Lives of the Workless
IT is difficult for the reviewer, who is himself unemployed and knows all that unemployment means in a distressed area, dispassionately and neutrally to review this timely and disturbing book, wherein the genuine voice—the cri de coeur—of the workless themselves is heard for the first time. The book should be read by, or to, every member of that large class of people in whom misinformed hearsay takes the place of exact knowledge or understanding. This book will supply that knowledge and perhaps lead to a new, compassionate understanding.
In the book 25 unemployed men and women of different professions and environment—including an ex-army officer
who sometimes no longer desires to live ; " a young elec- trician turned burglar who " feels justified in hitting back at Society ; " a miner's wife who " would rather be dead than go on like this ; " a skilled letterpress printer who haunts the free library " to take his mind off his loneliness, poverty and hunger; " a London fitter who " wants to smash the present order of things ; " a skilled engineer driven from home, as a result of the Means Test, by his wife and son, and whose " outlook is hopeless ; " an eighteen-year-old youth driven to depression and Communism; a one-time £1,000-a-year business man, driven to the gutter, who feels " a ghastly failure," is " embittered against all politicians and parties," and " wanted to smash things all round him ; " a London house-painter who says " family life is made more difficult . . . difficulties become permanent . . . my elder children regard themselves as working to keep a lazy father . . . who is only an extra burden ; " a village carpenter who " does not intend to starve," and " if not allowed to earn bread, will take it ;" his younger son " fed up with life at 21," and his elder son who " feels violent when he stops to think "—themselves unsenti- mentally describe the physical, mental and social effects of pro- longed unemployment and their struggles against almost unbearable misfortunes. We look into their homes and their minds ; see what they do, how they live ; and what and how they think during their enforced leisure. Understatement, and not overstatement is the keynote of an important book in which certain disturbing points need repeated emphasis at this time of forthcoming Unemployment Reforms.
The effects of unemployment are extremely complex, and although disillusion in the social, religious and political order is naturally common to most unemployed, prolonged unemployment tends to split the workless into roughly three camps : the indifferent fatalists, the revolutionaries (using the term broadly), who are driven to study and question the social and economic order, and the cyelothymics —perhaps the largest class—who, oscillating between optimism, pessimism and revolutionarism may end up in one or the other of, the first two categories. In all of theca
unemployment has wrought a remarkable change and shifting of values.
The collapse which produces this change is not an event, but a process. The unemployed man goes, as it were, through crucibles of complex demoralizing experiences, and finally emerges a changed man, with a new way of regarding the world, a markedly different Weltanschauung. Fore- most among the many factors (often " not assessable ") which generated and continue this process of change are : the feelings of unwantedness, uselessness and waste, the forcible " braking " of the conative drive, the slow drying up of religious and romantic feelings, the retreat from friends and social intercourse into the inner self with its results of increased introspection and intense feelings of fraying frustration, increased isolation and loneliness. Perhaps, however, by far the greatest change is the destruction of family and home life brought about by the operation of the moans test in its present form. After submitting to this rigorous test, many a man is driven to live parasitically upon, and beg the price of a smoke or cheap matinee, from his wife or children, who resent and usually show their resentment at having to keep him in idleness.. Family life is naturally soon made impossible, and homes become " armed camps," and often enough many an unfortunate man is driven from his own fireside into lodgings, as so tragically related in this book by a skilled engineer. Some other factors which cause change and the increasing formation of depression and psycho-neuroses amongst the unemployed are the smothering or repression of many normal instincts or desires—and under-nourishment which is usually the natural result of unemployment pay.
In the writer's opinion, under-nourishment is important, not only as the cause of physical ill-health, but of psychic ill- health as well. Long experience and observation have forced the reviewer to the belief—a belief which is strengthened in this book (most of whose unemployed contributors and families are living considerably below the recent British Medical Association minimum diet level—and know it) that under-nourishment and mental illness are undoubtedly cor- related. Dr. Morris Robb, in a thought-provoking appendix, emphasizes that unemployment is often the immediate cause of severe psychic—as apart from physical—illness, for whose precipitation it is unequalled both for its extent and for the intense and complex reactions it evokes.
We really know very little of the complex effects of unem- ployment. Our whole psychological- outlook towards the workless must be altered—especially that all too common " if-a-man-would-not-work-neither-should-he-eat " attitude. State and social service schemes for the unemployed—and especially for that growing class of wholly unemployed—should revise their methods and be prepared to cater more carefully for their psychological needs if future unrest is to be averted. In spite of almost intolerable misfortunes, the unemployed remain as yet relatively and strangely unembittered. They have not lost their hunger for that honest, paid work which alone gives that mental security which the finest social service schemes fail to give. Digging allotments and mending boots are no substitutes for it. They are essentially decent folk, an outlet for whose wasted talents we have blocked and must somehow open, and whose help we are losing in building up our common life. These are the main opinions expressed and the main conclusions to be drawn from this book—a book which should emphasize the necessity for destroying a strange illusion still fostered by many, notably by certain Ultra-Conservatives of the individualist school of Mr. Hugh Sellon. The illusion, that is, which consists in regarding the modern unemployed in terms of an outmoded and harsh nineteenth-century Poor Law. It is perhaps superfluous to state that this attitude has become meaningless—and dangerous—in an increasingly me- chanized world which denies honest work to the millions who are clamouring for it, knowing (as the writers of these memoirs insist) that there is no substitute for it.
If this book does nothing more than shatter the above illusion, and lead to a new reversal of social attitude to the workless, it will have achieved its purpose, and the editors, writers and publishers deserve gratitude and congratulation for producing what is perhaps one of the most important and disturbing social documents since the War.
AN UNEMPLOYED MAN.
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