Abstract

"Organized Labour and Industrial Life Insurance Agents in Britain, 1919-1939"

Heather Welland, SUNY Binghamton (hwelland@binghamton.edu)

This paper examines the labour disputes of industrial life insurance agents in Britain, particularly after 1919, when the National Amalgamated Union of Life Insurance Workers created an umbrella organization for existing insurance workers’ associations. Industrial life insurance was the contemporary term for “penny policies,” or life policies under £20. It had long been marketed as a private good that secured the public interest: a form of savings culture that kept working-class families working, and prevented their dependence on charitable institutions or the state. Industrial life insurance agents, embedded in the communities they sold to, operated at this intersection of private and public. This paper explores how they - and their employers – exploited this unique role during a period of broader labour unrest in Britain, when the relationship between public and private interest was complicated by organized labour and “collective interest.” When Pearl Assurance Company agents went on strike in 1920, for example, the company insisted they were safeguarding the public interest, refusing to raise wages if it meant raising customers’ premiums. And over the next two decades, industrial agents would use collective bargaining to try and protect private ownership of their collecting books, which represented the valuable relationships they forged with their clients. While insurance companies claimed these books as company property, agents defended a personal, portable “interest in books,” which they could take with them to another company or sell to other agents. Ultimately, these disputes worked to obscure real questions (questions central to this panel) about whether the social profit of industrial life insurance justified and legitimated its immense profitability as a business.