It came as a bit of a surprise to read last week that the word ‘unemployment’ dates back (in English – French may be different) only to 1888, when it was used in an article in the American journal, Science. The OED notes that it has been in common use only since about 1895. Before that time there was simply a choice between work & pauperism.
By the first decade of the C20th the scourge of unemployment was a topic of regular discussion in intellectual periodicals such as Contemporary Review. It was a ‘thing’ (like justice or security), with which society & government had a responsibility to deal, & not just the fault of the feckless. (They however, continued to figure in the arguments – indeed the OED gives us a quotation from the St James’s Gazette, in the year before the first recorded appearance of Unemployment, referring to ‘Persons who are unemployed because they are unemployable’.)
By the middle of the following century, in 1948, the United Nations recognised that “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment”
And the idea & scope of a contract of employment continues to grow – with its guarantees of protection from unfair dismissal, harassment & discrimination, & guarantees of equal pay, holidays & respect for family commitments.
At the same time however, we are seeing a growing tendency for the young – in particular – to be expected to work without pay, in the interests of gaining relevant experience & networking opportunities.
A recent article on the Guardian Datablog attempted to disentangle the numbers of those working without pay from the total numbers of ‘employees in employment’. The fact that job numbers are growing while the economy is stalling is causing much scratching of heads.
This revelation about the word unemployment makes me want to revisit the contemporary sources from the earlier C19th : what words were used, for example, to describe the plight of the ‘operatives’ who were laid off during the Cotton Famine. Or, indeed by the Chartists. And did Tawney use the word ‘unemployment’ in his Commonplace Book.
I may yet be a convert to the linguistic turn
Links
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Linguistic Turn
Employment figures: how the unpaid get counted
Related posts
Statistics leading to philosophy
RH Tawney’s Commonplace Book
