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Are living wages an unaffordable and unwieldy aspiration or a key progressive reform? Demands for fair minimum incomes have dominated national debates amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This topical book addresses the rapidly shifting politics of minimum wages in US, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Australia, where workfare has compelled many to find low-income work and where neoliberal thinking about minimum wages has prevailed. Analysing minimum wage policies within a political-economy narrative, this innovative book offers an alternative to the Basic Income narrative and identifies the success of Living Wage campaigns as central to welfare state change.
Waltman provides a detailed background for debates on welfare, workfare, and the "living wage." Reviews U.S. policy and demonstrates why early advocates of the welfare state wanted a living wage, why it has failed, and how it could be an essential element in providing economic justice and contributing to the prosperity of all. Also explains the difference between a minimum and a living wage and a fair and a just wage.causes and issues of poverty and inequality.
Wage setting has historically been a deeply political and cultural as well as economic process. This informative and accessible book explores how US wage regulations in the twentieth century took gender, race-ethnicity and class into account. Focusing on social reform movements for living wages and equal wages, it offers an interdisciplinary account of how women's work and the remuneration for that work has changed along with the massive transformations in the economy and family structures. The controversial issue of establishing living wages for all workers makes this book both a timely and indispensable contribution to this wide ranging debate, and it will surely become required reading for anyone with an interest in modern economic issues.
Taps into the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered in the Women's Employment Study (WES), offering insights into the lives of women in an urban Michigan county who left welfare for work and the role their family decisions play in their labor market decisions. Describes the day-to-day struggles these women face and the reasons they tend to remain in low-wage, dead-end jobs.
This volume analyses poverty and welfare reform within a context of low-wage work and the contours of the labour market that welfare recipients are entering. It aims to bring labour into the discussion of welfare reform and creates a bridge between the domains of labour and welfare.
This book examines the movement for living wages at the local level and what it tells us about urban politics. Oren M. Levin-Waldman studies the role that living wage campaigns may have had in recent years in altering the political landscape in four cities where they have been adopted: Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and New Orleans. It is the author's belief that the living wage movements are a result of policy failure at the local level. They are the by-product of the failure to adequately address the changes that were occurring, mainly the changing urban economic base and growing income inequality. The author undertakes a scholarly analysis of the issue through the disciplinary lenses of political science while also employing some of the economists' tools.
Entering the vigorous debate about the nature of the American welfare state, The Wages of Motherhood illuminates ways in which a "maternalist" social policy emerged from the crucible of gender and racial politics between the world wars. Gwendolyn Mink here examines the cultural dynamics of maternalist social policy, which have often been overlooked by institutional and class analyses of the welfare state. Mink maintains that the movement for welfare provisions, while resulting in important gains, reinforced existing patterns of gender and racial inequality. She explores how AngloAmerican women reformers, as they gained increasing political recognition, promoted an ideology of domesticity that became the core of maternalist social policy. Focusing on reformers such as Jane Addams, Grace Abbott, Katherine Lenroot, and Frances Perkins, Mink shows how they helped shape a social policy premised on moral character and cultural conformity rather than universal entitlement. According to Mink, commitments to a gendered and racialized ideology of virtuous citizenship led women's reform organizations in the United States to support welfare policies that were designed to uplift and regulate motherhood and thus to reform the cultural character of citizens. The upshot was a welfare agenda that linked maternity with dependency, poverty with cultural weakness, and need with moral failing. Relegating poor women and racial minorities to dependent status, maternalist policy had the effect of stengthening ideological and institutional forms of subordination. In Mink's view, the legacy of this benevolent--and invidious--policy contimies to inflect thinking about welfare reform today.
Imagine that the United States were to scrap all its income transfer programs—including Social Security, Medicare, and all forms of welfare—and give every American age twenty-one and older $10,000 a year for life.This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. First laid out by Charles Murray a decade ago, the updated edition reflects economic developments since that time. Murray, who previous books include Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, demonstrates that the Plan is financially feasible and the uses detailed analysis to argue that many goals of the welfare state—elimination of poverty, comfortable retirement for everyone, universal access to healthcare—would be better served under the Plan than under the current system. Murray’s goal, shared by Left and Right, is a society in which everyone, including the unluckiest among us, has the opportunity and means to construct a satisfying life. In Our Hands offers a rich and startling new way to think about how that goal might be achieved.
Since 1993, crime in the United States has fallen to historic lows, seeming to legitimize the country’s mix of welfare reform and mass incarceration. The Upper Limit explains how this unusual mix came about, examining how, beginning in the 1970s, declining living standards for the poor have defined social and penal policy in the United States, making welfare more restrictive and punishment harsher. François Bonnet shows how low-wage work sets the upper limit of social and penal policy, where welfare must be less attractive than low-wage work and criminal life must be less attractive than welfare. In essence, the living standards of the lowest class of workers in a society determine the upper limit for the generosity of welfare and for the humanity of punishment in that society. The Upper Limit explores the local consequences of this punitive adjustment in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood where crime fell in the 1990s. Bonnet argues that no meaningful penal reform can happen unless living standards and the minimum wage rise again. Enlightening and provocative, The Upper Limit provides a comprehensive theory of the evolution of social and penal policy.