Inventing Unemployment: Labour Market Regulation and the Establishment of the Commonwealth Employment Service
| Author | Anthony O'Donnell |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| DOI | 10.22145/flr.31.2.3 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
INVENTING UNEMPLOYMENT: LABOUR MARKET
REGULATION AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE
COMMONWEALTH EMPLOYMENT SERVICE
Anthony O'Donnell*
In 1888 the social wing of the Salvation Army in Britain had begun an ambitious
program for social reform and spiritual revival focusing on the disciplining and
retraining of the unemployed. City workshops in London gave unemployed workmen
board and lodgings in return for eight hours work a day. Efficiency, deportment and
cleanliness were rewarded by increases in food rations and eventually men were given
a cash allowance. Attached to the workshops was a labour bureau which would put
men in touch with potential employers. In 1905 the Liberal Magazine suggested that the
Army be given a government contract to deal with the unemployed and, four years
later, the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission recommended that public
authorities work in conjunction with religious organisations in training and reforming
the recalcitrant unemployed.
Reflecting on this history in 1972, José Harris concluded that:
it is difficult to see how any government of the period could have justified the delegation of
coercive or administrative powers over unemployed workmen to any unestablished religious
sect … [W]hat is perhaps most surprising about proposals for making the Army an organ of
public administration is … that they should ever have been considered at all.1
As it happened, the idea of a labour bureau did find widespread favour, but as a
service directly administered by the state. Britain established a national system of
labour exchanges in 1909. Exchanges were championed at an international level by the
International Labour Organisation ('the ILO') and in 1946 Australia established a
national exchange, the Commonwealth Employment Service ('CES').
By 1998, however, the CES had been disbanded and replaced by a 'Job Network' of
private providers of employment services to unemployed workers. As a result of a
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* BA (Hons), LLB, LLM (Melb); Research Fellow, Centre for Employment and Labour
Relations Law, University o f Melbourne. My thanks to Richard Mitchell and Chris Arup fo r
helpful discussion of many of the points raised in this article. The title and the inspiration
for my line of inquiry owe a debt to British and French scholars working in this field: see,
eg, William Walters, Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social (2000),
especially ch 2, 'Inventing Unemployment'; Robert Salais, Nicolas Baverez and Benedicte
Reynaud, L'Invention du Chômage: historie et transformations d'une catégorie en France des
années 1890 aux annés 1980 (1986).
1José Harris, Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy 1886–1914 (1972) 133–
4.
344 Federal Law Review Volume 31
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second round of tenders concluded in late 1999, the two largest providers of labour
exchange services contracted by the Commonwealth government are now religious
organisations, including the Salvation Army.2
This neat trajectory could be accounted for in a number of ways. The rise and fall of
the CES mirrors that of particular administrative fashions. In contrast to the time in
which Harris was writing, the state has increasingly given up direct delivery of
services, preferring to contract these out, often under conditions designed to mimic
'market' provision.3 Again, the abolition of the CES could in part be attributed to the
eclipse of its role as a general labour market intermediary in favour of its role as a
welfare organisation.4 The new involvement of church-based providers in the Job
Network may also represent a re-moralisation of the state's relationship to
unemployed people and unemployment relief. 5
In this article I argue that the CES was a contingent institution, and that its rise and
fall was linked in complex ways both to the changing political economy of the
employment relationship and to changing administrative understandings of
unemployment. As Noel Whiteside has observed in the British context, attempts to
divide the labour market into two discrete categories — the 'employed' and the
'unemployed' — have tended to ignore large numbers of people whose working lives
do not allow them to be placed unproblematically in either category. The extent to
which such a bipolar ordering did manage to capture the experience of the bulk of
labour market participants in the decades immediately following World War II, she
comments, makes those years exceptional.6 My concern here is to trace the
consolidation of this 'exceptional' state of affairs in Australia and to examine the role of
the labour exchange in both responding to and helping constitute a particular vision of
the labour market and of unemployment in thi s period.
My starting point is to highlight the proliferation of casual, subcontracting and
short-time working in the pre-World War II labour market in Australia and the extent
to which this confounded administrators' desire to easily delineate an unemployed
class. If we examine official discourse on unemployment in this period, therefore, it is
perhaps unsurprising that the 'organisation' of the labour market around stable, long-
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2Tony Eardley, David Abello and Helen Macdonald, 'Is the Job Network Benefiting
Disadvantaged Job Seekers: Preliminary Evidence from a Study of Non-Profit Employment
Services' (Discussion Paper No 111, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South
Wales, 2001). Other accounts of the transformation of the CES into the 'Job Network' can be
found in Terry Carney and Gaby Ramia, 'From Citizenship to Contractualism: The
Transition from Unemployment Benefits to Employment Services in Australia' (1999) 6
Australian Journal of Administrative Law 117; Anthony O'Donnell, 'The Public Employment
Service in Australia: Regulating Work or Regulating Welfare?' (2000) 13 Australian Journal of
Labour Law 143; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Innovations in
Labour Market Policies: The Australian Way (2001).
3 See, eg, Colin Hood, 'A Public Management for All Seasons' (1991) 69 Public Administration
3.
4O'Donnell, above n 2.
5Mitchell Dean, 'Governing the Unemployed Self in an Active Society' (1995) 24 Economy and
Society 559; Anthony O'Donnell and Christopher Arup, 'Social Security and Labour Law:
Constructing the Labour Market Subject' (Working Paper No 24, Centre for Employment
and Labour Relations La w, University of Melbourne, 2001) 27–31.
6Noel Whiteside, Bad Times: Unemployment in British Social and Political History (1991) 133.
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