Reinventing the Welfare State. Ursula Huws

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СКАЧАТЬ the protected workforces of developed Western economies were increasingly challenged by the existence of a global reserve army of labour, accessed by transnational employers either by offshoring the work to low-wage economies or by making use of a precarious migrant workforce in their home countries. This created a scattered though interdependent workforce, organised in global value chains, often outside the scope of national citizenship and therefore excluded from welfare coverage or employment protection.

      In this context, strategies to try to restore the post-war employment and welfare model might seem like trying to reassemble a Humpty Dumpty that was specific to its time and place, a Humpty Dumpty that, moreover, while viewed romantically through rose-tinted glasses by those whose lives were formed by it, might actually not even be seen as desirable by younger generations. In proposing to restore it, proponents of this strategy run the risk of being seen as old-fashioned and irrelevant, aligned with rigidity and bureaucracy, and positioned, like King Canute, as trying fruitlessly to stem the inevitable tide of progress and innovation.

      Indeed, most ‘woke’ young people who have grown up in the early twenty-first century would, if transported back to the 1950s, probably feel themselves to be in a restrictive, class-bound, sexist, racist and homophobic hell, as well as lacking in any scope to pursue an interesting or creative career or exercise choice as a consumer. It is hard to imagine anything they would hate more in practice than a return to many of the features of everyday life in the mid twentieth century.

      This book pleads for a different approach. Drawing on extensive research on changes in labour and welfare, it argues that what is needed now is not a nostalgic recreation of the institutional landscape of the post-war welfare state but a return to the principles that inspired it. Having identified these principles, it argues, a hard-headed analysis of the social realities of modern Britain should be carried out in order to see how these principles can best be applied to address the needs of the present population – a population that is very different in many respects from the one that had survived the Second World War, and that brought its memories of the hungry thirties to the ballot box when it voted for Clement Attlee in 1945. The context in which these principles must be applied is one in which work and consumption are increasingly organised in global markets by tax-evading multinational corporations, where digital technologies are used to extract value from a vast range of economic and social activities, where woman are as likely to be involved in paid employment as men, where homelessness and poverty are rife, where an ageing population has increasingly desperate needs for health and social care, and where the shadow of irreversible climate change hangs like a pall over everything.

      In my view it would be a grave mistake to try to turn the clock back. We have a historic opportunity to rethink from first principles what a welfare state fit for the twenty-first century could look like, and we owe it to the victims of neoliberal globalisation to give it our best shot. This demands something that is both more ambitious than attempting to recreate a patched-up version of the third quarter of the twentieth century (viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of the twenty-first), and more focused on the specific issues confronting the working class in a globalised digitalised economy.

      To understand the nature of the challenge it is first necessary to appreciate the immensity of the transformation of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state that has taken place over the last seven decades.

      In this book I first look, in chapter 2, at how the institutions of the welfare state have been transformed by a series of shifts and subterfuges from a means of improving living standards, increasing choice and redistributing wealth more equally across society to mechanisms for redistributing from the poor to the rich. Chapter 3 looks at changes in the labour market and how the twentieth-century standard employment model has been eroded, leading to widespread casualisation and the emergence of new forms of digitally managed precarious work. Chapter 4 outlines the changes that have taken place in the gender division of labour over the same period, thwarting many of the grand aims of 1970s feminism. It shows the way that developments in the welfare system and the labour market have interacted with each other to produce a vicious circle in which time poverty and financial poverty drive each other downward in a never-ending spiral, in ways that are highly detrimental to gender equality as well as to the quality of life, at work and at home.

      The rest of the book looks at ways in which this vicious cycle might be reversed, and how policies can be developed that promote equality, choice and improved work-life balance, while also addressing some of the other major policy challenges facing us – including caring for an ageing population, developing local economies and tackling food and energy waste.

      In chapter 5 I look at the mechanisms of redistribution and the underlying principles that must underpin such policies. I then go on to make some concrete suggestions: for a form of universal basic income that is genuinely redistributive (in chapter 6) and for a new charter of universal rights for workers (in chapter 7).

      In conclusion, the book looks at the services that the welfare state provides, or should provide, to make these redistributive and egalitarian goals a reality. It focuses in particular on services which have the potential to be delivered via digital platforms, such as those involving transport, food delivery and the matching of supply and demand between workers and clients in services such as childcare and social care. It extends its scope beyond the services that have traditionally been delivered by the state to explore others, such as food distribution, that, if brought within the scope of democratic control, could contribute more broadly to the public good, creating decent jobs and improving work-life balance for both women and men, while also addressing some of the major environmental challenges facing us.

      The book does not propose dogmatic solutions in relation to the scope of such services or how they should be organised. Rather it suggests a variety of different possible ways of delivering them, for example by integrated them into existing institutions or setting them up as partnerships, social enterprises or co-operatives, with the aim of encouraging a bottom-up approach at local level rooted in collaboration among a wide range of different social actors.

      CHAPTER TWO

       What Has Happened to the Twentieth-century Welfare State?

      For those who did not live through it, and even among some who did, there is a real danger of romanticising life in Britain during the period following the Second World War. In reality, it had many downsides. It was pretty hellish if, for example, you were black, or gay or unfortunate enough to get pregnant without being married. Although new opportunities were undoubtedly opened up for some, working-class kids who got scholarships to university or women who aspired to be taken seriously as intellectuals often faced condescension and ridicule. Indeed, it was a reaction to such strait-jacketed constraint and bigotry that produced the social movements of the 1960s – for women’s liberation, for civil rights, for gay rights, for a democratisation of universities – led by the first generation of products of this post-war welfare state.

      THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY WELFARE STATE: A CLUSTER OF CONTRADICTIONS

      In retrospect, many of the demands raised by the radical ’60s generation that made their way onto political platforms in the 1970s have been collapsed by idealistic thinkers on the left into a fuzzy unity with those of the 1940s and 1950s – a sort of composite idea of the good old days before neoliberalism, when a post-Keynesian welfare state is presumed to have constituted an agreed consensus of minimum standards, upon which further progress СКАЧАТЬ