In his 1950 treatise on “social citizenship,” the British sociologist T. H. Marshall hoped that the emerging welfare state would not just cushion citizens from the savage cruelties of the market but also guarantee basic economic rights to every member of society. His optimism, at least in the United States, was dashed. Instead, we have ended up with a tangle of means-tested and categorical social policies designed less to shield people from the compulsions of the labor market than to force their participation.
Our most generous social supports — including health insurance, pensions, and paid leave — are offered as “fringe benefits” attached to some jobs. A second tier (including Social Security) structure social insurance benefits around wage-based contributions. And what’s left of direct assistance for the poor increasingly mandates employment — invariably low-wage and highly exploitative.
The “work first” logic of US social policy is animated by the “principle of less eligibility,” a remnant of Elizabethan poor law holding that alternatives to wage labor can never pay more than the leanest and meanest of jobs. And, as scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued in Regulating the Poor (1971), that principle would and could be calibrated to labor market conditions: generous supports to dampen social unrest when labor markets were slack, miserly benefits when workers were needed.
The US deference to markets (and employers) is exacerbated by federalism — the ...
A post claiming to list all the actions taken by the Home Minister in Kashmir in the last 10 days is going viral on social media. The posts list out 18 points, which include claims regarding citiz...