Structural, organizational, and technological changes in British industryduring the interwar years led to a decline in skilled and physicallydemanding work, while there was a dramatic expansion in unskilled andsemiskilled employment. Previous authors have noted that the newun/semiskilled jobs were generally filled by “fresh” workersrecruited from outside the core manufacturing workforce, though there isconsiderable disagreement regarding the composition of this newworkforce. This paper examines labour recruitment patterns and strategiesusing national data and case studies of eight rapidly expanding industrialcentres. The new industrial workforce is shown to have been recruited froma “reserve army” of workers with the common features of relativecheapness, flexibility, and weak unionization. These included women,juveniles, local workers in poorly paid nonindustrial sectors, such asagriculture, and (where these other categories were in short supply)relatively young long-distance internal migrants from declining industrialareas.