786 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World

Dinnertime in an English workhouse, which provided relief for unemployed

workers experiencing the dislocation and social transformation accom­

panying the Second Industrial Revolution.

Age Pension Act (1908), which provided some income for workers over sev­

enty years of age whose incomes fell below a paltry sum per week. In 1908

the “deserving” poor in Britain could receive small old-age pensions. As a

result of the National Insurance Bill (1911), workers’ friendly societies

administered insurance payments based on voluntary (and thus unlike the

German case) employee wage deductions. The law’s most salutary effect

was to provide more workers and their families with direct medical treat­

ment. Yet a third of the British poor still received no assistance of any kind.

Moreover, government assistance to unemployed workers in Britain was less

well organized and less generous than that in France.

In France, pushed by Radicals and Socialists, the Chamber of Deputies

between 1890 and 1904 passed laws that eliminated obligatory special iden­

tity papers, or internal passports, for workers, created a system of arbitration

for strikes, banned female night work, established employers’ legal liability

for industrial accidents, reduced the workday to ten hours for women and

children, established a minimum age for industrial workers, and mandated an

obligatory weekly day of rest. It also affirmed the right of the state to monitor

conditions of work and hygiene in factories (although inspection was in

many areas nonexistent), passed a workmen’s compensation law with modest

pension benefits, and provided limited medical care for working-class fami­

lies. With the exception of Belgium, Sweden, and a smattering of other coun­

tries, in most of Europe workers could only dream of such reforms.