Living Wages And The Welfare State

Are living wages an unaffordable and unwieldy aspiration or a key progressive reform? Demands for fair minimum incomes have dominated national debates amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This topical book addresses the rapidly shifting politics of minimum wages in US, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Australia, where workfare has compelled many to find low-income work and where neoliberal thinking about minimum wages has prevailed. Analysing minimum wage policies within a political-economy narrative, this innovative book offers an alternative to the Basic Income narrative and identifies the success of Living Wage campaigns as central to welfare state change.

Waltman provides a detailed background for debates on welfare, workfare, and the "living wage." Reviews U.S. policy and demonstrates why early advocates of the welfare state wanted a living wage, why it has failed, and how it could be an essential element in providing economic justice and contributing to the prosperity of all. Also explains the difference between a minimum and a living wage and a fair and a just wage.causes and issues of poverty and inequality.

A range of different proposals were widely canvassed during the war years - the selection here is intended to resurrect a number of those that have subsequently dropped out of circulation but were influential in the climate of the times. A final section covers a number of early assessments of the implications of the introduction of welfare state legislation. Although the implementation of the welfare programme was in effect a bipartisan process it did not take long for doubts to be expressed. Some were directed at the principles on which the welfare state was being constructed. The collection closes with the discovery that poverty, whose banishment was a key objective of the whole enterprise, was still very much present.

Too many of the world’s citizens face impoverished living standards. The economic and financial crises have made matters worse. The viewpoint of Living Standards and Social Well-Being is that the fundamental objective for an economy is provisioning, not simply efficiency. The chapters in this volume examine how economies across the globe come to understand what constitutes a living and how they can improve living standards, including balancing paid work with family life and civic responsibility. The authors provide historical, theoretical, and empirical studies of moving economies at the macro level and households at the micro level toward improved living standards. It is argued that achieving well-being and decent living standards, through work and welfare state policies, is a social responsibility. Such improvements could be delivered through basic income policies, family support, job guarantees, decent work, shorter work weeks, and support from social welfare. These issues are important for economics and the other social sciences and in particular for social economics. This book was published as a special issue of the Review of Social Economy.

Leading scholars in the field examine the highly topical issue of the future of the welfare state in Europe. They argue that welfare states need to adjust, and examine which kind of welfare architecture will further Europe's stated goal of maximum social inclusion and justice. The volume concentrates on four principal social policy domains; the aged and transition to retirement; the welfare issues related to profound changes in working life; the new risks and needs that arise in households and, especially, in child families; and the challenges of creating gender equality. The volume aims to promote a better understanding of the key welfare issues that will have to be faced in the coming decades. It also warns against the all-too-frequent recourse to patent policy solutions that have all to often characterized contemporary debate. It intends to move the policy debate from it often frustrating vague and generic level towards greater specificity and nuance.

A comparative analysis of social policies in Britain and France between 1914 and 1945.

In a forward looking appraisal of the welfare state, Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State examines such issues as: *the current dynamics of poverty in Britain, drawing on similar developments in Europe and the US *the major areas of social policy within which this abandonment and demonisation of the poor is taking place *the historical antecendents to this relationship between the state and the poor *the creation and expansion of a 'welfare' state that characterised the era of social democracy until the mid-1970s and from the point of view of the poor, was limited and conditional *the ideology and organisation of the New Right *the new terrain on which the struggle over the future of welfare and social policy must take place.