Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia by Anthony O'Donnell (review)

This is an important book both for specialists in labour law and welfare policy, but also for labour historians. It addresses "unemployment" or "joblessness": what has that looked like over the past century, how has it been defined, how has it been measured, how has it been addressed by governments and the union movement? The book's strength is not simply its lucid explication of the evolution of law and policy relating to unemployment, but its secure grounding in historical context. And this historical context challenges some of the working assumptions of Australian political and industrial discourse.

When was there an "organised working class" in receipt of good conditions, industrial justice and job security? As O'Donnell shows, this came only with the exigencies of World War II. The war expanded the reach of government over the economy and citizens' working lives, moved labour around to where it was needed, trained it, and presided over better overtime and margins for women (my mother and her metal worker mates achieved 90 per cent of the male rate in the Commonwealth Aircraft Factory at Fishermen's Bend – "I felt like Rockefeller," declared her friend Rose).

Post-war labour shortages and long boom made job security in large manufacturing and government instrumentalities look like the new normal, at least for men, as women war workers returned to domestic life. The change had a lasting effect on the Labor Party, except that, as Piketty has shown, it was an artefact of an historical aberration that was crushed by the neoliberal revolt of the rich and the consequent shrinking of the state. It was doomed also, as Barry Jones first wrote, by technological innovation and automation, which was to do as much to destroy Australian manufacturing jobs as tariff reform.

O'Donnell starts with the first serious and systematic investigations of working-class poverty and underemployment in late nineteenth-century London, led by Charles Booth (with a young Beatrice Webb doing insightful work). Booth divided the London working class into seven layers, starting with destitution and crime, and creating a hierarchy of increasing security, with skilled trades and "permanent men" at the top. Poverty was associated with insecurity. The problem was often underemployment rather than rank, permanent joblessness. This was the nineteenth-century "gig economy" and its effects on health, families, crime, alcohol abuse and life expectancy were dire.

The Labor narrative celebrates the great achievements of organised labour: the eight-hour day, the formation of effective unions, the formation of an effective political arm and the legal regulation of wages based on the cost of living. But, as remarkable as the Harvester judgement was, the majority of poor Australians, above all Aboriginal Australians, were outside the magic circle of this Australian Settlement. Only Victoria had a substantial manufacturing base, and much of that relied on cheap juvenile and female labour that was subject to seasonal demand. Sydney and the other capitals were service economies driven by the agricultural cycles, with large numbers of men working half in the bush and half in the city – contributing to the instability of everyday life.

O'Donnell examines the evolution of the statistics of unemployment – what they were counting and how difficult it was to do so. In the Great Depression, governments were forced to rely on trade union records of men reporting as unemployed – a mechanism that surely greatly underestimated the extent of the crisis. But it was the war that changed government's powers over the workforce and its accounting of its operations.

The question was always, as it had been since the Old Poor Law of 1601, how to relieve destitution without rewarding idleness, and so it remains. To this day, there are work tests, punitive low welfare payments and withdrawal of relief. O'Donnell provides a superb account of the evolution of policy and practice, coming full circle from the recommendations of Booth, Beveridge and the Webbs for the creation of a Labour Exchange Bureau where...