Inventing Unemployment: Regulating Joblessness in Twentieth-Century Australia

This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question ‘How does unemployment happen?’. But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call ‘unemployment’? And how has that changed over time? Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories – the ‘employed’, the ‘unemployed’, those ‘not in the labour force’ – are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people’s working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of which forms of joblessness should be classified as ‘unemployment’ and which should not. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and consolidation of a specific idea of unemployment in Australia after the Second World War. It then charts the eventual unravelling of that idea, and relates that unravelling to the changing ways of ordering employment relationships. In doing so, Inventing Unemployment challenges the preconception that casual work, self-employment, and the ‘gig economy’ are recent phenomena. Those forms of work confounded earlier attempts to define ‘unemployment’ and are again unsettling our contemporary understandings of joblessness. This thought-provoking book shows that the category of ‘unemployment’, rather than being a taken-for-granted economic variable, has its own history, and that history is intimately related to our changing understandings of ‘employment’.

Table of Contents:
1. A Disorganised Labour Market The British Context Social Surveys, the Casual Worker and the Problem of Unemployment The Employment Relationship in Australia Regularising Work in Australia 2. Defining Unemployment: Pre-War Endeavours The Census Trade Unions Social Insurance 3. The Labour Exchange Solution The Labour Exchange in British Social Thought The Labour Exchange in Pre-War Australia Wartime Labour Administration and the Directorate of Manpower 4. Social Policy in Wartime Designing an Unemployment Benefits Scheme The White Paper on Full Employment 5. Unemployment in a Time of Full Employment The Post-War Labour Market Statistics: Counting Unemployment The Work Test: Regulating Unemployment Unemployment and Industrial Disputes 6. Limiting Unemployment The Married Woman The Remote-Area Aboriginal Australian The ‘Dole Bludger’ 7. Reinventing Unemployment The Demise of the Standard Employment Relationship Towards an ‘Active Society’ From Work Test to Activity Test Making Agreements Enforcing Compliance Unemployment Benefit or Basic Income? Manipulating the Means Test 8. Marketing Unemployment The CES in the Post-War Labour Market The End of the Public Employment Service in Australia: The First Phase The End of the Public Employment Service in Australia: The Second Phase The Evolution of the Job Network Contracts All the Way Down?

About the Author :
Anthony O’Donnell is Senior Lecturer in Law at La Trobe University, Melbourne.

Review :
It is often thought that people are either employed or unemployed. Inventing Unemployment helps to unpack why and how a rigid divide between the two categories is not particularly helpful in understanding either one ... Inventing Unemployment is an important and compelling book which furthers understandings of the employment–welfare nexus. [A] meticulously researched and detailed examination of Australian unemployment law, administration and policy settings over the last century … Social policy researchers, historians, public policy scholars and practitioners will find much value in the thought-provoking analysis offered by O’Donnell. This is an important book both for specialists in labour law and welfare policy, but also for labour historians … 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.