ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the changes that should be made in the unemployment insurance scheme and the Unemployment Assistance Board in a Labour Government's next term of office. Owing to the prevalence of unemployment every advanced capitalist state has been compelled to set up an intricate system of national social services to make some provision for the unemployed. These unemployment services have to be elaborate in order that they may be inserted as innocuously as possible into a structure of private enterprise; and our British system of unemployment insurance and unemployment assistance is one of the most ingeniously constructed of them all. In general the plan has been followed in this book of only discussing those aspects of the unemployment services that are most obviously unsatisfactory.