ABSTRACT
The Second World War banished unemployment. Labour market conditions changed dramatically. Britain‘s economic war plan was to shift resources from the civilian to the munitions sector while retaining sufficient capacity to produce consumer goods to preserve morale at home and manufactures for export to pay for essential imports. A more temporary result of the rise of physical planning was the comparative eclipse of the Treasury. The military crisis of 1940 not only facilitated necessary shifts in economic policy, it brought a change of government in which organized labour played an important part. Relations between Chamberlain and the unions had always been uneasy and the friction almost certainly retarded mobilization. The rise in the status of labour owed much to Bevin’s forceful personality, but also to the broad recognition that labour enjoyed enormous scarcity power, especially after 1940, but did not exploit its advantages.
