[Excerpt] The book redresses two imbalances in the recent literature on interwar unemployment: its almost exclusive focus on the United States and Britain, and its predominantly macroeconomic nature. To achieve these goals, the editors encouraged the authors of the country studies to address a set of microeconomic issues, including the extent to which the incidence and duration of unemployment varied across economic and demographic groups, and the effect of unemployment on labor force participation and poverty. Two macroeconomic issues also are addressed in several of the papers: the effects of real wages and of unemployment insurance on unemployment. These two issues have been hotly debated in the recent literature on interwar unemployment in the United States and Britain, and their discussion here for other industrialized countries represents a significant addition to the current debate

Boyer, George R

English

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[Review of the book Interwar Unemployment in International 
Perspective] 
George R. Boyer 
Cornell University, grb3@cornell.edu 
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[Review of the book Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective] 
Abstract 
[Excerpt] The book redresses two imbalances in the recent literature on interwar unemployment: its 
almost exclusive focus on the United States and Britain, and its predominantly macroeconomic nature. To 
achieve these goals, the editors encouraged the authors of the country studies to address a set of 
microeconomic issues, including the extent to which the incidence and duration of unemployment varied 
across economic and demographic groups, and the effect of unemployment on labor force participation 
and poverty. Two macroeconomic issues also are addressed in several of the papers: the effects of real 
wages and of unemployment insurance on unemployment. These two issues have been hotly debated in 
the recent literature on interwar unemployment in the United States and Britain, and their discussion here 
for other industrialized countries represents a significant addition to the current debate. 
Keywords 
unemployment, demographics, interwar period, United States, Britain 
Disciplines 
Economic History | Labor Economics | Labor History | Labor Relations 
Comments 
Suggested Citation 
Boyer, G. R. (1990). [Review of the book Interwar unemployment in international perspective] [Electronic 
version]. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 43(4), 489-490. 
Required Publisher Statement 
© Cornell University. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 
This article is available at DigitalCommons@ILR: https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/articles/532 
B O O K REVIEWS 4 8 9 
programs. The criteria the authors use in 
these evaluations include rewards for both 
employer and employees. The former seeks 
reductions in absenteeism, increased job 
satisfaction, and improved productivity; the 
latter also profit by more satisfaction in the 
job, but as well by having "more time away 
from work for the pursuit of leisure and 
recreational activities" (p. 156). That a certain 
amount of contradiction and illusion is inevita-
ble in this approach, the authors do not point 
out. 
Part 3 is essentially a "how-to" manual for 
employers. It consists of lists of p rocedures -
things to do and not to do when a new 
schedule is to be introduced. Some of these are 
useful, if very general and rather obvious: 
specifying objectives, making a list of potential 
alternative schedules, collecting information, 
evaluating information, planning for implemen-
tation, carrying through the implementation, 
evaluating the new schedule, and fine-tuning 
it. 
No attention is given to the differences 
between women's and men's preferences for 
alternative schedules. Working women, even 
single ones, continue to carry nearly full 
responsibility for home and children. The 
reason women fill about 90% of the part-time 
jobs in this country is that they do not have 
enough hours in the day to work full time and 
manage a home unaided. For working women, 
then, it is not leisure—or, as these authors 
often put it, "non-work"—that competes with 
work hours, but the demands of family life. 
Nothing is more impossible for the working 
woman than the 10-hour day, even for only 
four days a week. This gender difference in 
approach to alternative schedules makes flexi-
ble hours more attractive to women than to 
men and leaves women indifferent or hostile to 
compressed working hours. Thus, part-time 
work falls to women. Shift work, to the extent 
that family demands can motivate a choice that 
often is determined by seniority, may be a 
woman's "choice," dictated by the high cost and 
unavailability of child care. Her husband 
retains a daytime schedule, while she tries to 
live under the illusion that she has daytimes 
at home and works while the children sleep. 
Her sleep, and in the end her health, is the 
sacrifice. 
Alice H. Cook 
Professor Emerita 
New York State School of 
Industrial and Labor Relations 
Cornell University 
Comparative Industrial Relations 
Interwar Unemployment in International Per-
spective. Edited by Barry Eichengreen and 
T. J . Ha t ton . Dordrech t : Kluwer, 1988. 
xxii, 434 p p . $114 cloth, $48 paper . 
This book contains eleven articles on unem-
ployment during the interwar period in eight 
industrialized countries. Two of the papers, the 
introduction by Eichengreen and Hatton and 
the paper by Newell and Symons, are compar-
ative in nature. The others are concerned with 
unemployment in individual countries—the 
United Kingdom (two papers), the United 
States, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Can-
ada, and Australia. 
The book redresses two imbalances in the 
recent literature on interwar unemployment: 
its almost exclusive focus on the United States 
and Britain, and its predominantly macroeco-
nomic nature. To achieve these goals, the 
editors encouraged the authors of the country 
studies to address a set of microeconomic 
issues, including the extent to which the 
incidence and duration of unemployment 
varied across economic and demographic 
groups, and the effect of unemployment on 
labor force participation and poverty. Two 
macroeconomic issues also are addressed in 
several of the papers: the effects of real wages 
and of unemployment insurance on unemploy-
ment. These two issues have been hotly 
debated in the recent literature on interwar 
unemployment in the United States and Brit-
ain, and their discussion here for other 
industrialized countries represents a significant 
addition to the current debate. 
Considered as a whole, the book greatly 
extends our knowledge of various aspects of 
unemployment between the wars. Several of 
the papers construct new estimates of interwar 
unemployment rates for particular countries, 
and provide estimates of the incidence and 
duration of unemployment by age and gender, 
often obtained from previously neglected (or 
unavailable) data sources. The introduction by 
Eichengreen and Hatton provides an excellent 
comparative overview of various issues dis-
cussed in further detail in the individual 
country chapters. The other comparative pa-
per, by Newell and Symons, examines move-
ments in unemployment, real wages, and prices 
in 14 countries for the years 1923-38. The 
authors conclude that interwar labor markets 
were characterized by nominal wage rigidity, 
and that the combination of falling prices and 
rigid wages was a major cause of unemploy-
4 9 0 I N D U S T R I A L A N D L A B O R R E L A T I O N S REVIEW 
ment during the depression. Ironically, the two 
countries that do not conform to their scenario 
are the United States and Britain. 
The two best country studies are Mark 
Thomas's paper on Britain and Robert Margo's 
paper on the United States. Thomas uses 
Ministry of Labour data to calculate the 
incidence and average duration of unemploy-
ment by age, gender, and region for the years 
1929-38. He concludes that interwar Britain 
had a "bifurcated [labor] market, in which 
there is at once rapid turnover and persistent 
unemployment." High long-term unemploy-
ment was not caused by either generous 
unemployment insurance benefits or duration 
dependence, but rather by the "peculiar struc-
tural characteristics of the Great Depression of 
1929-32." Thomas's paper should be read in 
conjunction with the recent papers by Eichen-
green and N. F. R. Crafts on interwar 
unemployment. Together, these papers signif-
icantly extend our understanding of various 
aspects of unemployment in interwar Britain. 
Margo's paper on unemployment in the 
United States makes use of a newly available 
and very rich data source, the public use 
sample of the 1940 census. Margo estimates 
logit regressions to examine the determinants 
of employment status, the duration of unem-
ployment, and the probability of having a 
permanent relief job. He uses his analysis of 
work relief to shed light on the issue, originally 
raised by Michael Darby, of whether workers 
with relief jobs should be counted as employed 
or unemployed. Finally, he analyzes the impor-
tance of the "added worker" effect by estimat-
ing a logit regression of labor force participa-
tion of married women. Margo's paper provides 
the only multivariate analysis of unemploy-
ment incidence and duration for the interwar 
United States, and therefore is a major 
addition to the literature. 
The papers by Goossens et al. on Belgium, 
Green and MacKinnon on Canada, and Gre-
gory et al. on Australia also represent impor-
tant contributions. All three papers provide 
estimates of unemployment duration. The 
papers by Goossens et al. and Green and 
MacKinnon provide estimates of the incidence 
of unemployment by age, gender, economic 
sector, and occupation, and detailed analyses of 
government policies to aid the unemployed. 
Gregory et al. compare the functioning of the 
Australian labor market, with its high union 
density and centralized system of wage setting, 
with the "free" United States labor market, and 
reach the surprising conclusion that nominal 
wages were at least as flexible in Australia as in 
the United States. 
The remaining four papers are considerably 
weaker. Toniolo and Piva's paper on unemploy-
ment in Italy presents a discussion of Fascist 
unemployment policies and a sectoral analysis 
of the effect of real wages on employment, but 
offers no estimates of unemployment incidence 
or duration. Silverman's paper on Germany 
covers only the period from January 1933 to 
July 1935, and consists of a narrative of the 
debate between Hitler and his advisors over the 
use of public works policies, and a discussion of 
the accuracy of Nazi labor market statistics. 
The paper by Salais on French unemploy-
ment is disappointing. Salais uncovered a rich 
data set consisting of the employment histories 
of several thousand individuals in the Paris 
region from 1930 to 1939, but his graphical 
presentation of the results of his principal 
components analysis is extremely difficult to 
follow for people not familiar with this tech-
nique. 
Finally, the paper by Harris on the effect of 
unemployment on health in Britain contains 
litde that is new. Harris's only original contri-
bution, his analysis of the effect of unemploy-
ment on the height of school children in eleven 
British cities, consists of a simple comparison of 
height and unemployment rates, ignoring 
differences across cities in wages, cost of living, 
and other factors that might have caused the 
height differentials. 
George R. Bo\cr 
Associate Professor 
New York State School of 
Industrial and Labor Relations 
Cornell University 
Current Approaches to Collective Bargaining. 
Geneva: International Labour Office, 1989. 
Labou r -Managemen t Relations Series No. 
71 . 184 p p . $18.95. 
This publication contains some 20 papers 
prepared for an ILO symposium that met in 
1987 to review current trends in collective 
bargaining in industrialized market economy 
countries. (Only English-language papers arc 
included. Those prepared in French are 
available on request.) ILO staff members 
contributed three competent but somewhat 
overlapping comparative papers- All the other 
papers are reports on individual countries by 
local observers, except for Nils Elvander's 
comparative review of the Nordic area. 
About half the papers adhere to a suggested 


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