Abstract
The years immediately preceding the First World War were marked by significant industrial unrest with 40.9 million working days lost through strikes in 1912 alone and trade union membership increasing to over four million by 1914. A harmonious relationship between labour and capital was thus a major aim of post-war social reconstruction. Reformers and trade unions demanded shorter hours and a more equal distribution of leisure, both being resisted by employers. However, new Home Office guidelines on factory welfare revived interest in the socialization of workers in factory-based leisure communities. Leisure became an important non-statutory component of welfare as a field for the creation of a social community out of the economic community of the workplace. Although employers construed the leisure of their welfare schemes as an economic and a social good, critics argued it to be a distraction from low wages and trade union activity. However, the welfare provision of leisure could also be interpreted as a moral act; Alfred Zimmern, for example, who had worked in the Ministry of Reconstruction, believed it countered the dehumanization of factory work and Delisle Burns, reflecting the progressive liberal view that the factory was a social institution bound to the common good, suggested welfare could be both economically desirable and a moral good. After the War, as scientific management and industrial psychology devised schemes to bind employees to the corporate identity of the firm, welfare was decreasingly an expression of the paternalism of an individual factory owner. The provision of work-based leisure schemes was voluntary as, in most cases, was the worker’s decision to join them.