8 - The establishment of work–welfare programs in the United States and Britain: Politics, ideas, and institutions

Summary

THE INTEGRATION OF WORK AND WELFARE

In the postwar period both involuntary unemployment and poverty have been judged ills that society no longer wishes to tolerate. One factor shaping this preference for employment is memory of interwar mass unemployment and the resultant social and economic hardship. President Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security, whose report informed the Social Security Act of 1935, advocated federal programs to provide an “assured income” for citizens deprived of earnings from unemployment, old age, fatal injury at work or illness. The Beveridge plan enacted by the 1945–51 Labour administration in Britain was designed to establish basic social rights of citizenship including health care, child allowances, unemployment benefits, and education.

The commitment to relieving poverty and unemployment has been uncontroversial until recently. Since the mid-1970s a combination of economic pressures (principally to reduce government spending and taxes) and political ideas (evolving conceptions about the purpose of welfare policy) have resulted in important debates and reforms in several advanced industrial countries. Two pertinent examples of these trends are the United States and Britain, whose welfare traditions share many features though they differ in important ways. The achievement of the 1980s, and the subject of this chapter, is the reforms to the systems of welfare and unemployment benefits in each country under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, which created work–welfare programs.