ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relationship between collective action by unemployed people and the everyday action of individual unemployed people that takes the form of avoiding low-paid employment, doing cash work while claiming, maximizing benefit claims, busking, begging or committing minor property crimes. Market-minded political scientists and economists tend to emphasize the problems associated with complex public sector systems, welfare-state contributions and benefits, and political interests. The context for political movements of the unemployed was the period between 1880 and the 1970s, but most especially the 1920s and 1930s. The very concept of unemployment was not available before the start of this period, and as an organizing principle for political action, it was not effectively mobilized until after the First World War. Although many gave quite sophisticated accounts of the political and economic origins of precariousness, the couples saw themselves as responsible for decisions that would allow them to ‘pull together’ to cover their expenditures in current conditions.
