We have decided to adopt the second alternative, and our insurance system will, in consequence, be based upon four main principles. It will involve contributions from workmen and employers; it will receive a substantial subvention from the State; it will be organised by trades; it will be compulsory upon all--employers and employed, skilled and unskilled, unionists and non-unionists alike--within those trades. The hon. Member for Leicester[15] with great force showed that to confine a scheme of unemployment insurance merely to trade unionists would be trifling with the subject. It would only be aiding those who have, thank God, been most able to aid themselves, without at the same time assisting those who hitherto, under existing conditions, have not been able to make any effective provision.
To what trades ought we, as a beginning, to apply this system of compulsory contributory unemployment insurance? There is a group of trades specially marked out for the operation of such a policy. They are trades in which unemployment is not only high, but chronic, for even in the best of times it persists; in which it is not only high and chronic, but marked by seasonal and cyclical fluctuations, and in which, wherever and howsoever it occurs, it takes the form not of short time or of any of those devices for spreading wages and equalising or averaging risks, but of a total, absolute, periodical discharge of a certain proportion of the workers. The group of trades which we contemplate to be the subject of our scheme are these: house-building, and works of construction, engineering, machine-and tool-making, ship-building and boat-building, making of vehicles, and mill-sawing.
That is a very considerable group of industries. They comprise, probably at the present time, 2¼ millions of adult males. Two and a quarter millions of adult males are, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of these three kingdoms engaged in purely industrial work; that is to say, excluding commercial, professional, agricultural, and domestic occupations. Of the remaining two-thirds of the industrial population, nearly one-half are employed in the textile trades, in mining, on the railways, in the merchant marine, and in other trades, which either do not present the same features of unemployment which we see in these precarious trades, or which, by the adoption of short time or other arrangements, avoid the total discharge of a proportion of workmen from time to time. So that this group of trades to which we propose to apply the system of unemployment insurance, roughly speaking, covers very nearly half of the whole field of unemployment; and that half is, on the whole, perhaps the worse half.