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OK, welcome and today my guest is Dr Victor Quirk and Victor wrote a thesis that explored the opposition over history to the concept of full employment and it's great to have him here today. So Victor, do you care to just talk about the main idea of your work.

Well, thanks Bill. Good to see you again. As you know, I was brought to Newcastle some 20 years ago to do my PhD. I worked in the public employment services in Australia for 15 or 16 years, dealing with the long term unemployed, and was particularly upset with the the nature of policy making in this area, the sort of bullying of the unemployed and couldn't understand as a practitioner who who had some skill and and, you know, I interviewed some 12,000 long term unemployed people in my career.

I had a bit of a sense of what the issues were, and yet the policy makers seemed to be ignorant of them. And I couldn't understand that. So I went and studied, went and did a degree to try to, you know, end up in a policymaking area. And along the way, I did some work on the history of the English Poor Laws as part of my undergraduate degree and learnt that when the shift happened from feudalism to capitalism or from feudalism to waged labour, where people working for wages became the predominant form of organising the workforce.

And we're talking, we're going back 5 or 6, 700 years when all this was sort of emerging. We see the creation of this massive pool of peasants were thrown off their land and then employers profited by just employing those workers that they needed. They didn't have to feed an entire feudal peasant's family, just the workers that they needed, which left in in Britain this left tens of thousands of starving peasants roaming across the English countryside, begging and stealing to stay alive. Well, on the one hand, this was great for the land owners, the employers, because they got people would work all day for them for a crust of bread because they were starving.

But at the same time, there was this incredible social problems of people being, you know, robbed and attacked. There were thousands of beggars in all sorts of, you know, terrible social problems and eventually, Elizabeth I hit upon the idea in 1601 thereabouts to pay the unemployed some income support, a dole, to to try to settle down the social situation.

And that marked the beginning of these things called the poor laws that were in place in England for about 300 years. And what happened was the - it sort of solved some of the social problems but the employers and the landowners reacted by over the following 200 years, introducing all sorts of new conditions for managing the unemployed.

And so we have this this cruel workhouse system, all designed to impose as much pain and suffering on the unemployed as possible. And the employers position was essentially that they wanted to make sure that people were still compelled to work cheap to escape their poverty and the oppression of the workhouses.

So by the time it get to the 19th century and workers start getting started agitating for the vote, the issue - one of the dominant issues that they are most interested in was to secure the what they called the right to work, which was a concept that they said that once private employers employed all the people that they needed, the government had a responsibility to employ everybody else and effectively eliminate unemployment because they could see that the the main source of their oppression as a people came from the fact that they were always hungry for work and therefore they would work for whatever conditions were offered to them.

And and so then there was this this period of ferocious resistance by business groups and employer groups over the next hundred years or so where this policy of the right to work, it was initially it showed up in France in 1848 when workers first got the vote right to vote there after a brief revolution. And then as the British working people agitated for the right to vote and the right to have trade unions and things like that.

They also agitated for the right to work, and then throughout the early 20th century, labour movements in countries like Britain and Australia promoted this idea of of governments having a responsibility to eliminate unemployment.

And when you go back and look at the debates around these times and the sorts of opposition that was mounted, it was ferocious to try and stop the agitation for these sorts of ideas. And in Australia, what eventually happened was following the Depression, the government of World War II in Australia established full employment.

They were promoting this idea of the right to work. And as a consequence, Australia had 30 years of post-war full employment where unemployment was kept under two per cent. And so my PhD basically looked at all of these different episodes where the battle for the right to work held sway.

And the reason I was interested in this, of course, is because when I came to CofFEE to do my studying, the question that I wanted to answer most was if we have the technical economic capacity to eliminate unemployment, why is it that this isn't being embraced?

And so that's what my PhD was addressed at looking at seeing the current resistance to full employment in the context of a pattern, a historic pattern of opposition.

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