Wednesday 12 February 2020

Business, labour and the costs of welfare state development

an article by Dennie Oude Nijhuis (Leiden University, The Netherlands) published in Journal of European Social Policy Volume 20 Issue 1 (February 2020)

Abstract

This article presents a novel explanation for instances of business support for welfare state expansion. It emphasises 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.

Full text (PDF 14pp)

Labels:
business, distribution, labour_unions, social_wage, wage_bargaining, welfare_state,


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