According to the Beveridge Plan the population falls into four main social classes: 1) Employees; 2) Employers and the self-employed; 3) ‘Housewives, that is married women of working age’; and 4) the Unemployed.
Unemployment benefit stated that ‘there will be a joint rate for a man and wife who is not gainfully employed’; ‘every citizen of working age will contribute in his appropriate class according to the security he needs, or as a married woman will have contributions made by the husband’.37
Most married women have worked at some gainful occupation before marriage; most who have done so give up that occupation on marriage or soon after; all women by marriage acquire a new economic and social status, with risks and rights different from those of the unmarried. On marriage a woman gains a legal right to maintenance by her husband as a first line of defence against the risks which fall directly on the solitary woman; she undertakes at the same time to perform vital unpaid services.
Beveridge could be sure that his judgments were based on sound evidence:
At the last census in 1931, more than seven out of eight of all housewives, that is to say married women of working age, made marriage their sole occupation; less than one in eight of all housewives was also gainfully occupied.
Beveridge acknowledged that ‘there has been an increase in the gainful employment of married women since 1931’ — but that was to understate the importance of women workers in both world wars, and to take the contraction of employment in the interwar period, and the forcing of women out of the job market, as the norm. Beveridge went on to say that ‘even if a married woman, while living with her husband, undertakes gainful employment’, she is not in the same position as other employees, in two important ways. The first is that her work is ‘liable to interruption by childbirth’, and, he adds, ‘in the national interest it is important that the interruption by childbirth should be as complete as possible’. Second, the ‘housewife’s earnings in general’ are ‘a means, not of subsistence but a standard of living above subsistence’ — he does not say ‘pin money’, but the meaning is close to that.38
In Beveridge’s vision, the housewife’s ‘home is provided for her either by her husband’s earnings or benefit if his earnings are interrupted’. He criticised the ‘existing insurance schemes’ because they have ‘not recognised sufficiently the effect of marriage in giving a new economic status to all married women’. Evidence of the problem was that under the National Insurance scheme women ‘carry into marriage claims in respect of earlier contributions with full rates of benefit’ (though these were already disallowed under the Married Women’s Anomalies’ Regulations). Instead, Beveridge said, ‘the principle here is that on marriage every woman begins a new life in relation to social insurance’, and ‘she does not carry on rights to unemployment or disability benefit in respect of contributions before marriage’ — though she would receive a ‘marriage grant’.39
Beveridge knew that there would be criticism. ‘The decision to pay less than the normal rate of unemployment and disability benefit to housewives who are also gainfully employed is likely to be questioned’, he admitted. But ‘the case for it is strong’. ‘It is undeniable that the needs of housewives in general are less than those of single women when unemployed’ — because they would be dependent on their husbands. Given the maternity benefits and marriage grant, thought Beveridge, ‘housewives cannot complain of inequity’. Rather, he says, ‘Taken as a whole, the Plan for Social Security puts a premium on marriage, instead of penalising it’, and ‘the position of housewives is recognised in form and substance’.40
The Beveridge Plan was rightly celebrated for the commitment to social security it represented. But even as the welfare state offered help, it enshrined the role of the housewife in the organisation of the economy as a distinctive class, rewarding marriage and penalising those married women who worked, on the assumption that they would be dependent upon a male breadwinner.
Not just welfare law, but tax law too, institutionalised gender segregation. Before the Second World War only around 20% of the population paid tax, but alongside National Insurance, workers were subject to ‘pay-as-you-earn’ income tax, bringing the tax base up to 12 million. The tax system aggregated married couples’ incomes and gave a married person’s tax allowance that assumed women’s work was secondary, and incentivised the nuclear family. From 1969 married couples got tax relief on mortgages (Mortgage Interest Relief at Source), and from 1945 they got child benefits. There were benefits for lone parents, including free school meals, though these came with a great deal of social shaming. From 1948 the National Health Service took on the policy of ‘confining’ women in hospital wards for the last weeks of pregnancies to shield them from work and to cut infant deaths. A division of labour based on gender was written into the welfare state, and was a guide to employers.
Segregated workforce
After the war, women’s employment grew steadily, much more than Beveridge had anticipated. But the tenor of government policy mirrored the attitude of both employers and trade union leaders, that women had a subordinate place in the jobs market. One clear sign was that the growth in the numbers of women in work went hand in hand with sex-segregated workplaces. At Ford UK’s plant in Dagenham there had since the war been many women working alongside men on the assembly line, but a big shake-out in 1951 forced them out. Afterwards, women at Ford worked stitching seat covers with sewing machines, or in the canteen. Women worked in biscuit factories, like Peek Freans in Bermondsey, making sweets at Rowntree’s in York, and in the clothing trade working sewing machines. Many worked, too, as nurses in the new National Health Service — 194,900 in 1952, alongside doctors who were almost all men.41 Researcher Carolyn Vogler found that gender-segregated workforces are associated with more traditional roles in the home: ‘men living in households with a more traditional division of labour were more likely to be working in segregated jobs’.42
Women on Cadbury’s production line
In the post-war expansion of the economy, employers took advantage of the low wages women were expected to work for — expected by Beveridge and the Labour government, amongst others. With this outlook common in the labour movement the unions failed to recruit. Trade union membership rose from 7.8 million in 1944 to 10 million in 1966, but throughout the share stayed at four fifths men to one fifth women. Around half of all men in work over those years were members of a union, but only one quarter of all women were.43 As was common, the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers negotiated a differentiated pay rise of 5d an hour for men and 4d an hour for women in 1969 — even though 93,000 of its 111,000 members were women.44 It was common up until the 1990s to find largely female workforces represented by male trade union convenors, and often male shop stewards, too.
‘Coloured immigration’
In 1948 the British Cabinet was looking in alarm at the arrival of 492 Jamaicans on a ship called the Empire Windrush, bound for Tilbury. The Cabinet Economic Policy Committee regretted that the migrants were ‘private persons travelling at their own expense’ and that they could not be turned back, though they did look at whether they could be sent on to East Africa. The committee asked for a report on ‘the incident’ from Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones, and asked how any more like it could be stopped. Creech Jones accepted that the arrival was a ‘problem’ but that as a ‘spontaneous movement’ the government did not have the ‘legal power’ to stop it. Instead they would have to take special measures to manage the migrants.45
John Hazel, Harold Wilmit & John Richards arrive at Tilbury docks from the Caribbean on the ex-troop ship Empire Windrush (1948).
Britain’s post-war economy grew at a healthy average of 3% per year between 1948 and 1973. Demand for labour tightened and for the first time significant numbers of immigrants came from the British West Indies, and from the Indian sub-continent. They were joined by Asians forced out of Uganda and Kenya in the 1960s. More than a quarter of a million black West In
dians arrived in Britain between 1953 and 1962, along with 143,000 from India and Pakistan.
The legal and moral basis for the right of migration to Britain was set out in the 1948 Nationality Act. The British Empire had been re-organised as a Commonwealth after the war. Where the Empire nominally had common citizenship, each country was allowed to make their own laws afterwards, but Britain at first operated something like an ‘open door’ in recognition of the rights of former subjects. Practical restraints made migration between Commonwealth countries rare, except where there was labour recruitment.
Booming Britain took on West Indians and Asians as nurses and midwives, on the buses and the Underground, as labourers, as cleaners, and in catering. West Indian teachers were called on to fill places in the new Secondary Modern schools, after the school leaving age was raised. Indians and Pakistanis found work in textiles in West Yorkshire and Lancashire. Indian doctors found work in the new National Health Service, as did West Indian and some Asian nurses. Most jobs that migrants filled were unskilled, though many who came had good training and education.
From the outset the political establishment were nervous about the new migrants. When the Windrush arrived at Tilbury in 1948 a group of Labour MPs wrote to the Prime Minister that ‘an influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to bring discord and unhappiness to all concerned’. After the Attlee government’s reaction, the Conservative leader, Winston Churchill, planning the 1955 Conservative Manifesto, told the Cabinet that the best slogan would be ‘Keep England White’.46 Birmingham Labour MP Roy Hattersley argued that ‘unrestricted immigration can only produce additional problems’. In 1964 he thought that ‘we must impose a test which tries to analyse which immigrants are most likely to be assimilated into our national life’.47
Caribbean nurses
In 1949 the Ministries of Health and Labour, together with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council, and the Royal College of Nursing, started recruiting in the West Indies. By 1955, 16 British colonies had set up selection and recruitment schemes for the NHS.
In its first 21 years, between one quarter and one third of all NHS staff were recruited from overseas.
By 1954 more than 3000 Caribbean women were training in British hospitals, rising to 6,450 in in 1968.
In 1969 the Nursing Times pointed out that only 5% of overseas recruited nurses were reaching the top grades of the profession.
— Ann Kramer, Many Rivers to Cross, London: The Stationery Office, 2006
Government hostility was in time mirrored by race attacks in Notting Hill and the Midlands in 1958. These disturbances were taken as a justification for the first in a succession of laws to restrict immigration, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Under the Act, a set number of vouchers were issued through which migrants could enter, therefore controlling the numbers coming into the country from each Commonwealth country. More laws were passed in 1968 and 1971, all aiming to ‘tighten’ controls on immigration.
The practical impact of the immigration law was that it established a hierarchy in which black people were of lower status than those who were white. The hierarchy was ideological in that it embodied racial superiority. It was also practical in that black people were subject to treatment by public authorities that white people were not. Black workers were investigated by an Illegal Immigration Intelligence Unit of the Police Force, the immigration police, which raided scores of workplaces from its foundation in 1973. At the same time police paid special attention to younger black men on the streets, searching and arresting them for public order offences. Even schools were unofficially segregated, by local catchment areas, and by excluding many West Indian boys under disciplinary rules; in 1986, Calderdale Education Authority was investigated by the Commission for Racial Equality for keeping Asian children out of mainstream schools, by testing their language proficiency and pushing them into special language units.48 When Bernard Coard wrote a small booklet titled How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System, ‘the whole community’ was ‘galvanised’. (Schools today show some evidence of segregation by choice.)49
Discrimination against black people shaped their lives and the work they did. Overall, the numbers working in manufacturing fell by 745,000 between 1961 and 1971; but the number of manufacturing workers born outside Britain rose by 272,000. By 1971 79% of West Indian men and 78% of Pakistani men of working age were manual workers, compared to 50% of working men as a whole. Three quarters of immigrants’ wives worked compared to just 43% of all married women.50
A third of all the workers at the Courtaulds Red Scar mill in Preston, by 1964, were Asians: ‘Two departments of the mill were wholly immigrant, organised in ethnic work-teams under white supervisors.’51 The authorities’ differential treatment of black and Asian people in Britain made it easier for employers to treat them differently, too. One Asian Ford worker described the assembly line at Langley:
[W]alking along the Body line at Langley truck plant, on either the day shift or the night shift, is like walking around the world. The bottom section is where the work is hardest and there is hardly any overtime: the workers are mostly Asian with only the occasional white and West Indian worker. The middle section involves less arduous and slightly more skilled work. There you will see a mixture of African, West Indian, Asian and white workers. The top section is the repair area, an area where the pace of the work is not determined by the speed of the line, and where there is the most overtime. The area is predominantly white.52
Ford were well known for taking on black workers, and in their southern plant at Dagenham, West Indians were moving up the skills grade. Ford’s race relations would become a battleground for many years.
In 1982 Leila Hassan looked at ‘ancillary work in the National Health Service — catering, portering, washing up, cleaning jobs and laundry jobs done by some 70,000 blacks (mainly women), a third of the total workforce’. The women she talked to told her:
The government and ministers know that ancillary workers are more low paid than any other workers in the NHS or in the country and we are living below the poverty line, and never has the government offered us anything.
They added, ‘it is not the nurses doing the dirty jobs, it is the ancillaries, and without us the nurses couldn’t function, it’s we keep the nurses’.53
West Indian nurses were mostly taken on at the less qualified State Enrolled Nurse position while the better paid State Registered Nurse position was kept for whites. ‘The NHS reminds me very much of a colony in the way it’s run’, one nurse told Beverly Bryan and her fellow researchers: ‘the white sister will act as manager, organising the work for her black nursing staff, and then spend the morning sitting in the office’.54
Black workers were generally taken on in subordinate roles and discriminated against at work. Trade union offices would insist that they were ‘colour blind’; but they were also patriotic for British industry in a way that their officials took to mean ‘British jobs for British workers’. In 1965 a local union branch opposed jobs for black nurses at Storthes Hall Mental Hospital; the following year Asquith Xavier was barred from working at Euston station under an agreement between the Staff Association and the employers — colour bars were operating at Camden and Broad Street, too. In Keighley in 1961, engineers struck when two Pakistanis were put to work, and in the same year shop stewards at Alfred Herbert Machine Tools sought assurances from management that black workers would not be promoted.55
The end of corporatism
The problems of race and sex discrimination were important markers of the limits of the corporate society, of the outer boundaries beyond which the social contract no longer applied. But these problems were not its core dynamic. The basis of the system was the relationship to organised labour. It was that relationship that was tested to destruction in the 1970s and 1980s. The crisis, and the subsequent dismantling of the corpor
atist system, would shake up all relations.
In the 1960s Britain’s competitiveness with its industrial rivals was slipping, and its profit rates were under pressure. British workers had been driven hard to produce more in the post-war years. But ever-greater capital investments gave, to the frustration of the employers, a declining rate of return. Labour-saving machinery increased the product efficiency of industry, but in lowering prices reduced profit margins too. The National Board for Prices and Incomes saw the barrier to increased profits as workers’ reluctance to raise productivity, a view that echoed managers’ resentment at the imagined encroachment on their right to manage under agreements with the unions.
Over the years from 1965 to 1979 governments and employers tried different ways to address what they saw as a ‘productivity gap’ through the corporate system they had built. Harold Wilson’s government tried to enforce a wage freeze in 1966 alongside increased productivity. Then Labour tried to stop unofficial strikes with their ‘In Place of Strife’ white paper: proposals to manage industrial conflict through a quasi-legal framework. Labour’s working-class supporters were put off, and Edward Heath’s Conservative government was elected — only to try put in place a yet more coercive Industrial Relations Act. The attempt to impose pay restraint and limit industrial conflict through the corporate system only tended to provoke a greater reaction. Using it to restrain labour militancy and force up productivity strained the corporate system to breaking point.
The first sign of the crisis of corporatism was a rising crescendo of industrial conflict, and unnervingly for the system’s defenders, of unofficial strikes, rising to 24 million in 1972. According to the government white paper, ‘In Place of Strife’, ‘95 per cent of all strikes in Britain were unofficial and were responsible for three quarters of working days lost through strikes’.56
The Equal Opportunities Revolution Page 5