Search Results

A wide variety of voluntary work camp systems developed in the interwar years. This chapter distnguished between those which provided a social service, including the main work camp systems organised by university students, and the pacifist International Voluntary Service camps; and camps organised in order to promote social change, including nationalist and environmentalist camps that both prepared people for a future world and exemplified aspects of life in the new world. Once more, there was a clear gender division, with work camps aimed almost exclusively at men. Unemplyed women were recruited into what were effectively holiday camps, to recuperate; and women in the IVS camps acted as domestic workers, while the men performed symbolically heavy manual labour.

Under the National Government, the Ministry of Labour's control over work camps grew, as did its scale. While recruitment was voluntary once more, the number of camps and training places were expanded, and the scheme was opened up to all long-term unemployed males. Its main focus continued to be ‘reconditioning’ through heavy manual labour. The creation of the Unemployment Assistance Board brought the remaining municipal labour colonies under the control of central government, and increased the civil service professional cadre concerned with training. A number of policy-makers continued to press for compulsory recruitment (workfare) but this was resisted by the training professionals, who preferred the more relaxed discipline of voluntary recruits. There was increasing attention to measuring and analysing the physical changes brought about by ‘reconditioning’. However, placement rates were low after training, and the majority of trainees returned to unemployment. In its own terms, the scheme must be judged a failure. The camps closed in 1939.

In 1929, the Labour Party came to power, and the overseas training centres were turned into camps for training the long term unemployed. The focus of the new camps was to be on ‘reconditioning’ young unemployed men, through heavy manual labour in remote settings. The Labour Government introduced compulsory recruitment for the long term unemployed, as part of its wider policy for ‘labour transference’. This reflected a longer term socialist debate about national citizens’ service, with the Webbs in particular taking a strongly authoritarian view of the obligations of the unemployed. In practice, compulsory training – workfare in modern terms – was a failure, and it was abandoned when Labour lost power.