"'Steady Work' for the 'Steady-in-Work'": Industrial Layoffs, Unemployment Compensation, and the Campaign for a Guaranteed Annual Wage, 1932–58

New-Deal policy-makers affiliated with the “Wisconsin School” of labor economics argued that unemployment insurance should serve not only to provide relief to jobless workers but also to stabilize the seasonal peaks and valleys of industrial employment itself. To do so, they designed a compensation system designed to incentivize employers to regularize production by making firms’ tax liability proportional to their rates of lay-off. Drawing on archived transcripts from hearings before the state administrative courts that adjudicated compensation claims, this paper shows how state officials charged with fairly administering benefits sought to distinguish between legitimately laid-off workers and so-called drifters only intermittently attached to the labor market. Yet, the persistent insecurity of industrial jobs compelled workers to adapt survival strategies that confounded this distinction: laid-off claimants were disqualified from receiving benefits because they quit their jobs in anticipation of seasonal layoffs, refused recalls to firms they knew to be unstable, and supplemented their wages with income from informal work. As rates of benefit disqualification increased in the face of employer pressure to tighten eligibility criteria over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, industrial unions campaigned for a guaranteed annual wage that promised to both shore up and stand in for an exclusionary welfare state. Yet the private benefit plans unions ultimately accepted replicated the administrative structure of state programs, in some cases proving even more restrictive. I argue that the public-private New Deal state afforded workers the right to employment “security” on the basis not only of their formal legal relationship to firms but on the basis of their perceived moral status as “steady” workers. Defying workers’ own means of pursuing security in the absence of regular employment, this logic continued to undermine policymakers’ efforts to stabilize work.