Productivity must be Accommodated

Abstract

As unemployment has risen over the last decade or so, uneasy eyes have turned towards the new technology. Blame for unemployment has been attached to its productive potential.

‘The statement that the country is not overpopulated, and that its industrial system is still capable of absorbing the growing supply of labour, must always be something of the nature of a prophesy … Because up-to-date industry has expanded, the inference is made that it is still expanding, and capable of expansion. Because this expansion in the past has taken place through alternations of good years and bad years, the inference is made of any particular period of depression that it is only a temporary phase and will give way to renewed prosperity. All this, however, is far from inevitable.’ —W. H. Beveridge (1909)

‘even now, when the technologies are in their infancy in Britain, jobs are being lost’.—Clive Jenkins and Barrie Sherman (1979)