The Social Problems of the 'Sixties

There would be fairly general agreement among those who can remember earlier days that Catholic interest in 'the social question' has declined. It is not difficult to find the reason for this present lack of interest, for 'the social question' no longer exists in the form it did a generation or two generations ago. The development of industrialization in this country, as in many others, brought with it the growth of a wage-earning proletariat; and for many the wage which was their sole source of income was insufficient to provide them with the requirements of a decent life. Even at the outbreak of war in 1939, our social order was marred by the effects of low wages and unemployment, the twin evils produced by the low level of economic activity. Thus in 1936, Rowntree's survey of York showed that something like one-third of the working-class population of that city was living in poverty, and that the major cause of such poverty was unemployment and low wages.Today the position is very different. In a more recent survey, it was shown that now only three per cent of the working class population of York is living below the poverty line, and that virtually none of this remaining poverty is the result of either unemployment or low wages. If we look at the level of unemployment, the comparison with the years even just before the war is startling. The Government White Paper on Employment Policy published in 1944 was still thinking in terms of an average level of unemployment of eight per cent, and this was the figure used for actuarial calculations in connection with the National Insurance Scheme

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