About five years ago I had the opportunity of witnessing at very close
quarters the working of an unemployment scheme on an industrial basis.
The great Lancashire cotton industry was faced during the war with a
very serious unemployment problem, owing to the difficulty of
transporting sufficient cotton from America. It met that situation with
a scheme of unemployment relief, devised and administered by one of
those war Control Boards, which in this case was essentially a
representative joint committee of employers and employed. The money was
raised, every penny of it, from the employers in the industry itself;
the Cotton Control Board laid down certain rules and regulations as to
the scale of benefits, and the conditions entitling a worker to receive
it; and the task of applying those rules and paying the money out was
entrusted to the trade unions.
Well, I was in a good position to watch that experiment. I do not think
I am a particularly credulous person, or one prone to indulge in easy
enthusiasms, and I certainly don't believe in painting a fairy picture
in glowing colours by way of being encouraging. But I say deliberately
that there has never been an unemployment scheme in this country or in
any other country which has worked with so little abuse, with so few
anomalies, with so little demoralisation to any one, and at the same
time which has met so adequately the needs of a formidable situation, or
given such general satisfaction all round as that Cotton Control Board
scheme.
I cannot describe as fully as I should like to do the various features
which made that scheme attractive, and made it a success. I will take
just one by way of illustration. It is technically possible in the
cotton trade to work the mills with relays of workers, so that if a mill
has 100 work-people, and can only employ 80 work-people each week, the
whole 100 can work each for four weeks out of the five, and "play off,"
as it is called, in regular sequence for the fifth week. And that was
what was done for a long time. It was called the "rota" system; and the
"rota" week of "playing off" became a very popular institution. Under
that system, benefits which would have been far from princely as the
sole source of income week after week--they never amounted to more than
30/- for a man and 18/- for a woman--assumed a much more liberal aspect.
For they came only as the occasional variants of full wages; and they
were accompanied not by the depressing circumstances of long-continued
unemployment, but by what is psychologically an entirely different and
positively exhilarating thing, a full week's holiday. That meant that
the available resources--and one of the difficulties of any scheme of
unemployment relief is that the resources available are always
limited--did much more to prevent misery and distress, and went much
further towards fulfilling all the objects of an unemployment scheme
than would have been possible otherwise.
That system was possible in the cotton trade; in other trades it might
be impossible for technical reasons, or, where possible, it might in
certain circumstances be highly undesirable. The point I wish to stress
is that under an industrial scheme you have an immense flexibility, you
can adapt all the details to the special conditions of the particular
industry, and by that means you can secure results immeasurably superior
to anything that is possible under a universal State system. Moreover,
if certain features of the scheme should prove in practice
unsatisfactory, they can be altered with comparatively little
difficulty. You don't need to be so desperately afraid of the
possibility of making a mistake as you must when it is a case of a great
national scheme, which can only be altered by Act of Parliament.