During the Depression Roosevelt tried one economic cure after another--heavy spending, public works, direct relief, the NRA Codes, the Blue Eagle campaigns, regulation of industry, restrictions on spending.
"He understood," Garry Wills noted, "the importance of psychology--the people have to have the courage to keep seeking a cure, no matter what the cure is. Those who wanted ideological consistency or even policy coherence, were rightly exasperated with Roosevelt. He switched economic plans as often as he changed treatments for polio."
And while the New Deal did not overcome the Depression--it took World War II to fully mobilized the economy--the multiplicity of government programs kept the people going, and in the process preserved the system of democracy at a time when so many other countries in similar despair were turning to fascism or communism.
(Character Above All: Franklin D. Roosevelt)

The term New Deal is commonly used in the United States to describe the domestic reform agenda of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Roosevelt first used it in his speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination for President in 1932. The New Deal is generally considered to have consisted of two phases. The first phase occurred from 1933 to 1934 and endeavored to provide recovery and relief from the Great Depression through programs of" agricultural and business regulation, inflation, price stabilization, and public works".

In 1933 Congress held special session to establish several emergency organizations, notably the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration. Congress also established farm relief, stiffened banking and finance regulations, and created the Tennessee Valley Authority.

As these relief and recovery measures to provide got off the ground the second phase of the New Deal was put into motion from1935 to 1941 with social and economic legislation to assist the mass of working people. The first year saw the establishment of the social security system along with the initiation of National Youth Administration and Work Projects Administration. By 1938 the Wages and Hours Act was passed into law.

The speed of reform relaxed by 1937 as Republican opposition emerged from the huge public spending, high taxes, and centralization of power in the executive branch of government;. Among the Democratic party members there was strong condemnation from the "old guard" and from angry members of the Brain Trust.

At the end of World War II, most of the New Deal legislation was still intact and it remains the foundation for American social policy.

Sources:

Character Above All: Franklin D. Roosevelt Essay:
www.pbs.org/newshour/character/essays/roosevelt.html -

New Deal:
www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0835397.html

In a terrific example of no good deed goes unpunished, most of the southern third of the United States hates FDR for these programs, and its legacy.

In my high school this era of American History was described as the socialist period. There are many, many people who still describe FDR as an evil communist and blame him for many of the ills of the country today. The fact that these programs fed large portions of the South for about a five year period, or that it employed large numbers of transient males for almost a decade has been forgotten.

What is not forgotten is the building projects. The TVA, described above, gave electrical power to a large portion of the eastern half of that state, as well as western Virginia and northern Georgia. (They did not yet have it). Many of the public libraries, high school buildings and community centers in small town southern America where built by the WPA during this time period, and most of them have plaques explaining this.

In Britain, the New Deal is New Labour's main scheme for reducing unemployment figures. Perhaps more than any of their other works, it epitomises the New Labour approach: Vaguely well-intentioned, neatly packaged yet ill-defined, bureaucratic, full of buzz words and quite clearly designed to tackle the problem at the symptom level.

After six months on Jobseeker's Allowance - the Tories' replacement for the old Unemployment Benefit, designed to get people off the dole by making their life as unpleasant as possible - an unemployed person qualifies for the New Deal. This has several immediate and less immediate consequences: First of all, you will be assigned a New Deal Personal Adviser. At your first New Deal interview, they will fill in a bunch of forms for you to sign and explain roughly what the New Deal entails: An initial, mandatory two-week course to remind you what a CV is, how to write application letters and so on; a renewed pressure to visit the Job Centre every week and apply for at least two jobs there however inappropriate they may seem; a Jobs Subsidy Voucher to show to potential employers to make sure they know about the £2,310 subsidy they could get from employing someone on New Deal, if they jump through the correct hoops.

Once on New Deal, you also qualify for an extremely useful 'New Deal Travelcard', which entitles you to child-rate fares on almost all public transport in London, and some of the public transport in other parts of the country; most significantly, it also allows you to get half-price tickets on Britain's ludicrously over-priced trains. My impression is that most New Deal Advisors will fail to mention this; it is well worth pulling them up on it if so.

There are various subtly different forms of the New Deal depending on age and so on, each with advantages and disadvantages - New Deal for Young People, New Deal 25+, New Deal 50+. There are also special arrangements for parents, for the disabled, for musicians and probably various other groups of people. My personal experiences of New Deal, and therefore what I write here, obviously reflect my age at the time (24) and location (Holloway).

If you still don't have a job after ten to twelve weeks you qualify for 'New Deal Options', where your 'Options', unsurprisingly perhaps, amount to choosing between three or four things that you probably don't much want to do. Specifically, you can take an NVQ - a National Vocational Qualification - in any of various subjects; or you can enter a 'start your own business' scheme; or you can go and work nine to five in a charity shop until you find something better. I was unable to extract any further options from either my New Deal Adviser or the official New Deal web site, but apparently it is also possible to join something called the Environment Task Force; perhaps there are still other options that they prefer to keep quiet about.

The New Deal Gateway To Work Course

'You've got to get out of this idea that your life is yours to just, you know, enjoy all the time.'

If you can imagine the sort of course they would make people attend after six months on the dole to make them better job seekers, that is exactly what the initial two-week course is like: Shades of the nightmare jobseekers' course from The League of Gentlemen, but less extreme. When I attended, it became clear very quickly that the people running it didn't have anything like two weeks' worth of actual material to deliver, so the days were heavily padded out with frequent fag breaks, 'brainteasers' and 'group exercises'. On the second day, for instance, we were divided into groups and asked to rank fifteen items in terms of their importance for survival in a desert; moderately interesting, but its relevance to finding a job in Britain was not immediately obvious - something to do with team skills, I think.

'Every little step builds confidence. Doesn't it?'

The course was held mainly in an irregularly-shaped room with grubby grey-pink walls featuring inspirational posters proclaiming 'We've been successful - so can you!' with lists of people who had passed through the place and the kinds of success they'd found - junior hair stylist, admin assistant, restaurant attendant and so on. On the first day we were told firmly that we were to be there at 9.30 every day and that '9.30 does not mean 10.30. It does not even mean 9.35.' On the second day, none of the trainers turned up until quarter past ten. I wrote this while I was waiting:

It's 9:45, but the New Deal people haven't come in to start the lesson, or whatever you call it, that officially should have begun quarter of an hour ago.
   People sit doodling, or filling in crosswords, or staring blankly into space, sipping coffee because there is no tea. I'll bring my own tomorrow, if I remember.
   Many of the seats remain unoccupied, and I wonder if this means that people are just too dispirited to turn up, and will lose their benefits as a consequence.

   At five to ten a few more people have filed in. The Ethiopian former policeman has finished his crossword and flips through the sports pages, then he starts doodling too.
   A couple of people strike up conversations about smoking weed, and what we did here yesterday, and what it was like being a raddock in Ethiopia.
   One of the instructors, or whatever they are, comes in, sits down, says a few words to yesterday's lippy latecomer, leaves again.

   The feeling of boredom, remarkably, intensifies. It's not clear why we haven't started yet. Possibly this will make us better job-seekers. About half the people in the room go outside for a fag.

   At quarter past ten one of the women comes in at last, divides us into two groups, and leaves with the other group. A few of the guys left behind chat about what it was like when their women had kids, then the conversation turns to the World Trade Center and suicide bombing.


   Finally she comes in and starts talking about CVs, asks everyone if they have CVs and what they think they're for, before informing us that the purpose of a CV is to get you an interview.
   Then she asks us what we think are the most important things to put on it: Name, address, Qualifications, experience, attributes, interests. That sort of thing. References.
   She writes 'Profile' up on the board and tells us it's the most important part of a CV. She explains that she means an ad-style paragraph summing up your qualifications and so on, and recommends not writing it in the first person.

   I learn that the girl sitting next to me has been told not to do the A Levels she needs to get on a nursing degree, although they would have fallen within the sixteen hour a week limit for education on the dole, and to come here for two weeks instead.

   The impatient guy with the criminal conviction and no intention to look for work and no belief that he could find it if he did ends up leaving; he was sick of the vaguely patronising attitude of the instructor, and she was sick of him making snarky comments.

I don't want to come down too harshly on the course; in all fairness, I expected worse. The advice on CV writing and so on was certainly helpful for many of those attending, and perhaps even me; and the one-day courses on first aid and health and safety at work provided certificates and potentially useful knowledge, some of which may even stick with me. The main problem, besides the course not having enough content to fill its allocated time, is the one size fits all approach. It probably goes without saying that one course is never really going to be a very good fit for everyone when you throw twenty or so of the long-term unemployed together at random, ranging from those who can't get work because of their criminal records, to those who aren't getting work because they're training one day a week as accountants, to those with good degrees trying to break into difficult marketplaces, and so on.

'This guy's got too many interests, he's not gonna have time to work.'

All in all, I am ambivalent about the whole New Deal thing. It has certainly achieved its main aim of reducing unemployment figures, particularly amongst the young; it is hard to gauge to what extent this represents a genuine increase in gainful employment, and how much of it might be down to its effectively massaging the numbers and coercing people into jobs and training programmes which are basically inappropriate. It seems fair to expect, though, that the official figures reflect at least some degree of real improvement over the old system. On paper at least, this looks more or less like a success for New Labour - even if it might not feel like that to very many of the people actively involved with it.

---

Based mainly on personal experiences, with supplemental information from the New Deal web site: http://www.newdeal.gov.uk/

As I am currently (1/6/03) starting my second week of the New Deal Gateway To Work course, I have decided to offer up some information on my own experiences in the hope of helping others out.

As mentioned in another writeup, the New Deal is a scheme introduced by the Labour government of the UK to try and help the long term unemployed. It's just a shame that some of us don't need help, we just need to be left alone. The scheme seems to be aimed at those with very few, if any, qualifications who would like to be a bricklayer but who could probably do any menial, unskilled manual labour going, if only they would sober up once in a while.

One particularly troublesome aspect of the New Deal is the fact that your Jobsearch Advisor will find it much easier to force you to go for jobs that you have no interest in. For example, in a couple of days I will attend an interview for a three month office position, talking to people on the 'phone and entering data into a computer. Six years of education, an Honors Degree in Computing, £12,000 of debt and probably the same again spent simply on living, and they want me to be a data entry clerk. The day after, I'm going for a job as a network technician on twice the pay and with a company car, so obviously I'll be trying hard at the interview to become a data entry clerk. I had better new screw it up too much though, or I'll loose my benefits assuming I don't get the other job.

Another aspect of New Deal is that you are required to attend the Job Centre for an interview once a week, rather than once every two weeks as is normal. This is probably supposed to allow your advisor to nag you a bit more often, in the hopes of making you take any random job they can find and get you off the national statistics. In practice, it can be very depressing, as you seem to be making slower progress than before (due to only being able to read the weekly jobs paper once instead of twice, having less time to look etc) and by making you attend the Pit of Long Term Loosers, er... I mean Job Centre more often.

If you advisor really does start to get to you, remember that you can not only complain but also ask to see someone else.

Just in case your spirit was not already broken, it is mandatory to attend the Gateway to Work course when on New Deal. This has been detailed in another writeup for this node, however I would like to add a few things. The "stuck in a desert" game seems to be fairly universal, it's point apparently being that each item can have many uses, and therefore as a computer programmer you may like to turn your fantastic IT skills to data entry, rather than trying to justify your life so far by getting something that pays a bit more than minimum wage. Sorry, I'm a little disillusioned.

So far, the Gateway to Work course as taught me one thing: that my CV would be better if I removed the paragraph indentation. I feel this is sure to get me a job, although I'm slightly disappointed that the standard of English has fallen so far since I left school.