BOOK REVIEWS
| Published date | 01 March 1976 |
| Date | 01 March 1976 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1976.tb00043.x |
British Journal
of
Industrial
Relations
Vol.
XIV
No.
1
BOOK
REVIEWS
Redundancy and Paternalist Capitalism.
A study in the sociology of work, by
RODERICK
MARTIN
AND
B. H.
FRYER
George Allen
&
Unwin, London,
1973, 278
pp.,
€4.75.
Z’hrough
no
Fault
of
Their Own.
Systems for handling redundancies in Britain, France
and Germany, by
SANTOSH
MUKHERIEE. A PEP Report, Macdonald, London,
1973,
284
pp.,
E2.50.
Men Out
of
Work.
A Study
of
Unemployment in Three English Towns, by M.
J.
HILL,
R.
M. HARRISON, A.
V.
SARGEANT
AND
V.
TALBOT. University Press, Cambridge,
1973,
194
pp., Cloth
E4.20,
Paper
f2.00.
A
National Survey
of
the Unemployed
by W. W. DANIEL. PEP, Vol. XL Broadsheet
No.
SOCIAL
science research responds, though maybe somewhat lethargically,
to
what may be
described as the dominant problems of the society. The problems are those issues which
are defmed
as
interfering with the proper functioning of the system. Thus in post second
world war Britain such questions
as
incentives, productivity, management efficiency,
strikes and trade union attitudes were highlighted and investigated. There have
been
other
issues, of course, which have disturbed significant sections of the society but because they
have not interfered with the functioning of society or may even have been necessary for it,
they have not
been
defmed
as
problems.
For a large part of the period since
1945
unemployment has fallen into the second
category.
In
the first place it has been low. Between
1948
and
1966
the level of unemploy-
ment was
1.5
per cent or less for most years and only in one year did it rise above
2
per
cent. That level, in general, was considered to be consistent with full employment.
In
any
case popular generalisations were made about the behaviour of workless people in a situa-
tion in which the number of work vacancies exceeded the number of applicants which
precluded them from serious consideration.
Social
scientists largely accepted these
generalisations. The fact that there might be many thousands
of
workers without earnings,
many with dependant families, did not constitute a problem for the country. Until the
middle period of the
1960’s
little interest was taken by social scientists in the analysis of
unemployment. Then the situation changed quite dramatically.
In that
period
political attention began to be focused on the quality and quantity of
labour power as a determinant of productivity.
It
was recognised that people had
to
change their jobs and alter their
skills
as a consequence
of
managerial decisions to im-
prove efficiency. There was talk of ‘over-manning’ and ‘labour loading’. In the mines and
on the railways there were dramatic and severe cutbacks in the use of labour power. The
Labour Government from
1964
was particularly concerned about the deployment of
labour.
It
introduced a Redundancy Payments Act in
1965
as an attempt
to
reduce the
resistance of employers to changes involving a loss of jobs. The Selective Employment
Tax was later introduced to encourage managements
to
use labour power more efficiently.
The acceptance of unemployment, albeit of short-term duration, was seen for the first time
in the post-war period as necessary for the proper functioning of the system.
At this point social scientists entered the stage and studies about redundancy began to
appear. The most influential of early works were
White Collar Redundancy:
A
Case
Study
.by Dorothy Wedderburn in
1964,
and
Redundancy and the Railwaymen
by the
same author in
1965.
The operation of the Redundancy Payments Act stimulated studies.
Questions were raised about the attitudes of employers
to
redundancy, the scale of in-
voluntary unemployment, the reemployment prospects of redundant workers. And these
led, in turn, to further questions about the composition of the unemployed in terms of age
skill, educational background, health and motivation. Popular generalisations about un-
employed workers began
to
be
put to the test.
102
546, 1974, 161
pp.,
E2.50.
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