‘Blind alley’ to ‘steppingstone’? Insecure transitions and policy responses in the downturns of the 1930s and post 2008 in the UK

ABSTRACT Even before the crisis of 2008, the growing insecurity of young people’s transitions from school into work had been of concern to many observers in the UK. During the crisis itself, young people were disproportionately unemployed and concentrated in insecure employment sectors. Policy makers refrained from any labour market intervention insisting that the flexible nature of this work prevented higher unemployment. In unemployment, benefits entitlements were reduced and became subject to greater conditionality to counter a perceived crisis of social dependency. These changes have often been discussed in terms of the rise of neo-liberalism and the breakdown of post-war labour market securities. This article takes a complementary but different comparison with the 1930s, when similar liberal policy orthodoxies dominated. The evidence assembled shows significant continuities and contrasts in how youth unemployment was interpreted and responded to in the social security system and in wider labour market policies. In doing so, it illustrates the distinctive features of contemporary neo-liberalism and contributes to debates on youth unemployment, benefits and insecure work.


Introduction
Under the Conservative-led coalition government of 2010-2015 and subsequent Conservative governments, youth unemployment was a key policy concern. Disproportionately unemployed and feared to be vulnerable to long-term 'worklessness', young people were a central object of concern in debates around poverty and dependency. Youth unemployment was concerning the policy makers even before the 2008 crisis, gradually increasing since 2004 even during periods of stronger economic growth (Resolution Foundation 2012).
There has been a great deal of concern about the increasingly fragmented and insecure nature of youth transitions from education into the labour market. Young people have been not only disproportionately unemployed, but also under-employed and increasingly pushed to expanding insecure sectors of the labour markets (Bessant 2018). For instance, people aged 16-24 years are the group most likely to be on zero-hour contracts (TUC 2016). This takes place in a wider context in which insecure employment and self-employment are on the rise (Gregg and Gardiner 2015) amid the shift from an industrial to a service-based economy (McDowell 2020).
Discussions of the rise of insecurity have tended to examine the erosion of the post-war settlement since the end of the 1970s (Bessant 2018). Ideological shifts meant the state no longer sought to correct the systematic inequalities but instead act upon the person of the disadvantaged young. Policy has 'individualised' (Woodman, Shildrick, and MacDonald 2020) and de-standardised transitions, involving a shift of responsibility from the state, to the individual, an 'individualism from above' (Farthing 2015). Accompanying these changes has been a restoration of older discourses of blame which have labelled the unemployed as responsible for their own condition as individuals and which resemble those prominent in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In prevalent narratives, youth unemployment is frequently stated to have re-emerged as a policy problem during the 1980s, following three decades within which full employment policies in an industrial economy had rendered transitions from school to work relatively straightforward (Simmons, Thompsons, and Russell 2014). This re-emergence accompanied the changing policy paradigms from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism (Bessant, Farthing, and Watts 2017). This entailed the decline of full employment policies in favour of skill-based supply side interventions which became seen in the New Labour years and beyond as the primary means by which youth unemployment might be alleviated by public policy (Simmons, Thompsons, and Russell 2014).
This article seeks to bring different aspects of the present situation into focus through an alternative comparison with the 1930s. While the period between the 1930s and the present will be referred to, in particular to contextualise the current policy, the article will focus on the direct comparison of the two periods. It takes a thematic approach, examining policy discourses in both periods. The 1930s was a period in which, like today, liberal orthodoxies held sway (Cooper 2021) and problematics of social dependency influenced the discussions of unemployment despite economic downturn. By contrast, today's system is often characterised as neo-liberal, as a return of the hegemony of liberal principles amid the destruction of the welfare state. This is not, however, a straightforward return to the past though (Brown 2015) as neo-liberalism is substantially distinct from what has come before. Examining policy in the 1930s adds a new dimension to this discussion by showcasing what is distinctive about today's neo-liberal regime in contrast to the liberalism of the inter-war years. It reveals in many ways the extremity of the punitive approach taken toward the young unemployed in today's policy.
This article therefore argues that the study of the 1930s can make a number of contributions to debates on youth unemployment and welfare reform. This study highlights the persistence of dependency discourses despite apparent refutations, while also showcasing the extremity of conditionality in the present-day social security system. It will be argued that while both are periods in which liberalism predominated, significant differences can be found which challenge views of neo-liberalism as a restoration of older ways of thinking.
This article is structured as follows. The next section sets the scene by looking at how youth unemployment featured in the academic literature debates on social security/ welfare reform since 2010. It then proceeds to the comparison of both periods after briefly setting out the methods and analytical approach used to deal with archival evidence from the 1930s.

Youth unemployment in present-day social security debates
The youth unemployment problem has been framed in different ways including as a problem of low skills and qualifications (UKCES 2015), as one of human capital deficiency, of entrenched vulnerability, as a failure of employment policies or as a failure of communities to socialise workers with the required work ethic (CSJ 2013). Although there have been great changes in work and its organisation in the intervening 80 years, the way unemployment is discussed still resembles the classically liberal discourses of 'demoralisation' and dependency seen during the great depression and before. Although extended discussion of changes in work in the intervening period is beyond the scope of the article, it should be noted that the profiles of the unemployed in the two periods are very different as well. Discussions of youth unemployment in the 1930s overwhelmingly focused on working class youth; however, in the present middle-class graduates also feature, with some arguing that these credentials no longer guarantee access to secure jobs or straightforward transitions (Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2011).
When transitions are broken, they are managed by the social security system: unemployed young people have posed particular challenge for social security systems, as can be seen in the 1930s as well as today. Labour market entrants have little entitlement to contribution-based benefits. However, young claimants also historically cause problems for means tested systems as they are often seen as having low needs and therefore problematising the 'less eligibility' principle (also described in terms of 'work incentives').
Even as youth labour markets fractured, access to social security benefits has become increasingly subject to compliance with behavioural criteria (Dwyer and Wright 2014). Political rhetoric around the system has been characterised by a pervasive moralism across Conservative and New Labour governments (MacDonald, Shildrick, and Furlong 2020) with the 'deservingness' of various groups of claimants being debated. Although young people could hypothetically be seen as worthy subjects within this environment, as they arrive in a labour market situation which is not of their making, this is largely not how this debate has played out. Instead, the young unemployed have been frequently condemned as especially morally deficient (Cameron 2012), characterised in political rhetoric as part of the cultural problem of 'worklessness' and 'dependency' as diagnosed by the government. They were blamed for their apparent sense of 'entitlement' to benefits, high expectations of the labour market and 'pickyness' about the sorts of jobs they were prepared to accept (CSJ 2013). While academics have identified a lack of evidence for this cultural problem (e.g. Shildrick et al. 2012), this has not seriously curtailed its role in policy discourse, MacDonald, Shildrick, and Furlong (2020) have noted the continued role of underclass themes in discourses about youth unemployment.
Policy has moved toward activation as standard transitions fragmented (Farthing 2015). The coalition government initiated a major programme of 'welfare reform' as youth unemployment was high and rising. 'This reform' aimed to target what the government described as a problematic culture of 'worklessness' and entitlement among young people, particularly those coming from 'intergenerationally workless' (Shildrick et al. 2012) households. Youth unemployment has been seen, at least in part, as a problem of socialisation rather than of a lack of opportunities. This view has been used to justify a series of escalations in the behavioural conditionality applied to claimants of out-ofwork benefits. These measures have had a disciplinary intent, aiming to re-socialise those in receipt of out-of-work benefit and instil a form of ideal liberal subjectivity upon them, they 'seek to produce and encourage the kinds of self-determining, choicemaking subjects or self-actualising and responsible citizens demanded by the new economy and social order' (Anderson 2018, 461). Policy has been underpinned by a preoccupation with young people's 'character' (Brooks 2013) their working discipline and imbibing of an 'entrepreneurial spirit'. Young people have been required to adopt an ethic of 'adaptability and self-management' (Worth 2003). As employment security has declined, employability security (Chertkovskaya et al. 2013) has become the aim of policy. This focus on the skills and effects of unemployed young people can be seen in the supply side nature of policy in the neo-liberal period from the Youth Training Scheme of the 1980s onwards (Bessant, Farthing, and Watts 2017). Such a policy individualises responsibility for broken transitions it burdens 'the entity at the end of the pipeline' (Brown 2015, 133).
The article will now outline the approach taken towards the archival material, before proceeding to the comparison of the 1930s and present day.

Archival and documentary sources in this article
The method used in this research is a form of theoretically informed qualitative documentary study of original historical documents from the 1930s. This work was done as part of an ERSC-funded research project which examined the young people's transitions from school to work, with particular attention paid to the West Midlands. As well as examining the crisis post 2008, this project also looked at previous recessions for the purposes of comparison.
The research used several primary documentary sources. Files of interest were those of the national and local government institutions involved in formulating policy towards young unemployed people. Files of the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labour and the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB) found at The National Archives of the UK were used to examine the national policy. However, since significant elements of policy were administered by local authorities, records of Birmingham City Council were used to understand how the policy operated in practice.
Research on the 1930s was conducted in an exploratory manner. A motivated search to locate material relevant to present-day policy issues was necessitated by the comparative nature of the research project, a 'history of the present'. It was not possible to have a comprehensive idea of the contents of the archives holding material on unemployment of youth prior to beginning to explore them, so archive catalogue lists for these relevant organisations were searched for reference to youth and juvenile (the group between the school-leaving age of 14 years and the acquisition of adult employment rights at 18 years) unemployment. The research identified an initial range of sources and explored outwards from there, following up references in secondary sources as well as in other files and 'snowballing' additional material in the light of the analysis of previous documents. Relevant files were read, where possible copied, and longform notes taken.
Archive documents are always limited by what survives. Furthermore, archives are not created with knowledge of the specifications of future researchers (Scott 1990). At times for instance in the records of Birmingham City Council, the files surveyed were the only documents relevant within the archive in question and the question of sampling did not arise. When this was not the case, a saturation criterion was employed.
This article is centrally concerned with the discursive construction of the youth unemployment problem, the way policy was articulated and justified. It examines how official understandings came to frame the problem and how this has changed over time (Walters 2000, 1). Accordingly, in reading these documents it has been important to seek out statements of senior civil servants which contain justifications for policy which were recorded in order that they could be communicated. Descriptions of claimants which referenced their character or their nature as subjects, were of particular interest. These should be understood in the context of what Brown (2015) calls political rationalities. These are types of reasoning which come to 'capture the way a normative order of reason comes to legitimately govern as well as structure life and activity as a whole' (Brown 2015, 117). This is what was sought in the archive files: ubiquitous governing principles that can be said to govern society, neo-liberal rationality being one such formation, as was an earlier form of liberalism in the 1930s. It is within these that specific policy responses will be formulated and enacted. Unemployment from the start was recognised as a 'problem for liberal government. It is in terms of key liberal patriarchal principles and norms that the issue is discussed' (Walters 2000, 3).
The sections that follow will set out and compare how youth unemployment was perceived and handled in the 1930s and since 2010.
Views on the nature of the unemployment problem in the 1930s and since 2010 The youth unemployment problem in the 1930s was seen as liable to pose a long-term social threat, creating social dependency but also delinquency (Bradley 2007) and longterm disillusionment with the social order (Meera 1936). Policy makers perceived a need to maintain social discipline. The question was what place should the juvenile unemployed have in a system of unemployment relief?
The young unemployed posed particular problems for the mainly contributory system of support for the unemployed which dominated. A contributory system would ordinarily exclude those without an adequate contribution record. School leavers would normally have to work for a period before becoming eligible. However, during a recession there arose the question of those denied the opportunity to contribute. Was this figure to be treated as a 'victim' or a 'villain' (Brown 1990)?
Themes of dependency and 'demoralisation' dominated the discussions. On one hand, there was the desire for young workers prone to 'demoralisation' not to be introduced too early in life to the 'bottomless purse of the state' (TNA AST7/94 Letter to Williams from Bullard 11 December 1937). The 'objections which may be summarised in the phrase 'doles for children' (TNA Cab27/502 Memorandum from Betterton (Minister of Labour) of 1933 on policy toward Juveniles) concerned the dangerous effect of normalising or supporting life outside of work. For those who held this view, the unreciprocated receipt of public money was a 'more insidious evil' (TNA MH57/8: Brief for the minister's speech to the 1935 Public Assistance Conference attached to minutes of 18 March 1935) than the insufficiency of benefits to meet needs. This was the classic liberal concern that social provision would create and perpetuate social dependency. This combined with the view that young people, being without settled habits of work, would be especially vulnerable to demoralisation would appear to make a strong case, in line with the prevailing liberal political logic, against including young people in schemes of social assistance.
Insurance allowed the juvenile to claim in their own right from the age of 16 years, but they would be considered a dependent up to that point. However, the rates paid assumed continued residence in the family home (benefits for 18-21s were in fact cut to reinforce this in 1928 (Burns 1941)). Policy aimed to reinforce normatively defined family units casting mutual aid as a moral duty. Dependency is an ideological concept; its meaning has changed over time and been interpreted differently. Its use serves to legitimate certain social relations, family structures, and forms of employment and to delegitimise others (Fraser and Gordon 1994). In particular, the benefit system of the time casts the dependence of women and children on men as legitimate. However, on the part of a liberal and patriarchal state, there was also the objective of delineating the responsibilities of the state for the young unemployed from those of the family. The state was keen to ensure that it was not forced to pay for those it regarded as family dependents. The maintenance of traditional family structures was an important consideration in policy design.
It should be noted that this was a highly gendered problematic, much more so than today. Evidence from the JICs in Birmingham shows that unemployment and underemployment were seen as a problem in that it would render young men unable to fulfil allotted roles as the heads of self-sufficient families (Birmingham City Council 1931). Prevalent assumptions about women's likely working lives, that they would be shorter and would end upon marriage, meant that they appeared as a much lesser object of concern in these discourses.
Policy makers had similar understandings of young people's unemployment in both periods as generative of long-term social problems. Similar discursive themes can be observed, the concern with 'demoralisation' that can be found in the 1930s resonates strongly with contemporary themes of learned dependency and 'worklessness' as pathology (e.g. Shildrick et al. 2012). There is a common tendency to blame social problems on young people's poor choices, high expectations and a lack of long-term thinking. As well as to problematise working class families as sources of poor socialisation. The 'responsibilisation' (Brown 2015) of the subject appears to be something that neo-liberalism has in common with its historical predecessors.
One example of this can be found in David Cameron's speech in 2012 calling for cuts in Housing Benefit for the young which used arguments which resembled those that 'may be summarised in the phrase 'doles for children' (TNA Cab27/502 Memorandum from Betterton (Minister of Labour) of 1933 on policy toward Juveniles) in the 1930s. Cameron contrasted the situation of a young worker living at home with her parents and failing to earn enough to move out with that of a benefit claimant who was: only 19 years-old and doesn't have a job but is already living in a house with her friends. How? Because when she left college and went down to the Job Centre to sign on for Job Seeker's Allowance, she found out that if she moved out of her parents' place, she was automatically entitled to Housing Benefit (2012).
He concludes that 'the system we inherited encourages them to grab that independence, rather than earn it' (Cameron 2012). This is recognisably the problematic of demoralisation via state support, quite continuous with the problematics of pre-welfare state liberalism.
There was a similar need in both periods to enforce the line between parental and state dependency. Policy sought to enforced dependence on the family to reduce that on the state. For instance, by withdrawing support for independent living offered by Housing Benefit. Juvenile allowances in the 1930s were set at such a level as to make independent living very difficult. This caused problems for migrant juveniles despite the intention of government to encourage movement from the 'depressed areas' to parts of the country with lower unemployment. In both periods, policy makers sought to distinguish young people from adults through lower entitlements.
Neo-liberalism appears quite continuous with the liberalism in the inter-war years in its focus on individual responsibility. Policy makers appeared to see youth unemployment as a socialisation problem and assessed possible measures to relive its hardships as potential sources of further dependency. Differences, however, can be found in how policy responses were formulated.
Dependency and discipline in the social security system As can be seen above, authorities feared the social consequences of providing support to the juvenile unemployed, assessing policy against the problematics of dependency discussed above. But on the other hand, in the 1930s they desired to exercise the disciplinary functions of state institutions upon young workers. After all, to exclude them from support entirely would mean to leave them unsupervised. In this liberal system, payment was used as leverage to require the individual to accept behavioural/disciplinary regulation. This resulted in a combination of relaxations in eligibility criteria and increases in conditionality. In the present, however, as we will see, the approaches taken to youth eligibility and discipline are significantly different.
Juveniles in receipt of unemployment insurance benefit were required to attend institutions called Juvenile Instruction Centres (JICs) as a condition for receiving financial support. JICs (also sometimes known as 'dole schools'), a mixture of educational institution and detention centre. From 1930, local authorities were obliged by the Ministry of Labour to run JICs where there were >50 juveniles who had been claiming Unemployment Insurance Benefit for >12 days. Until 1931, the design of the insurance scheme had required that the juvenile accrue 6 months of contributions after reaching the age of 16 years to make a claim, leaving an effective 2.5-year gap between the school-leaving age (14 years) and the ability to make a claim. In 1931, the Commission recommended that entry into unemployment insurance should be lowered to 14 years (Burns 1941). This would remove the need for the juvenile's family to claim Public Assistance should they become unemployed 'or else the young person may suffer privation not calculated to maintain his efficiency as an industrial unit' (TNA LAB 2/2043/1218 Note from Clara Rackham November 1931, Age of Entry). This would also have the additional benefit in bringing juveniles into contact with the employment exchanges. This contact with exchanges would facilitate better job matching and act against the 'blind alley' problem. The Royal Commission 'wish[ed] to express our strong conviction of the importance of this effort to save juveniles from the deterioration which, especially in early years, is inevitably the result of the prolonged absence of any regular occupation' (Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance 1931).
This lowering of the age would widen access to insurance benefit and therefore increase the numbers required to attend the JIC. But it would not resolve the problem of unsupervised unemployed youth by itself as it would not do anything for those not in receipt of benefit. To close the gap between school and the disciplinary mechanisms for the unemployed, the Royal Commission went further than before. They concluded that attendance at the JIC not only should be a condition for the receipt of Unemployment Insurance but should be compulsory for all those without a job whether or not they were in receipt of benefit. The arguments for this were perhaps made most clearly by Labour party politician, and former Suffragist Clara Rackham, a member of the Commission who expressed a general consensus in seeing the JIC as a solution to the problem of 'demoralisation'. Rackham argued for compulsory attendance on the following grounds: there is [currently] no power to compel unemployed juveniles between 14 and 16 to attend Juvenile Instruction Centres, as this can only be done as a condition of benefit. Evidence has been given to show that boys and girls often arrive at the Centres at between 16 and 17 years old demoralised by long periods of idleness from which they have suffered since leaving school. This again would have been obviated if they could have been compelled to attend at an earlier age as a condition of benefit. And there would also be less resentment at having to attend and fewer disciplinary difficulties if the young persons were brought into the centre before they had left their school work and training so far behind. (TNA LAB 2/ 2043/1218 Note from Clara Rackham November 1931, Age of Entry.) This was a case for disciplining unemployed youth via the centres which were supposed to maintain working habits.
Insurance allowed the juvenile to claim in their own right from the age of 16 years, but they would be considered a dependent up to that point. However, the rates paid assumed continued residence in the family home (benefits for 18-21s were in fact cut to reinforce this in 1928 (Burns 1941)). Dependency is an ideological concept which serves to legitimate certain social relations, family structures, and forms of employment, and to delegitimise others (Fraser and Gordon 1994). In particular, the benefit system of the time casts the dependence of women and children on men as legitimate. However, on the part of a liberal and patriarchal state, there was also the objective of delineating the responsibilities of the state for the young unemployed from those of the family. The maintenance of traditional family structures was an important consideration in policy design.
Historians have debated the level of success compelling juveniles to attend the JIC. Garside (1977) argued that detention represented a wholly inadequate policy response which succeeded only in warehousing the unemployed. From a more educationalist perspective, Pope (1977Pope ( , 1978 argued that the JICs were alienating institutions with an unimaginative curriculum which served more as means of detention than of education. There is an unaddressed question, however, about how the unemployed attendees were perceived, to what extent they were seen as blameworthy and as an object for discipline. In Birmingham, there was some ambiguity about how the JIC was seen. On the one hand, a Councillor Hume, the then head of the Birmingham Education Committee, when representing the Association of Municipal Corporations to the Royal Commission for Unemployment Insurance opined, that he: was opposed to the idea that every claimant of benefit should be made to attend the Junior Instruction Centre because many of these claimants were "nice" boys and girls, whereas the Centre contained rough characters, incipient criminals and the residuum of undesirables. (TNA Lab2/2043 1218 part 1 Evidence by Educational Authorities' Associations before the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance) This therefore appears as an institution for the detention of a dangerous subsection of youth. It also suggests that the main rationale for incarceration in state-run institutions was disciplinary.
So, compulsory training and detention were major parts of the policy response to juvenile unemployment. The uniqueness of the juvenile can be illustrated by the rejection of any similar regime for young adults. While cases were made that some regime of compulsory training might play a role in 'mitigating any adverse effects of blind alley jobs upon progressive employment for the adult' (TNA AST7/314 Draft report by A.T Lennox-Boyd Paragraph 13 'Blind Alley' employment). This was in the end rejected as it was thought to be politically impossible to force those on an insurance-based system into such a regime. The juvenile's status as not yet adult meant they could be subjected to things others could not.
This policy response to 'demoralisation' provides one of the most significant contrasts between the 1930s and the present. While in the 1930s there were moves to put young people in contact with the 'constructive' mechanisms of the exchanges. Policy moves in a different direction today. There has been no attempt since 2010 to 'credit-in' those who were deprived of an opportunity to contribute as there was in the 1930s.
However, the detention which characterised inter-war policy responses does not exist today. However, it should be noted that today under 18s are mandated to be in some form of education or training. Youth is to some extent a shifting category historically.
In the escalated sanctions regimes in place since 2012 (Watts, Fitzpatrick, and Bramley 2014), young people have been disproportionately affected. The aim of this regime appears to be to expel as many claimants as possible from the benefit system and reduce the claimant count. The system being seen as a generator of social dependency, analogous to the problem of 'doles for children'. The idea of a constructive role for the successor to the exchanges, JobcenterPlus that might render contact beneficial, appears much less strong than in the past. Although the 'neet' (an acronym denoting those Not in Education Employment or Training) is an object of concern today, the idea of loosening eligibility to connect them with the Jobcentre does not appear to have been seriously considered. The 'neet' is instead an apparent object of moral judgement in the neo-liberal era whereby the claimant is stigmatised for a lack of individual responsibility (Simmons, Thompsons, and Russell 2014). By contrast in the 1930s, at least as far as the juvenile claimant was concerned, far from excluding claimants through escalations in conditionality, as is the practice in 'welfare reform', policy makers tried to make eligibility criteria looser.
A substantial contrast can be seen here. In the present-day policy deterrence and disallowance of claims has been a central priority amid 'ubiquitous conditionality' (Dwyer and Wright 2014). This has been the case even when this might lead to detachment from means of regulation/support. The approach in the 30s was much more variable with other considerations moderating the small state instinct to deny support.
It can be seen that the neo-liberal political rationality rejected many policy solutions adopted by inter-war liberalism, showing less faith in the ability of state institutions to mitigate labour market problems. Neo-liberalism appears to reject the use of institutions to rationalise labour markets which was a major element of liberal policy in the 1930s. This extended to the use of conditionality to end claims and disconnect the unemployed from the system.

Perceptions of insecure and casual employment in the two periods
Concerns about youth unemployment in the 1930s were related to a broader concern about the long-term consequences of labour market insecurity, expressed as the problem of casual labour. This can be related to the contemporary problem of underemployment and to new insecurities in the labour market.
From the late nineteenth century 'casual work' was widely regarded as a problem, as a generator of inefficiency in industry but also of social problems. It was seen as source of dependency, 'as expensive, inefficient and a source of social and moral degeneration (poverty breeding criminality, sickness and incapacity)' (Whiteside 2015, 155).
Irregular employment was seen as insufficient to create developed habits of work. The charity The Pilgrim Trust held that the 'spells of casual work which a 'general labourer' finds for himself are not enough to give men the habit of working' (Pilgrim Trust 1938, 151). twentieth century social reformers saw casualism as creating structural social problems, not just individual moral/psychological ones. The young William Beveridge saw casual labour as a feature of poorly organised labour markets, and as wasteful (Phillips and Whiteside 1985;Whiteside 1991). Social investigator E.W. Bakke associated casual employment with the tendency of unemployed young men to 'loaf' around in the streets, becoming a source of what today might be called 'anti-social behaviour'.
Among the solutions advocated was the use of the newly established Labour Exchanges to identify and exclude the least efficient workers in the industry. In 1909, Churchill had argued that it was not possible to divide the 'vagrant and the loafer' from the legitimate workman without a set of work tests (i.e. the offer of permanent work) like those offered by the Exchanges (King 1995); by offering these tests the Exchanges sought to impose the discipline of regular work. De-casualisation, while desiring to increase job security (even at the cost of the increased unemployment of some) had essentially conservative aims. Seeking to 'foster economic independence of the individual and the integrity of the family' (Phillips and Whiteside 1985, 108).
For the young this problem took a particular form, the 'blind alley'. This 'blind alley' referred to jobs which led nowhere, or least provided no prospect for long-term employment and/or training. These were seen as storing up unemployment for later along with its associated social problems creating, 'young men for whom the lessons of self-discipline and the influence of working experience have not come with any great force. They are a problem now. They will be more of a problem as they grow older' (Bakke 1933, 188). Jobs of this nature included work as messengers, 'errand boys', 'van boys' and other forms of cheap labour. These jobs despite being unskilled, paid better than many 'progressive' opportunities including apprenticeships. Young people, in taking these occupations 'endangered their future prospects of useful employment' (Garside 1977, 324) by taking unskilled work from which they would be dismissed at the age at which they would come to receive an adult wage, at which point the employer would hire another juvenile. The decisions of juveniles to take such 'unprogressive' work were labelled as a problem of short-termism and lack of thrift on the part of juveniles and their families. The Ministry of Labour's Divisional Controller for London in a Memorandum of April 1937 described the effects of this kind of work: [t]he main reasons for the boys unemployment appeared to be that some had drifted unguided from one unskilled job to another without considering prospects in later years. Work had been easy to get and the wages they had earned high, and they were not prepared to consider employment offering a wage usually paid to boys of their age (TNA LAB19/243 Memorandum of the London Divisional Controller April 1937).
'Blind alley' jobs were not always preferred to unemployment by policy makers in the 1930s, rather seen a part of same of the same problem. This raised dilemmas for policy makers. Whether to encourage causal work as an alternative to unemployment or whether to allow a certain 'choosiness' (often decried in the unemployed) in job search. However the solution to casualism was the coordination of labour markets through exchanges rather than empowering claimants to reject casual work. This was not decommodification but a conservative attempt to enforce regular employment habits. While for adult claimants some allowance was made for the claimant to retain their 'normal occupation', this was much less the case for the juvenile without an established working history.
Although a certain paternalism is continuous, major differences can be seen between the two periods in the attitude the authorities took towards insecure or temporary work especially as it relates to young people. In the 1930s, the conclusions of early twentieth century reformers that 'casualism' was a social danger held sway. In the early twentyfirst century insecure employment has been encouraged as a solution to unemployment rather than being seen as part of the same problem. The Taylor report of 2017 for instance defended Britain's 'flexible' labour markets, seeing their very 'flexibility' as the reason why the UK experienced lower unemployment than comparable states. This logic has seen the defence of the zero-hour contract on grounds that it is a 'steppingstone' towards more secure employment, that the accumulated experience would increase employability. This is in sharp contrast to the logic of the 'blind alley' problem. In the inter-war years 'de-casualisation' was a strategy for reshaping the labour market along liberal lines, the aim of preventing 'relief in aid of wages' having long been a principle of Poor Law administration. What we now call underemployment was seen as a sign of poorly organised labour markets.
State subsidies to low paid work were seen as source of dependency in the 1930s in a way which contrasts sharply with the extensive subsidized for low paid work in the present (especially since the establishment of Tax Credits under New Labour). In recent years, attempts to develop systems of in-work conditionality (Dwyer and Wright 2014) show that in-work subsidies are still seen as a problem by contemporary policy makers. However, it remains the case that insecure work has been largely seen as an alternative to unemployment rather than a problem of the same nature of 'casualism'. Policy makers interest in the 'rationalisation' of labour markets through institutions like employment exchanges (Phillips and Whiteside 1985;King 1995) is not evidenced today with modern day jobcentres being understood to have much more limited functions.
This view of insecure work perhaps reflects the shift from an attempt to create employment security in the twentieth century to 'employability security' in the 21st (Chertkovskaya et al. 2013) amid an ethic of 'projective' work (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). That is, one in which the individual is expected to secure their independence through developing their capacity to adapt quickly to new roles, growing their human capital in each post to advance to the next.
The way that broken transitions have been managed in these two periods reflect different visions of ideal labour markets within a broad category of liberalism. In the inter-war years industrial integration and long-term planning were prized Boltanski and Thévenot (2006). While under neo-liberalism, quick adaptability in the face of changing markets is far more so.

Conclusion
This article has described how insecure youth transitions were problematised and responded to by policy makers in the 1930s. It has argued that these resemble, but also contrast with, the present day. The evidence from the past that has been presented can serve to problematise and contextualise (Goodwin et al. 2020) the present day neoliberal policy, laying bare its assumptions and contrasting them to those of the past.
The article, through an exploration of archival data, has demonstrated similarities in how the problem was framed in policy-making discourses. In both periods, there was a prevalent view of young people as vulnerable to dependency and/or demoralisation. They were seen as malleable objects for intervention and discipline.
A theme running throughout the findings has been the view of the state itself in policy discourse. In both periods, young claimants are cast as victims not so much of economic circumstance but of the welfare state itself, socialised into the acceptance of easy money and immoral lifestyles. What differs in the solutions held to follow from this view. In the 'welfare reform' agenda of the coalition and its successors, statist bureaucracy is blamed for its inflexible and antiquated nature which has led to a failure to create incentive structures to which claimants can respond (Cabinet Office 2010). The solution was held to be to enforce reliance on the market through disallowances. While in the 1930s, a more positive view of the difference state institutions could make, appears to have predominated.
A crucial difference is that presently unemployed youth are pushed towards immediate job outcomes and expected to gain 'work experience' through performing insecure labour. Underemployment has been problematised by critics of policy, but the dominant view of it has been as an alternative to unemployment. Evidence from the 1930s shows a different understanding. The problematisation of 'blind alley' work stands in sharp contrast to its idealisation in the 'flexicurity' era. The neo-liberal governance exemplified by 'welfare reform' can be seen in the rejections of state rationalisations of the labour market. Seen as unnecessary by Beveridge and others, under neo-liberalism self-work in job search, etc. is conceptualised as productive and desirable in and of itself, firstly in disciplining the unemployed and secondly in creating ideal neo-liberal subjects (Boland 2016).
Rather than representing an inefficient failure of industrial organisation, precarious work is seen as 'flexible' and a sign of a market-mediated efficiency (CBI 2017). Neo-liberalism instead conceives of modernisation as a movement away from the state, seeing social policy as no longer building efficiency but holding it back. In both periods, the worker is encouraged to maintain their 'independence' from the state and to ideally not claim state support. Yet in the 1930s this was to be secured by their status within a trade which provided long-term employment. In policy debates post 2008 to argue for such a model of work was regarded as to hold out against modernity. The language with which an efficient economy is described and thought of has changed. In an integrated industrial society, planning should be long term, there should be a continuity between the present and the future. Workers should acquire specialisms and find places in an integrated industrial structure (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). At present this is not the case, on the contrary flexibility and impermanence have been preferred and insecurity and underemployment have not been recognised as problems in the same way.
A significant overall contrast can be observed in the rigidity of the general policy approach. The drive to 'credit-in' in the 1930s represented a concession to circumstance, an acknowledgement that those leaving school during a depression entered a situation not of their making. This cannot be seen at present. On the contrary, eligibility criteria and conditionality have become tighter, and a greater scepticism is evident of their claims to be legitimately unemployed. In the 1930s there appears to have been a greater tempering of the liberal instinct towards moral judgement and punishment of the unemployed. This historical analysis has illustrated the extremity of the present moment.