1 Introduction 2 Wage Supplements and the New Poor

Notes 1 Introduction 1 . Defined as an hourly wage, below two-thirds of the median (£7.69 in April 2013). 2 . In common with previous economic crises (see Mungham, 1982; Davies, 1986; Finn, 1987; Brown, 1990) the 2008/09 economic crisis disproportionately affected young people. While youth unemployment was rising before the crisis, it nevertheless increased rapidly during it, peaking at 20% in the winter of 2012. By the autumn of 2014 it stood at 16.6% (Fergusson, 2013, Hough, 2014) and nearly a third (29%) of unemployed young people were long-term unemployed (i.e. they had been unemployed for twelve months or more) (Hough, 2014). 3 . References to a cost of living crisis have been made by analysts of various political back- grounds – see, for example, the centre left position expressed by the then Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband’s Cost of Living Crisis speech of November 2013 (http://labour- list.org/2013/11/ed-milibands-cost-of-living-crisis-speech-full-text/ , accessed 9 January 2015), and from a right-wing perspective the Institute of Economic Affairs (http://www. iea.org.uk/blog/cost-of-living-crisis-causes-and-solutions , accessed 9 January 2015) and Centre for Policy Studies (Morgan, 2014). 4 . The neo-Marxian tradition upon which the book draws explains the use of the term ‘wage work’. Marx (1976, originally 1867) distinguished between work as an activity (labour) and the capacity of people to do work (labour power). He argued that people always have to work to fulfill their needs, to sustain their lives. However, capitalist societies are distinctive because, for most people, in order for them to subsist they have to sell their labour power in exchange for the means of their subsistence (i.e. they have to engage in wage work). It is only through this commodification of labour power, treating it like any other commodity, that ‘the market-orientated self-valorisation of capitalism becomes possible’ (Jessop, 2002, p. 15). 5 . While policy discourse is gender neutral in referring to lone parents, the term lone mother is used in Social Security and Wage Poverty in recognition of the fact that the vast majority (92% in 2011 – ONS, 2012) of lone parents are women. 6 . This is not to deny concerns with the potential of state-sponsored old-age pensions to act as a wage supplement, and, as a consequence, to incentivise employers to cut the wages not only of pensioners, but wage working people more generally (see, Macnicol, 1998). 2 Wage Supplements and the New Poor Law 1 . Pitt argued that minimum wages took no account of familial need. This meant that if the ‘minimum [were] fixed upon the standard of a large family it might operate as an encouragement to idleness in one part of the community, and if it were fixed on the standard of a small family, those would not enjoy the benefit of it for whose relief it was intended’ (House of Commons Sessional Paper, 1796, col. 709). The latter argument was repeated 130 years later by Eleanor Rathbone (1924) in The Disinherited Family . 2 . Although Marshall (1926, p. 105) notes that ‘serious writers’ (she cites Thomas Firmin, 1681 and John Locke, 1697) had condemned wage supplementation by the end of the 17th century. Their preference for tackling poverty among families with dependent children was for the employment of the children or their removal from their parents. 3 . Quadrupling from £2 million in 1785 to almost £8 million by 1817 (Himmelfarb, 1984). 215 216 Notes 4 . Exemptions included widowed and deserted wives who could not earn enough to keep their families, or where age or infirmity prevented people from maintaining themselves or their families (Select Committee on the Able-bodied, 1828, p. 9). 5 . The Act for the Regulation of Parish Vestries 1818 and the Act to Amend the Laws for the Relief of the Poor 1819. 6 . Senior was ‘“laissez-faire” professor of economics [at Oxford University], with a known hostility to the allowance system’ (Wood 1991, p. 60, see also Fraser, 1973). He was also a Malthusian. Chadwick was keen to apply the utilitarian test of promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number to British institutions. William Sturges Bourne had chaired the 1817 Select Committee on the Poor Laws. In his 1816 Treatise on the Records of Creation John Bird Sumner had suggested the gradual abolition of the poor laws and their replacement with charity and self-help institutions, such as friendly societies and savings banks (Knott, 1986), via an attempt to reconcile God and the ideas of Thomas Malthus in the minds of ‘conscientious Christians’ ( ibid ., p. 44). His Treatise , therefore, strongly reflected Malthus’ view of the relationships between population and poor relief – ‘The old Poor Law, by acting as a barrier to the operation of the principles of population, obstructed the creation of virtues proper to the labouring classes’ (ibid ., p. 45). Sumner had been Senior’s tutor at Eton. 7 . The Poor Law Commission existed between 1834 and 1847. 8 . The Poor Law Board replaced the Poor Law Commission in 1847 and was itself replaced by the Local Government Board in 1871. 9 . A copy of the 1842 Outdoor Labour Test Order is available at: http://www.workhouses. org.uk/gco/outdoorlabourtestintro.shtml (accessed 30 October 2015). 10 . http://www.workhouses.org.uk/gco/outdoorlabourtestintro.shtml (accessed 20 July 2015). 3 Wage Supplements and Poor Relief in the 1920s: Norfolk’s Agricultural Labourers 1 . Later, President of the Board of Agriculture (1916–1919). 2 . Barley was excluded as a concession to the temperance movement. 3 . Starnes (1939, p. 501) describes the conciliation committees as ‘almost a complete failure’ because few district agreements were reached and even fewer were passed to the Minister of Agriculture for agreement, and because grievances could only be addressed through civil law proceedings. 4 . For instance, in November 1922 Walsingham Union in Norfolk agreed to a reduction from 30s to 27s 6d per week for the relief paid for a woman and her five children in a neighbouring union (Freebridge Lynn). The reason given for Freebridge Lynn making this request was ‘that Agricultural Labourers wages have been reduced’. Acknowledging that the woman had to support five children, it was felt that she nevertheless had ‘no husband to provide food for, whereas a good many agricultural labours have a wife and several children’. The concern for Freebridge Union was the relationship between poor relief and wages, and the number of people that both might be expected to support. Such arguments, though, were not merely applied to able-bodied paupers. Freebridge Lynn Union made a similar argument in the case of a woman with one child ‘who cannot earn anything being very frail’. In this example its board of guardians wanted to reduce her relief from 12s per week to 10s (letter from the Clerk of Freebridge Lynn Union to the Clerk of Walsingham Union, 16 November 1922, NRO C/GP/19/35). Both requests were agreed to. This is not to argue, though, that all boards of guardians were quick to reduce relief during periods of falling or stagnating wages. In the same month the Walsingham Guardians agreed to reductions in relief for two of its paupers residing elsewhere, although it reviewed its own level of outdoor relief, deciding not to change it as it Notes 217 was ‘fair to both recipient and ratepayer’. This decision was based upon a compar- ison to relief granted in other Norfolk Unions, with which its own scale of relief ‘contrasted fairly’, and a calculation that related poor relief granted by the Union in 1911 to increases in the cost of living. This analysis suggested that ‘the cost of living given ... is approximately about 5% more than the standard increase in the cost of necessities’ (Minutes of the meeting of the Walsingham Board of Guardians, 29 November 1922, p. 945, NRO C/GP/19/35). 5 . In March 1922 the Forehoe Union had to deal with a number of unemployed able- bodied men who said that they could not ‘support their families whilst being paid the 75% basis of wages’. The guardians ‘directed relief accordingly’ (Minutes of meeting of the Forehoe Board of Guardians, 6 March 1922, p. 57, NRO C/GP/8/150). In the winter of 1922 the Mitford and Launditch Board of Guardians heard that unemployed men working in the stone pits on relief work were complaining that what they received in relief (£1 0s 2d per week) was not enough to keep themselves and their families. For the Guardian (and Chairman of its Unemployment Committee) Mr Brett the problem was essentially the operation of less eligibility – ‘that men on unemployment relief work must be paid less than the ordinary wages for the district’ ( Norfolk Chronicle , 1 December 1922, p. 5). Where wages were higher, such as Norwich, Brett suggested ‘such a margin could be allowed and the men still be paid enough to live on, but in an agricultural district, with the wage at 25s, the rule operated very hardly on the men in the stone pit’ (ibid .). The Reverend W. H. Macnaughton-Jones was recorded (ibid .) as saying that he thought the ‘present pay was absolutely a starvation one’. The issue was referred to the Union’s Unemployment Committee. 6 . The focus in this section is upon agricultural labourers. They were, however, not the only labourers in full time wage work to approach Norfolk Guardians for relief in aid of wages in the study period. So, for instance, Wayland Union was approached by an employee of Thetford Rural District Council ‘whose 25s per week was not sufficient to himself, his wife and his seven children under the age of 13’.

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