Mobility in the Labour Market

Employment Changes in Battersea and Dagenham

Margaret Jefferys, Margot Jefferys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415868495
• eBook ISBN: 9781136253508
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is Volume VII of eighteen in a series on the Sociology of Work and Organisation. First published in 1954, this study deals with certain aspects of the industrial mobility of adult male workers in Dagenham and in Battersea. The large national and the small local investigation are, however, mutually complementary. National policies must be applied locally; and labour mobility, or immobility, results from innumerable decisions made by individuals whose lives and attitudes reflect the peculiarities of the environment in which they live and work.

PREFACE

THIS study was supported from funds earmarked in the academic quinquennium 1948–52 by the University Grants Committee for the development of the social sciences, in accordance with the recommendations of the (Clapham) Committee on Provision for Social and Economic Research. As this Committee pointed out, social research is very expensive; and the more realistic and practical it becomes, the more formidable is the outlay involved. Nor can extensive field inquiries be undertaken by individual members of an academic staff carrying heavy teaching responsibilities. The share in this special allocation for the social sciences assigned to the Department of Sociology, Social Studies and Economics at Bedford College was, therefore, largely devoted to the establishment of a small social research unit, equipped to conduct field investigations. The present volume is the work of this unit, acting with the advice of Mrs. Gertrude Williams, Reader in Social Economics in the University of London, and myself.

The inquiry is modest in scale and restricted in area: it deals only with certain aspects of the industrial mobility of adult male workers in Dagenham and in Battersea. The large national and the small local investigation are, however, mutually complementary. National policies must be applied locally; and labour mobility, or immobility, results from innumerable decisions made by individuals whose lives and attitudes reflect the peculiarities of the environment in which they live and work. Intensive local case studies are not only useful to those directly interested in the districts concerned: they have a wider significance for the light which they throw upon the range and the nature of local variation.

Battersea and Dagenham were chosen partly because they could be easily and cheaply reached from central London. They had, moreover, the merit of being both alike and different. Both give a substantial volume of industrial employment; but whereas Dagenham's industries are relatively modern, those in Battersea tend to be old-established. As between these two areas, however, the similarities in the pattern of labour mobility proved to be more striking than the differences. Strong general influences are clearly at work.

Some of the findings fully confirm expectations. No one will be surprised to learn that young men change their jobs more readily than their elders. Other results are socially as well as economically suggestive. The large contribution to total mobility made by a small group of frequent job-changers is, for instance, very striking. If the most mobile 15 per cent in the population sampled had been as stable as the remaining 85 per cent, the total volume of movement between employers would have been halved. Within the limits of the present inquiry it was not possible to analyse further the make-up or the social characteristics of this highly mobile minority, though the fact does emerge that an unusually high proportion of these frequent job-changers did not discharge themselves, but were dismissed by their employers. This is clearly one of the many cases in which the findings of one investigation suggest the starting point of another.

At other points again, the study helps to correct the perspective in which we see the modern world of near-full employment. The link, for instance, between labour turnover and industrial mobility is too often missed. A man cannot ordinarily change from one industry to another without also changing from one employer to another. In the areas examined a significant proportion of job-changes turned out to be also industry changes—a fact which suggests that problems of mobility and of turnover are not entirely unrelated.

Such differences between the two areas as do emerge from the inquiry suggest that policies of industrial dispersion may create special problems in districts such as Battersea where the resident population is declining. The young move out, leaving an industrial population which is predominantly middle-aged and elderly, and in consequence highly unadaptable to industrial change. These dangers may be minimized by intelligent redevelopment: only if they are ignored, must the price of New Towns be paid in evacuation areas that are both economically and socially derelict.

The success of field investigations in the social sciences is not just a matter of the skilful design of experiments or of the technical proficiency of interviewers. It depends no less upon the patience and the active co-operation of busy people who allow their ordinary pursuits to be interrupted, and who themselves help the investigators in many different ways. Those responsible for this inquiry record with pleasure and gratitude their indebtedness to officials of the London region of the Ministry of Labour for facilitating contact with employers in the districts investigated; to the employers themselves for co-operation at every stage and particularly for allowing interviews to be arranged in their factories; to trade union officials and representatives for repeatedly smoothing away difficulties that at times threatened serious delay, if not actual failure; to the borough librarians for supplying material on the history of the areas concerned; and, not least, to the many hundreds of individual workers who consented to record their personal industrial histories in order to pro- mote better understanding of one of the many formidable problems that face the British economy.

B. W.

Chapter One

THE PROBLEMS OF LABOUR MOBILITY

LABOUR mobility, defined as the movement of labour between different employment opportunities, has long been a subject of theoretical interest to the economist. It was in the inter-war years, however, that it first acquired practical importance. Previously, economists had confined their attention, in the main, to an enumeration of the reasons why labour was not automatically attracted to occupations where wages were rising from those where they were stable or declining. The imperfect mobility of labour was thought to be the cause of failures in a self-regulating economic process; but these failures seemed unimportant and likely to do no more than delay an inevitable adjustment of supply to changing demand. This confidence was sustained by the belief that those changes in the demand for labour which were due to changes in the structure of the economy itself were essentially gradual and on a small scale, so that they could be met almost entirely by adjustments in the yearly intake of young recruits.¹ Unemployment, when it caused public concern, was not associated with the immobility of labour. In short, nineteenth and early twentieth century interest in mobility was, in the main, confined to its effects on wages.

In the inter-war years, the maldistribution of labour came to be seen as a fundamental problem of great urgency. The national economy was confronted with changes in the demand for labour as rapid as they were fundamental. Moreover, persistent large-scale unemployment among able-bodied men and women in certain industries and areas provided dismal evidence of the loss suffered by an economy which could not re-deploy its manpower resources. It was no longer possible to believe that automatic adjustments in the number of young recruits entering different industries could produce equilibrium.

It was natural, therefore, that attention should be turned, first, to the problem of devising suitable ways of measuring labour mobility and, secondly, to the study of the factors which were preventing the free movement of labour out of depressed industries and areas. It is significant of the character of inter-war problems that the yardstick used to measure mobility was not the movement required to equalize wage rates in comparable occupations, but the movement necessary to equalize unemployment rates in different industries and areas.¹ Equally indicative of the character of the times was the emphasis laid on assessing the importance of unemployment assistance as a deterrent to movement.

Since the end of the Second World War, the inflationary economic situation has necessarily given a new direction to interest in labour mobility. The problem has been one no longer of absorbing available man-power into employment, but of distributing it in the way best calculated to meet industrial requirements, in a situation in which the demand for labour has continuously outstripped the supply. Moreover, the difficulty which many employers have experienced in retaining their labour has focused attention on the volume of movement which takes place between different forms of employment, apart from the effect which such movement has on the distribution of labour between different industries and different areas. Labour replacement, no less than the absorption of labour by expanding industries, has been seen as a problem affecting the smooth working of the national economy.

Successive governments have tried to control the distribution of labour between different industries by measures designed, in the main, to influence the demand for labour by individual producers. Controls on the distribution of raw materials, both home-produced and imported, price control and purchase tax, the licensing of building and the control of industrial development have all been measures whose purpose was to encourage or discourage the individual producer's demand for labour. Their failure to achieve more than partial success, however, has inevitably led to the discussion of measures to control the supply of labour as well as the demand for it.

From time to time during the past seven years, measures similar to the war-time direction of labour have been advocated; but there has been an overwhelming reluctance to introduce compulsion of this kind in peace-time, and an implicit understanding that direction of labour can be regarded only as a last resort when all else has failed. Discussion has been concentrated, therefore, on the possibility of introducing measures to reproduce artificially the incentives and compulsions which, in the absence of statutory direction, control the movement of individuals in the labour market. The problem has been seen as one of discovering ‘some method enduring in its efficiency, flexible in its operation and able to secure the confidence of both employers and workers, which will make use of the natural motives and incentives which influence the individual’.¹

It is in this context that a national wages policy has been advocated, the assumption being that, if those industries and occupations most essential to the national economy were to carry higher rates of wages than less essential employment, labour would respond by moving from the latter to the former. Exponents of such a policy have argued that, since inflationary pressure and the vested interests of trade unions have prevented such wage differentials from emerging naturally, governmental measures must be taken to create them artificially.

The theoretical simplicity of the argument has won it many adherents; but there have been at least two objections to applying it in practice. In the first place, while a few influential trade union leaders might have been found to support it, in the movement as a whole resistance would undoubtedly have been great. A system of wage d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK AND ORGANIZATION
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER
• APPENDICES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX