poor Law. While there was no compulsory work for benefits for this group, there was a certain amount of debate about to what extent they could be compelled to undertake compulsory training. However, in the end, relatively little compulsion was applied (Burns, 1941). For this group ‘there could be no question of falling back’  on the poor law methods of ‘the work centres or the workhouse, [as] one can imagine the outcry’ (Unemployment Assistance Board, The National Archives, 1936). This fear of an ‘outcry’ prevented the treatment of workers who were ‘normally’ employed in respectable occupations like paupers. While a distinction between training and work was made by policymakers (Unemployment Assistance Board, The National Archives, 1938) the protests of the unemployed put limits on government’s ability to put this into practice. There was a great deal of public sympathy with the unemployed which coalesced around the hunger marches of 1932 and 1934 (Hannington, 1977; Stevenson and Cook, 1979).

The traditional administration of the Poor Law was based on a few fundamental principles: discretionary relief (that is, no legally guaranteed right to relief), deterrence and ‘less eligibility’. Deterrence meant that the conditions attached to the receipt of relief would be sufficiently unpleasant to ensure only the genuinely desperate would apply. ‘Less eligibility’ was the principle that the relief on offer should provide a significantly worse standard of living than even the worst-off ‘independent labourer’ (Fox-Piven and Cloward, 1972; Polanyi, 2001; Burns, 1941). In the present day this is called a ‘work incentive’.

The group of ‘paupers’ was viewed as characterised by incapability, immorality and needing firm guidance. The group was the ‘antithesis of all that is considered “social” and “respectable”: its members are improvident and lack “character”; they survive on the basis of occasional work, crime, prostitution, and begging; they revel in gambling, promiscuity, vice and drink’ (Walters, 2000: 20–21). Poor Law tradition had seen them as largely responsible for their condition, which reflected their innate characteristics. Lax administration would encourage their vices and therefore increase the pool of paupers, generating poverty rather than alleviating it (Whiteside, 1991). Birmingham Council considered this to be the question of a ‘third class’ ‘of persons who were unable, or unwilling, to satisfy the conditions attaching to the intermediate grade or the insured class. This group raise[d] the issue of employability’ (Birmingham City Council, 1931a) and of the causes of their failure to compete for work.

So enforced work was embedded in a system of stratification informed by highly moralistic criteria for receipt, and informed by a view of the problematic of social dependency and demoralisation. While this classic view was no longer ubiquitous, it retained a foothold in Public Assistance.

Public Assistance in the 1930s: enforced work

Where there was substantial doubt over the motivation and ‘employability’ of the claimant (that is, mainly in the Public Assistance system) older methods continued to be used. The classic Poor Law method had been to offer a ‘test of work’ prior to granting relief and Public Assistance maintained this, albeit in a modern guise.

Public Assistance sought to introduce a national standard of training and task work in out-relief (relief paid to claimants outside of the workhouse). Local authorities had the power to compel recipients to undertake work or training as a condition of receiving relief. The purpose was ‘[t]o maintain the employability of those willing and able to work, so that when opportunity offers these men have no difficulty in resuming their places in industry’ (Trades Union Congress, 1933). While the Poor Law traditions of deterrence remained, authorities were attempting to rationalise and modernise its administration. The view was that disciplinary measures must become attuned to the constructive purposes of employability and improvement: ‘[t]here must be discipline but the discipline should be that of the school rather than that of the prison’ (Ministry of Health, The National Archives, 1933). Evelyn Burns, who produced a comprehensive report on the UK’s welfare system for the US based Social Science Research Council published in 1941, linked this to the expansion of out-relief amid rising unemployment during the 1920s which meant that the need for relief had exceeded the capacities of the workhouses.

The Ministry of Health stressed that work should be presented as an ‘opportunity not a penalty’ (Ministry of Health, The National Archives, 1932). Its language downplayed punishment and stressed the modernisation of the system, its focus was on ‘employability’ and the prevention of demoralisation. Policy aimed to be ‘systematic instead of haphazard and definite and remedial in object instead of aimless and negative’ (Ministry of Health, The National Archives, 1932).

So the purpose of Public Assistance was to reform a tradition of Poor Law administration to suit modern policy objectives. References to the Poor Law today tend to denote something antiquated and while this perception was present at the time, the ‘Poor Law view’ retained influential proponents who saw it as having a place in the solution of modern social problems.

Public Assistance in the 1930s: Birmingham and elsewhere

In Birmingham in 1930 Public Assistance claimants were set to work after receiving relief for six weeks. In 1931 under instructions from the Ministry of Health this criterion was toughened up to four weeks. The Ministry justified this with the statement that ‘unoccupied intervals must be prejudicial to the habit of steady work, which it is desired to maintain, more particularly for the man with smaller responsibilities’ (Birmingham City Council, 1931b). Younger men and those without children being a particular object of intervention.

In 1930 in Birmingham these schemes were of a very limited nature with 28 claimants ‘set to work’ as of 20 May, out of 846 men ‘relieved on account of unemployment’ (Birmingham City Council, 1930) by the PAC. However, in 1931 a substantial rise in unemployment in the city as well as the country as a whole led to higher numbers relieved and expansion of the scheme to hundreds of claimants. By March 1932, 175 (70 on a waiting list) were put to work from a caseload now numbering in the thousands, and by September 1932, 300 of the 2,000 unemployed men whom the PAC considered to be good candidates for the schemes were ‘set to work’, while further expansions of the schemes (Birmingham City Council, 1932a) were being considered.

The work itself involved ‘levelling ground, cleaning out and straightening rivers, and excavations for sand and gravel’ (Birmingham City Council, 1932b). These tasks were similar to those found elsewhere. In 1933 the TUC issued a call for evidence from its affiliates on the practices of their local Public Assistance Committees (PACs). In Wimbledon and Sunderland men were put to work in sewage plants and rubbish tips moving and burning rubbish. Other PACs (for example, Mansfield and Chelmsford, Bermondsey) put claimants to work on the maintenance of the institutions themselves. Work constructing and maintaining roads was a feature of enforced work in Oxford, Crayford and Mansfield. In Chatham as in Birmingham, men were involved in excavating river beds and in Lowestoft in constructing a boating lake. Estates and grounds maintenance also featured in several local areas. The pattern appears to be one of hard unskilled manual labour. Hours of work varied considerably from location to location although four-day weeks were common: for instance, 28 hours per week in Birmingham and 32 in Bermondsey, while some areas had a lower requirement (12 hours per week in Carlton and Netherfield) (Trades Union Congress, 1933). Reduced hours could be a sign of the local authority lacking the resources to put claimants to work full time. Alternatively, they could allow the authority to maintain the principles of less eligibility by reducing hours for the claimants receiving the lowest allowances. Trade unions alleged the London authorities were using skilled labour to undercut wages in trades including boot making, French polishing, furniture and brush making, and hairdressing, further alleging that the claimants had been remunerated with food tickets in Poor Law fashion.

The work was not always presented as the ‘opportunity’ of the Minister of Health’s speech (noted earlier). Birmingham’s officials understood the work as a penalty incurred by the unemployed man (Birmingham City Council, 1931b). If claimants derived benefit from the experience, this was positive but incidental: if they did not, work was still imposed. The pauper was marked as irrational and was not permitted to make this decision himself; rather, officials who saw themselves as having access to a superior rationality would decide.

It can be seen here that traditional deterrence philosophies influenced policy. However, there is also evidence of the same therapeutic discourses seen in contemporary policy. The same contradiction between views of enforced work as constructive and punitive seen in the present can also be observed in the 1930s.

Comparisons with workfare today

One of the major similarities between the two eras is the way benefit receipt was framed as a major cause of national crisis. Social services expenditure had grown five times between 1911 and 1929. The influential May Commission (appointed to review government spending) argued this was ‘a grave handicap,s… the prime cause of the present crisis in the national finances’ (May Commission on Public Expenditure, 1931). Policymakers held strong preferences for spending restraint and therefore sought to create administrative devices to identify any claimants whose receipt of support could be seen as inappropriate. Post 2008, austerity arguments have been similar, that the crisis required ‘strong financial discipline at all levels of government’ (Cameron and Clegg, 2010). The Coalition’s aim however was that the state should be permanently ‘downsized’, not merely as a temporary response to crisis (Taylor Gooby, 2012). In discourse this national narrative also filtered down to individuals; setting the nation on a sure footing required instilling discipline on individuals.

Enforced work in both periods can be seen as a solution adopted by policymakers to the perennial problem of ‘out-relief’, that is, the difficulty in exercising a regime of surveillance and behavioural enforcement over those receiving support but existing outside of disciplinary institutions. The offer of unpaid work was and is a means of enforcing market discipline, forcing those reluctant to work to abandon their claims. These practices reflected a classical liberal faith in markets as emancipatory institutions (Esping-Andersen, 1990), with relief seen as at risk of perpetuating poverty by enabling resistance to market discipline. This faith can be seen today in rhetoric accompanying escalations in conditionality where enforced work appears both as something owed in exchange for relief but also constructive and emancipatory. This sense of ‘constructive’, while rhetorical and morally loaded, also serves to highlight the nature of disciplinary power which builds up a subject able to ‘self-govern’ in the manner desired by policymakers.

The use of this type of technology of power has not been a historical constant. Today there is a ‘strong mainstream political agreement in favour of conditionality, whereby welfare entitlements are increasingly dependent on citizens agreeing to meet compulsory duties or approved behaviour’ (Fletcher, 2015: 330). Conditionality has become increasingly severe and ubiquitous (Dwyer and Wright, 2014). This contrasts with the situation in the 1930s where its application differed greatly between groups. It is this differentiation of rights and statuses which forms the key difference between the two periods. Political discussion in the 2010s focused overwhelmingly on the rights of taxpayers, usually understood to be an entirely distinct group from the unemployed. It is possible that the lack of the legitimating device of contributions, owing to the long-term decline of the UK’s contribution based unemployment benefits (Bell and Gaffney, 2012) has meant that claimants have been unable to gain status on the basis of past behaviour. The ‘ubiquitous conditionality’ referred to by Dwyer and Wright (2014) erases differences in treatment in favour of a universal escalation of disciplinary measures to push claimants toward the labour market.

Enforced labour had a narrower base of application in the 1930s. The placements had gone from being restricted to able bodied men on low status non-contributory benefits in particular localities in the 1930s, to being applied to potentially any claimant of unemployment benefits who has been out of work for a given period, and to some claimants of disability benefits, under the MWA regime (Rafferty and Wiggan, 2017). In the 1930s enforced labour took place in a context of an overall ‘vision’ of ideal labour markets based on male breadwinners as the heads of self-sufficient families as can be seen in the designs of Public Assistance schemes. These ideals contrast with those which have predominantly informed policy today which assume two-earner families and make different normative assumptions about gender and work.

Conditionality today is applied in a much more uniform fashion across gender lines. Under New Labour and later the Coalition, government policy was to include more lone parents in unemployment benefits and therefore to subject them to greater conditionality (Rafferty and Wiggan, 2017). At the same time there have been a series of measures to ‘activate’ claimants of disability benefits with repeated ‘tightenings up’ of assessment criteria designed to move people with health problems onto unemployment benefits, as well as increased conditionality in disability benefits (DWP, 2012).

In part this may be partially explained by apparent differences in public support for the unemployed. In the 1930s public sympathy appears to have been relatively strong, enough certainly to make politicians and civil servants shrink from politically difficult disciplinary measures such as extending enforced work to claimants of Unemployment Assistance. However, this appears to be much less the case in the modern period. First, there is a greater political consensus around activation policy, the centre left assenting to activation policies and punitive language about welfare. At times this was justified by paternalistic arguments that activation would deliver social inclusion ‘from above’ (Patrick, 2017). Sources of opposition which were strong in the 1930s were much less so in the 2010s. The campaigning of a strong union movement that was important in building public support for the unemployed in the 1930s, when unions argued that Public Assistance schemes undercut the working conditions of union members, was less influential in the 2010s. Militant movements of the unemployed like the National Unemployed Workers Movement had a far larger social base than modern activist equivalents.

The introduction of MWA and harshening of the treatment of social security claimants went along with harshening public attitudes towards them (Deeming, 2015). Much academic research documents the growing propensity of much of the British public to believe myths about the benefit system (Baumberg Geiger and Meueleman, 2016) amid increasingly ubiquitous media hostility to it. Jensen (2014) documents the importance of television representations in establishing a ‘common sense’ about welfare benefits which centres around underclass narratives. This has involved establishing hard binaries between taxpayer/workers and dependent claimants of a kind which justify a punitive turn and establish the latter as morally obligated to the former. These stark binaries contrast to the 1930s within which, while the morality of the unemployed certainly formed a major part of public debate, the unemployed were not understood to be an entirely separate class. One can certainly identify continuities in discourses focused upon dependency and demoralisation between the two periods (Welshman, 2006; Macdonald and Shildrick, 2014). However, the 1930s was a period in which these narratives were under increased challenge by a growing union movement, a militant movement of the unemployed but also by a new policy apparatus which administered the new social security system along different lines to the older Poor Law system and rejected key parts of its logic.

There are also clear differences in the designs of the schemes. MWA placements have mainly been in the service and retail sectors rather than the ‘pick and shovel’ work of the Public Assistance schemes. In this sense one aspect of task work as a punishment, its heavy manual nature, was missing. Work placements have been in the private and voluntary sectors rather than work undertaken for the public body itself. The disciplinary rationale behind policy is present in both periods, the institutions having a ‘constructive’ and not merely deterrent purpose. However, this policy was not evenly applied and intersected with a complex differentiation of rights and statuses in the 1930s and a less differentiated system in the ‘welfare reform’ era.

Despite these differences, however, a great deal of continuity between MWA and the treatment of able-bodied unemployed men on Birmingham’s Public Assistance programme can be observed. In both the stated aim is to improve employability, and there is an insistence on a full working week as a discipline especially for the poorly socialised young. The placements have been intended to resemble waged work in order to develop a transferable discipline; time disciplines and patterns of behaviour were to be learned in the placements and then transferred into the labour market (DWP, 2010a). The aims of MWA are very much like the aspiration of the Minister of Health that the man set to work on Public Assistance should ‘improve his capacity as a potential worker’ (Ministry of Health, The National Archives, 1932).

This discipline is not an eternal imperative as it exists in a particular context of liberal capitalism, the management of the ‘workfare state’ preferring supply side flexibility to demand management (Peck, 2001).

Conclusions

This article has contributed to the debate on enforced work since 2010 through a historical comparative analysis informed by governmentality theory. The historical evidence presented serves to contradict the image of novelty and innovation presented by advocates of enforced activity. It has demonstrated its continuity, in a number of key respects, with the modernised version of Poor Law administration presented in Public Assistance.

This continuity has significance for how welfare reform should be analysed. It demonstrates that claims for the novelty of the project should be regarded with scepticism. This is not to claim that there are no differences, or that because policy has historic precedents it cannot be considered to mark a significant change. Neoliberalism is not a mere restoration of classical liberalism, but a regime with significant differences (Brown, 2015). Restoration of old ideas, given that it takes place in a new context, is not a direct or straightforward process.

‘Activation’ of the passive and ‘workless’ has been the central objective of recent welfare reform, and similar objectives drove the development of the Public Assistance system. In both periods the aim of government policy is stated as being to improve employability: placements were meant to resemble waged work in order to impart a transferrable time discipline, and obedience. Deterrence remained a core purpose of the programmes to test those whom policymakers regard with suspicion. However, this suspicion was structured differently in the two periods. In the 1930s this enforced work was applied primarily to the ‘pauper’, seen as distinct from the unemployed and not part of the usual labour force. Only a small portion of total unemployed people were seen as of this category. Since 2010 however there has been a broadening of application. While Public Assistance was applied to a relatively small portion of able-bodied men without the contribution records to access mainstream benefits, MWA was applied across gender lines, to a portion of claimants of disability benefits, and to potentially any unemployed person who had been receiving support for a given period of time.

Welfare reform has been described by its advocates as transforming an antiquated system for the twenty-first century. At the same time, though, reform is also billed as a return to the ‘first principles’ (Freud, 2011) of the Beveridge report. These ‘first principles’ date back, however, far longer that its advocates care to acknowledge. They can be found more easily in the last days of the Poor Law than the first days of the welfare state. While this article has discussed a return to practices from the 1930s, the general picture of the 1930s shows improvements over time in the treatment of the unemployed, enforced work was applied on a limited basis. Despite the end of the Work Programme in 2016 the trajectory of policy in the present-day period remains towards escalating conditionality and further cuts to entitlements. In the 1930s policymakers were forced to acknowledge mass unemployment in policy, and conditionality requirements were progressively relaxed, with ‘activation’ being recognised as inappropriate for most, whose unemployment was recognised as caused by the depression. No such acknowledgements are evident today.

Funding

This work was funded by the ESRC under grant ES/M500600604/1.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.