Speenhamland system

The Speenhamland legislation referred to 1795 in several English counties according to a common model adopted social laws.

Content of the legislation

With these laws, the problem of rural poverty should be solved institutionally. A labor market in our modern sense did not exist, because the previous laws always fixed the rates and at the same time restricting the workers ' freedom of movement. Workers should work where they lived, vagrancy was strictly followed. At the same time the peasants were given low wages, which they could not feed their families. In order to safeguard the income and at the same time prevent the emergence of unemployment, those laws shall fix a minimum subsistence allowance, which was based on the price of bread. This should be achieved through surcharge payments to the wage of the public sector.

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The municipalities subsidized indirectly the landowners, with the result that wages have continued to fall. At the same time the peasants had no interest in wage increases because their reward was located mostly below the defined poverty line. After a few years this led to a decrease in productivity, which increases the pressure on wages even further increased. Until 1834, this practice resulted in Zusammenpiel with the Combination Act (prohibition of trade unions) large parts of the rural population in the dependency.

Karl Polanyi, however, also notes that the legislation enjoyed great popularity: The parents spent more time with their children, no one had to fear hunger, children were free independent from their parents and employers in their wage policy. He describes the system as a social innovation of the " right to life ".

The cause of failure was unclear at that time. Initially different causes have been blamed for poverty, to the rise of tea consumption. The impoverishment of the working population in spite of the combined wage model, which was established by the Speenhamland system required a plausible explanation. So Karl Polanyi noted in Great Transformation that Thomas Robert Malthus, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham falling wages at the time of the Act does not, with the municipal subsidy, but as evidence of the then common in these circles "iron law of wages" the subsistence law saw. Linked with mechanistic and biological analogies, this concept grew from Thomas Malthus to " a divine law that protects people against laziness " on.

The failure of Speenhamland led to a radical departure from the previous support of the poor; Work has been traded on markets - just search for the specific benefit (homo economicus ) was left as a utopian solution. The shock of the pauperization 1795-1834 was taken as an opportunity to elevate the market principle - based moralizing natural law ideas.