Business, labour and the costs of welfare state development

This article presents a novel explanation for instances of business support for welfare state expansion. It emphasizes the importance of cost considerations in shaping business preferences and argues that their willingness to support and ability to oppose demands for increases in the generosity of social insurance programmes depends primarily on the extent to which labour unions accept that these increases are to be financed by workers themselves. Based on a comparative-historical analysis of postwar welfare state development in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the article shows that this willingness among others depended on the type of labour market risk, the margin for pay increases, and the extent to which social welfare initiatives were perceived as actual improvements to the social wage by labour unions.History and International Relation

Low Pay, Wage Relativities, and Labour’s First Attempt to Introduce a Statutory National Minimum Wage in the United Kingdom

 This article highlights the distributive considerations behind the longstanding opposition of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) to the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage in the United Kingdom. Possibly because of its strong preoccupation with class divisions, the existing literature on labor market development has failed to fully recognize the importance of these considerations in shaping the TUC’s longstanding opposition to statutory intervention to assist the low paid in the United Kingdom. In much of this literature, it is argued that this opposition mainly resulted from union fears that statutory intervention would undermine their function and with that their ability to attract union members. This article casts doubts on the importance of this. The analysis shows that Britain’s occupationally organized labor unions consistently opposed any measure that would reduce the wage advantage of their members over lower paid workers, and illustrates how this mattered to the persistence of poverty in employment and the failure of postwar attempts to improve matters for the lowest paid in the United Kingdom.History and International Relation

Incomes Policies, Welfare State Develoment, and the Notion of the Social Wage

Political economists have long argued that the success of post-war incomes policies rests on national systems of political exchange under which governments used welfare benefits to compensate labor unions for delivering wage restraint. This article shows why this view is problematic. It argues that national incomes policies generally arose under economic circumstances that left little room for welfare state expansion and instead often forced governments to embark on austerity measures. Based on an analysis of British and Dutch efforts to set up incomes policies and expand the boundaries of the welfare state, the article further argues that post-war wage settlements under which labor unions moderated their wage demands (or better, reserved part of the margin for pay increases) to finance welfare state expansion typically had little to do with government attempts to obtain union support for incomes policies. Instead, they depended on organized labor's willingness to accept that public welfare improvements added to the social wage and were therefore at least partially to be financed by workers themselves.Cities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

Labor Divisions and the Emergence of Dual Welfare Systems

 This article illustrates the possibility of consistent labor union opposition to redistributive welfare state expansion, and demonstrates its importance for the postwar emergence of so-called dual welfare systems. In recent years, scholars have paid much attention to the postwar welfare trajectories of countries where social policies came to stratify rather than reduce social inequalities. Yet they have paid little attention to the importance of organizational divisions among workers for this. Despite recent criticisms of traditional class-based views of postwar welfare state expansion, much of the welfare state literature continues to view organized labor’s involvement in this through a perspective that assumes labor unity and support for this expansion. This article illustrates why this is problematic. It does so by reexamining and highlighting organized labor’s role in the postwar emergence and persistence of the “social division of welfare” in the United Kingdom.Cities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

Efficiency, social inclusion, and the Dutch pathway towards vocational education and training reform

Cities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

The TUC and the Failure of Labour's Postwar Redistributive Agenda

 This article illustrates the crucial role played by the TUC and its occupationally organized affiliates in the failure of Labour’s postwar social agenda. It has been widely recognized that Labour’s inability to improve the social insurance system and construct an effective floor under wages during the first decades of the postwar period was of crucial importance to the continual underdevelopment of the British welfare state and the emergence of a dual welfare system in the United Kingdom. Yet that Labour’s inability to do so was to a large extent the result of union opposition has largely been neglected. This article shows that Labour’s postwar social agenda had strong consequences for the distribution of earnings among different groups of workers, and that these consequences were fiercely resisted by unions representing privileged workers. In doing so, it illustrates the limited political feasibility of government measures that aim to provide adequate earnings and security against labor market risks for all workers in countries where privileged workers largely organize along occupational lines.Cities, Migration and Global Interdependenc

Labor divided. Union structure and the development of the postwar welfare state in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom

This book compares the process of postwar welfare state development in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom by analyzing the role of the labor union movement in the creation and expansion of social policies. It argues for a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of organized labor in welfare state development. It emphasizes that welfare state development is mainly about redistribution of income and risk within the worker category. Based on this premises, the book has set out to understand under what circumstances unions are willing to redistribute income and risk among workers. It argues that this depends foremost on their organizational blueprint.</p

Christian democracy, labor, and the postwar politics of solidaristic welfare reform

Cities, Migration and Global InterdependenceHistory and International Relation

Middle-class interests, redistribution and the postwar success and failure of the solidaristic welfare state

Cities, Migration and Global InterdependenceHistory and International Relation

Explaining Post-war Wage Compression

One of the main problems confronting labor unions during wagebargaining is how to deal with the conflicting demands of differentgroups of workers over the division of labor market earnings. Thisarticle explains how their internal organizational blueprint determineshow they deal with this and criticizes the scholarly preoccupationwith union density and wage bargaining centralization as explanatoryvariables for cross-national and temporal variation in wage inequality.It does so based on a critical analysis of collective bargaining in theNetherlands and the United Kingdom during the first four decadesof the postwar period.History and International Relation