With the holiday season you're likely to have heard the line from Dickens' Christmas Carol at least once this month. You know, when the charity fundraisers come to Scrooge's office looking for a handout for the needy and Scrooge responds grufly with "Are there no prisons... and the Union workhouses, are they still in operation?" Referencing the way in which the early Victorians dealt with the problems of homelessness, debt and unemployment.
Dickens uses this as an example of Scrooge's miserly inhumanity and lack of charity. The fundraisers visiting him are embodiments of the liberal movement which was just catching on at that time, and Scrooge the symbol of the harsh old system liberalism would eventually do away with. And there's no question that the prisons, almshouses, poorhouses and other 'charitable' institutions of that era were horrible places which we're well rid of. No one has seriously considered returning to that sort of system because of the evil reputation which still lingers from that time, but perhaps it's sensible this Christmas season to look at the possibilities of a reinvention of the concept of the Victorian workhouse for the modern era.
Workhouses were the Victorian way of dealing with the poor, homeless and unemployed. Their equivalent of today's guys on street corners with signs saying "will work for food". If you were indigent and could not provide for yourself or get a job, you were taken care of by state-sponsored charities. They would clothe you (in a nice warm wool uniform), feed you three meals a day, and house you (in dormitories segregated by age and gender). 
To cover the expense of these services you were put to work in a Workhouse doing relatively unskilled and not terribly physical labor - basically the kind of work we're farming out to 12 year olds in Indonesia and Malaysia today. Under this system there was no tax burden for welfare, no problem with unemployment and no one starving or wandering homeless in the streets.
On paper it looks like a fantastic solution to the problems of social welfare. The catch was in the way that the system was administered. Because the standards set for workhouses were very basic and government oversight was minimal, they were a way for operators to take both government money and money earned from the labor of the workers and pocket as much of it as they could skim. By providing bare minimum sustenance and shelter and working the laborers as hard as possible there was real money to be made by those at the top. These abuses could have easily been resolved by a relatively modest increase in government oversight and enforcement, but by the time the government in England was willing to address these issues the system had already gotten such a bad reputation that they ended up doing away with it instead, and because of that reputation no one has been willing to look at the concept or anything even vaguely similar for more than a century.
Article comments
1 - Fan of Gonzo
Hey, Gonzo Marx is right, this article is more relevant today than ever before. A real, humane solution to poverty and homelessness!
FOG
2 - Dave Nalle
Relevant in August and even more relevant today when it's a year old and still just as valid for this holiday season as it was for the last.
I actually went to a performance of Oliver today at a local theater and it reminded me of this article during the scene in the foundling home and with the street arabs working for Fagin.
The problems of poverty were so much greater in Dickens England than they were today, yet they managed to find solutions which required minimal government intrusion and were potentially humane - had they been managed less corruptly.
It may seem backwards, but perhaps we could learn something from that past culture.
Dave
3 - Christopher Rose
There's also the issue that most people simply wouldn't co-operate with such a scheme, especially in such an excessively individualised country as the USA. I doubt that would even work in Europe, Dave, where we still generally believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual.
4 - Dave Nalle
And I agree with the rights of the individual being paramount in a free society, but the workhouse concept can work within that context, if as I suggest in the article, participation is on an at will basis. You would always have the option to leave the system, receive no public assistance and sink or swim on your own.
Dave
5 - gonzo marx
until yer busted for "vagrancy" under your plan, eh Mr Nalle?
as long as Profit is involved for corporate structure you will have abuses....check the history of work programs in our prison system...many instances of abuse...not quite on the Dickensian scale, but still there
there are some possibilities in this Concept, i just cannot see it working as long as Corporate culture is allowed to be in charge...since Profit is their only motivation rather than the welfare of those Involved...far too easy for a "company store" type scam where these poor folks can never get themselves out of Debt to the "system" and essentially become indentured servants to "the Company"
does anyone else but me see the Irony of the same person writing this piece AND the Santa Claus piece at the same time?
could just be me
Excelsior!
6 - Dave Nalle
until yer busted for "vagrancy" under your plan, eh Mr Nalle?
At which point you'd be given three hots and a cot, medical care and a roof over your head for six months 'recovery' which would include drying out and detoxing, after which you'd be free to try again.
as long as Profit is involved for corporate structure you will have abuses....check the history of work programs in our prison system...many instances of abuse...not quite on the Dickensian scale, but still there
I'm certainly no fan of private prison management, which has a dismal record, but private charities have a much better record, and they'd be in the lead role here.
there are some possibilities in this Concept, i just cannot see it working as long as Corporate culture is allowed to be in charge...since Profit is their only motivation rather than the welfare of those Involved...far too easy for a "company store" type scam where these poor folks can never get themselves out of Debt to the "system" and essentially become indentured servants to "the Company"
This is only because you think that businesses are inherently evil, when that's really not the case.
does anyone else but me see the Irony of the same person writing this piece AND the Santa Claus piece at the same time?
You think Santa would not endorse a humane system to provide support for the most needy in society?
Dave
7 - EBANESER SCROOGE
WHEN I WAS BROUGHT HERE EVEERBODY TREATED ME THE WRONG WAY I DON'T MEAN MY MOM I KNOW SHE LOVES ME DARLY BUT WHAT I'PRONOUNCE HUMBUG I NEED E.M TO MEET THERE MATCH
8 - Dr Dreadful
My Dickens must be off. If Ebenezer grew up in the workhouse, then presumably it must have been that Twist fellow who wasn't keen on Christmas.
9 - bliffle
Given the 2009 circumstances, the widespread failures of our leaders and rulers, do we need Workhouses for the rich?
10 - Roger Nowosielski
Siberian labor camps is a much better place.
11 - bliffle
If the purpose of Workhouses is to administer a dose of humility to slackers that, one hopes, will inspire them to go forward and do better, who is more deserving than the rich knaves who precipitated this economic fiasco?
12 - Dave Nalle
Workhouses are for people who have no means of support and need a place to live and 3 square meals. I think that what your class-envy desires for the rich are deathcamps.
Dave
13 - Roger Nowosielski
I don't subscribe to any class envy concept, Dave, nor do I share it. It's foreign to me - as it ought to be to every true-blue American. That's one reason, I maintain, why communist ideology in America is a dead end: we've all bought into the bourgeoise values and those of egalitarianism.
But your anger should be more directed against these greedy bastards rather than the poor.
14 - Mar k
We will (hedge: might well) need 'workhouses' along the line of the CCC before this crisis is over. Dave is the humanist in this case.
As for the other red meat -- the French found the guillotine cathartic.
15 - Roger Nowosielski
I'd like to believe that (about Dave). And it may have to come to that unless we experience a miraculous recovery. The Soviet experiment, though, with forced labor camps for "crimes against society" is more humane and constructive than the Reign of Terror. I sure hope that people like Madoff and Sanford get their proper due.
16 - Dave Nalle
I don't believe I've expressed any anger towards the poor. Read this article. It's really a pretty sensible suggestion on how to handle the poor and unemployed humanely, adapting the victorian idea which was originally quite liberal in intent to the modern context, while addressing the obvious shortcomings.
Dave
17 - Roger Nowosielski
Well, if it's going to be like anything that Mark suggested in #14, approximating CCC, I'd have no problem with it - a kind of halfway house. Except I mightn't go for what was a liberal standard in the Victorian age. I believe we've progressed somewhat since.
18 - Dave Nalle
What you've got to remember about 19th century liberalism is that while their intentions were usually good, their ability to follow through on them sometimes left something to be desired.
In the case of workhouses they went wrong because although they had the right idea by putting them out for private management, there was too little government oversight. We've gotten better at that since then, plus liberal values have permeated the society far more, so that no one is going to let a workhouse run as a business become abusive. Someone in authority will claim oversight and regulatory power and keep things in line.
Dave
19 - bliffle
What silliness has been voiced here since my post #11.
Workhouses for the poor are NOT instituted to help the poor and provide them with 3 hot meals a day and a warm place to sleep. Anyone with an eye in his head can see that everywhere this has been done that the cheap privatizers responsible ALWAYS drive the expenditures down to gruel and a diseased blanket.
Do you really think that Dave Nalle suddenly gives a care about the fortunes of the miserable? How deluded must you be?
Workhouses, which have always been miserable disease-ridden holes within which people die with alarming suddenness, have ALWAYS been with the intention of punishing the poor and unfortunate. "So that they may improve" is always the given excuse.
That's why the poor avoid them like the plague. They are horrible. And there is NO way to improve workhouses. Because at the very center of the whole scheme is not help, but PUNISHMENT. They are invented by punishers, not helpers.
Take a look at the people who advocate workhouses.
So, as I said before, the purpose of workhouses is to improve the 'morals' and behaviour of failed people.
In that case, why not workhouses for the rich failures we find all around us? Perhaps they'll do better in the future.
Isn't that what Mao did with his "8th of May" camps? And didn't it work?