Inventing Unemployment

Anthony O'Donnell

"This book examines the evolution of Australian unemployment law and policy across the past 100 years. It poses the question 'How does unemployment happen?' But it poses it in a particular way. How do we regulate work relationships, gather statistics, and administer a social welfare system so as to produce something we call 'unemployment'? And how has that changed over time? Attempts to sort workers into discrete categories - the 'employed', the 'unemployed', those 'not in the labour force' - are fraught, and do not always easily correspond with people's working lives. Across the first decades of the twentieth century, trade unionists, statisticians and advocates of social insurance in Australia as well as Britain grappled with the problem of what forms of joblessness should be classified as 'unemployment'. This book traces those debates. It also chronicles the emergence and...