Reinventing the Welfare State

Digital Platforms and Public Policies

Ursula Huws

• Éditeur: Pluto Press
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786807090
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Economics
• Sous-sujet: Economic Theory

The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically exposed how today's welfare state cannot properly protect its citizens. Despite the valiant efforts of public sector workers, from under-resourced hospitals to a shortage of housing and affordable social care, the pandemic has shown how decades of neglect has caused hundreds to die. In this bold new book, leading policy analyst Ursula Huws shows how we can create a welfare state that is fair, affordable, and offers security for all.

Huws focuses on some of the key issues of our time – the gig economy, universal, free healthcare, and social care, to criticize the current state of welfare provision. Drawing on a lifetime of research on these topics, she clearly explains why we need to radically rethink how it could change. With positivity and rigor, she proposes new and original policy ideas, including critical discussions of Universal Basic Income and new legislation for universal workers' rights.

She also outlines a 'digital welfare state' for the 21st century. This would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Since 2016, worrying fissures have opened within the British working class and among the political parties that purport to represent its interests. Many have responded to this situation by retreating into polarised positions or succumbing to deep and paralysing forms of depression that render them despairing or inactive. This book is written to try to counter such reactions, in the belief that, despite these painful divisions, there is much more that unites people than divides them. Above all, and against some of the evidence from the 2019 general election, it seems to me that among the British people there is a deep hunger, across a wide political spectrum, for a welfare state that genuinely cares for its citizens, in all their diversity, from cradle to grave. New evidence for this hunger has emerged during the coronavirus crisis, although as I write it is still too early to tell where this will lead. Despite the many temptations to scapegoat others for the deficiencies of the existing welfare state, or to give in to defeatism, I believe that there are large numbers of principled people out there with the courage and fundamental decency to set aside their differences and campaign to bring a better welfare state into being. I write, therefore, from a position of optimism, offering this book as a constructive contribution to the development of a manifesto for hope and a collaborative form of politics that can build an alternative future. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to provide them with an economic and social environment in which they do not have to pour their energies into scrabbling to survive but can live decent and fulfilling lives and focus their energies on tackling the huge challenges facing the planet. Let’s give it our best shot.

It is clear that the welfare state we have in the UK is no longer fit for purpose. But what can be done about this? This is one of the greatest challenges facing us as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. Do we try to recreate the cosy world of the mid twentieth century, or do we need to design something new, for a digital, global era?

The mid twentieth-century welfare state plays a powerful role in the socialist imaginary. It not only provides the ancestry of many of our present institutions, creaking though some of them may be, but also represents an aspirational model. In Europe, especially, it is still regarded by many as the norm by which decency is measured, promising security, social solidarity, cradle-to-grave protection against penury, equality of opportunity and a vision of progress.

When asked what a ‘proper job’ looks like, most people would still point to the model, established after the Second World War, at least for a privileged minority, of full-time, permanent employment with regular working hours, with the risks of illness, disability or unemployment covered by national insurance, and a pension waiting at the end to provide for a happy retirement. Similarly, there is still widespread support for the idea that a decent society is one that provides enough shelter to ensure that nobody has to sleep on the street, and a welfare safety net that prevents starvation.

Many would still agree with Beveridge’s memorable aim of eliminating the five ‘giant evils’ of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. It was in this spirit that the post-war Attlee government gave us several of the foundational features of what most British people still regard as normative social rights: universal healthcare, universal secondary education and a national insurance system providing universal pensions, child benefit and freedom from destitution via a social safety net.

The generations brought up in the embrace of this welfare state, or at least the socialists among them, have watched its slow unravelling over the last four decades with horror, putting their political energies into trying to preserve what they can of it – demanding the renationalisation of what has been privatised, the re-regulation of what has been deregulated and the reinstatement of budgets that have been cut. They demand, in other words, a solution that appears to many to be a turning back of the clock. Existing government institutions are often such a taken-for-granted feature of the social landscape that it can be difficult for people of this baby-boomer generation to separate the specific features of those institutions from the social goals that inspired their design. Their experience of trying to defend these twentieth-century bodies during the long hard years between the rise of neoliberalism at the end of the 1970s and the financial crisis of 2008 has made them deeply suspicious of reform. But this may also have made it difficult for them to comprehend the extent to which a gap has grown up between those original social goals and the way these institutions now function. And perhaps these very experiences may have desensitised them to the views of younger generations, who have only ever seen the welfare state through the prism of neoliberalism.

For anybody who entered the labour market after 1990, the post-war world of work – dominated by male breadwinners in full-time permanent employment supporting dependent families – is almost inconceivable. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the symbolic establishment of a new international division of labour in which 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 could be built. Such a view glosses over the extent to which the third quarter of the twentieth century was marked by internal tensions and contradictions, some of which harked back to older tensions within the volatile assemblage of ad-hoc coalitions that has made up the British labour movement over its long and turbulent history.

One example is the tension between those, represented in the nineteenth century by followers of Ruskin and William Morris, who thought work should be meaningful and socially productive, and those whose goal was to put in the fewest possible working hours for the greatest possible reward – debates which resurfaced in the 1970s in discussions about Workers’ Alternative Plans and the Institute for Workers’ Control.

That is only one example. Many other tensions can be identified relating to other issues. Take, for example, the debates about women’s reproductive labour among second-wave feminists in the 1970s: Should domestic labour be socialised? Should there be ‘wages for housework’? Or should we rely on social pressure for men to do their share of unpaid work in the home?

Similarly, there were fierce disagreements about nationalisation and the position of workers employed by the state or in nationalised industries. Should they be regarded simply as members of the working class, who should negotiate with their employers in exactly the same way as those who worked for private companies? Or did they occupy a special position in providing services to citizens not for profit but for what Marxists called the ‘use value’ of these services?¹

Such examples could be multiplied. The deeper one looked at how the welfare state functioned, the more contradictions emerged and the more challenging it became to imagine solutions that could create a successful balance between democracy and efficiency.

POST-WAR CIRCUMSTANCES FORGED UNUSUAL SOLIDARITIES

The British welfare state was forged in very special circumstances. A population with vivid memories of the horrors of the 1930s depression and the risks and deprivations and losses of the war had got used to centralised planning and rationing. A capitalist class still largely made up of nationally based companies was unusu...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What Has Happened to the Twentieth-century Welfare State?
• 3 What Has Happened in the Labour Market?
• 4 What Has Happened to Gender Equality?
• 5 Recalibrating the Mechanisms of Redistribution
• 6 A Universal Basic Income that is Genuinely Redistributive
• 7 A New Deal for Labour
• 8 Digital Platforms for Public Good
• 9 The Way Forward
• Notes
• Index