Could workhouses ever make a comeback (in any form) in the western world?

Great Debates
1

I visited a couple of Victorian workhouse museums recently and was impressed by the underlying ethic that, although conditions were severe and prison-like, practice didn’t often live up to theory and exploitation was not at all uncommon, they were at least an attempt to prevent people starving to death through poverty and homelessness.

I’m just wondering if workhouses could ever acceptably return in any form in the western world - it seems that modern notions of human rights, along with diminished requirements for unskilled manual labour, would make it difficult, but still I wonder… in the aftermath of, say, some massively destabilising event such as natural disaster, world war, depression or pandemic, could some practically-workable variation on the workhouse theme actually be implemented?

Reference material: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~peter/workhouse/

2

Already happened.

3

That’s not the same thing. In Victorian England, you didn’t end up in the workhouse by committing a crime – at least not usually, I don’t think.

I’ve sometimees wondered the same thing as the OP. Call it a group home, and have the members do some prosocial labor – cleaning up roadsides, scrubbing graffiti, shoveling snow for the elderly, etc. Sort of like our old WPA. The real difficulty is finding some job (often unionized) that they’re not going to displace.

4

What relevance does this book have to the discussion?

5

Privatized prisons are the new workhouses. And like the old workhouses, they’re supposed to make at least some attempt at turning a profit on the inmates’ labor. (Whether any old workhouse actually was profitable I do not know, but it must have made some difference that its shelter was not simply offered to paupers for free.)

6

This reminds me of those famous lines from Dicken’s “A CHRISTMAS CAROL”
(SCROOGE): “are there no WORKHOUSES, no jails?”
(Kind Gentleman): “yes…but many would rather DIe than go to them”
(SCROOGE): “well, they had better die now, and decrease the surplus population!”
Somehow, workhouses don’t sound that welcoming! But you have a VERY valid point-if you are poor, it is almost impossible to live (decntly) in an American city-the rent is just too high! Some kind of communal living arrangement might well be a good idea-except, if you exclude ec-criminals, dope addicts, and drunks (which would be necessary), you will wind up getting sued by a LOT of people!

7

Ah, so that’s why nobody lives in cities anymore, the rent is too high!

Hmmm…and communal living arrangements sound good. Perhaps several people could get together to rent an living space. These people would share rooms…we’d have to think of a catchy name for it of course, since this sort of thing has never been done before.

And Brainglutton, what do private prisons have to do with workhouses? Nothing. The prisons don’t make a profit from the labor of the prisoners, they make a profit by charging the state a fee to keep the prisoners incarcerated that is larger than the cost of keeping the prisoners incarcerated.

The phenomenon of private prisons may be something to discuss, but it is irrelevant to this discussion.

8

Hey, I’ve got an idea! You could even make a TV show around that! Am I a genius or what?

9

They weren’t, at least a lot of the time, they weren’t - but that might just have been flawed implementation - they certainly set out to try to perform a public good. Conditions in workouses did improve gradually until they were phased out completely in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

The issues I think modern western citizens would have with the Victorian style of workhouse would be:

-Personal liberty
-Personal property
-Privacy (dormitories, communal showers)
-Hygiene (washing facilities limited)
-Relationships (Families separated into men, women, children - only spending a couple of hours per week together)
-Monotony of diet
-Enforced religion

The labour itself, I don’t think would be a massive issue. Also, arguably, some of the above stuff just didn’t need to be the way it was.

10

It was partly flawed implementation, but it was partly intentional. There was the idea that you should make the workhouses bad enough that people didn’t want to go there, so that only the truly needy would go, and not those able bodied people who didn’t need relief. As this website points out:

11

Privatized prisons don’t have anything to do with workhouses. The old workhouses weren’t penal. They were public welfare institutions, with the intention of poor relief.

12

In the UK we have something a bit like privatized workhouses.

From what I’ve heard and seen of them, they are worthy of a mention in ones will.

13

Japan (from what I hear), has poor people who are still physically capable stand and guard construction sites. Personally I can’t see anything particularly horrible about this (though I don’t know what the penalty is for not doing it.)

I think that the main issue with a workhouse, though, is that the only way to make it self-sufficient in the real world is that it would have to be a miniature economy. But anyplace that has to take anyone in is going to be dragged down by people who fell out of the real economy due to laziness, alcoholism, etc. Certainly, some X percent (possibly the majority even) will relish the prospect of being able to find employment, but it’s hard to work with and particularly to manage a place where the other Y percent of everyone is just looking for a handout. And once the people in charge start having to separate “the good from the bad” or trying to make the bad work regardless, nothing much good will come. You’ll get cases of beatings, bullying, etc.

Possibly with a setup like follows, you could get something that works:

There’s an open yard/tent with a work-area, and an office in the back with a window. In the morning you go up to the office and sign up, then go to work. Note that there will be no one “managing” the work-area–just guards or something to make sure people don’t destroy the machines/tools or do anything dangerous (i.e. bouncers.)

At the end of the shift you take all the widgets you made up to the office, and for that they let you in for lunch. The more widgets you made, the larger a menu you get a choice from (or you can bank your points.)

Repeat for the afternoon shift, and getting dinner.

Showers would be open to all (maybe one job would be to clean people so that the amount of water used per person was kept constant.) Lodging would require that you had made at least W number of widgets that day (W adjusted to match how much housing room they had.)

I.e. you try to set it up such that there really aren’t any sort of manager people. People can come and work or not, up to them. But the more work they do, the more benefits there would be.