Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power, Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Swenson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Industrial Societies

Current wisdom about the American welfare state's laggard status among advanced industrial societies, by attributing it to the weakness of the Left and organized labor, poses a historical puzzle. In the 1930s, the United States experienced a dramatically progressive turn in social policy-making. New Deal Democrats, dependent on financing from capitalists, passed landmark social insurance reforms without backing from a well-organized and electorally successful labor movement like those in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Sweden, by contrast, with the world's strongest Social Democratic labor movement, did not pass important social insurance legislation until the following two decades.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Non Union

The metal miners of the Tri-State district (Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma) opposed social democratic unions and government regulation for nearly a century. Historians of organized labor in the United States have neglected workers like these, opting instead to focus on workers who joined unions. This introduction outlines how this study of the non-union and anti-union miners of the Tri-State district changes the field of labor history. The story of the Tri-State miners shows how some American workers rejected the protections of working-class solidarity because they inherited and embraced a faith in capitalism, white supremacy, and aggressive masculinity.

Who Voted with Hopkins? Institutional Politics and the WPA

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Amenta ◽  
Drew Halfmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Political Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Institutional Politics ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
State Organizations

Scholars of the politics of public social policy have engaged in contentious debates over “institutional” and “political” theories. Institutional theories hold that U.S. social policy is inhibited by fragmented political institutions and weak executive state organizations. Political theories hold that the United States lacks a left-wing political party and a strong labor movement to push for social policy. Both theories are thus pessimistic about and cannot account for advances in U.S. social policy.

Organized Labor and the Invention of Modern Liberalism in the United States

1987 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 317-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Orren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
American Strain ◽  
Comparative Treatment ◽  
American Labor Movement ◽  
American Labor

There is perhaps no political topic that has been given such relentlessly comparative treatment as the American labor movement. It is rare to read any comprehensive political or historical study of organized labor that is not cast, implicitly or explicitly, against the greater class consciousness of European counterparts. The explanations advanced for the uniqueness or the lack of vigor in the American strain—abundance of land, immigration, early suffrage, a revolutionary heritage of “republicanism”—constitute most of what exists in the way of theories about American labor politics.

Caritina M. Piña and Anarcho-syndicalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 136-152
Author(s):  
Sonia Hernández
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Free Thought

This chapter explores the role of women, such as Caritina Piña, who lived in the United States borderlands and figured prominently in the leadership of the Tampico labor movement. Piña’s vision underscored and promoted the well-being of worker activists. Shaped by her position in a new postrevolutionary Mexican world and influenced by the long history of organized labor along the lines of anarcho-syndicalism, Piña helped to both sustain the labor movement by promoting free thought in the anarchist—broadly conceived—tradition. Her unique transborder feminismo not only transcended geopolitical boundaries but consistently invoked the language of worker dignity and the revolutionary family.

The Japanese Labor Movement, 1912–1919: Suzuki Bunji and the Yūaikai

1970 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-579
Author(s):  
Stephen S. Large
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
University Graduates ◽  
Labor Organization ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Institutional Foundations ◽  
At Home

AbstractsThe Yuaikai (Friendly Society) was the only large, national labor organization in 1912–1919 Japan. Its founder, Suzuky Bunji, an intellectual and Christian humanist, believed that cooperation between labor and management was the key to developing the Yuaikai into a true labor union movement in a day when organized labor was held in suspicion. Accordingly, Suzuki organized the Yuaikai workers into potential unions and tried to persuade business and government to accept a moderate union movement. Suzuki's gradualist tactice resulted in expansion of the Yuaikai. By 1917, after two trips to the United States, Suzuki had become the symbol of Japanese organized labor at home and abroad. But Suzuki's moderate approach to reform was jolted by repression of the Yuaikai in 1917–1918 by business and government and his moderate leadership in the Yuaikai was challenged by militant workers who resented intellectual domination of their movement and by radical university graduates who sought to turn the Yuaikai into a revolutionary organization. These two groups conspired to turn the Yuaikai into the relatively militant Sodomei (General Federation) in 1919 and to reduce Suzuki's power in the movement but their revalry for power greatly undermined the capacity of the Sodomei to build further on the institutional foundations laid for organized labor by Suzuki Bunji.

Opening the Window for Reform

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN T. S. KEELER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Socioeconomic Crisis ◽  
The New Deal

Under what conditions are governments within established democratic political systems willing and able to launch ambitious reform programs? In other words, what conjunctural factors generally serve to open the “window” for reform? The central argument of this article is that extraordinary policy-making generally becomes possible only when a macro-window is opened by a government's achievement of an impressive mandate and/or by the onset of a severe socioeconomic crisis. The mandate-reform hypothesis is tested with data from Britain, France, and the United States, then the significance of both mandates and crises is demonstrated through an analysis of eight “reform government” case studies ranging from the New Deal to Thatcher's Britain.

Political Institutions and U.S. Social Policy

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Amenta ◽  
Amber Celina Tierney
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Party System ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Administrative Authority ◽  
Social Insurance System

United States political institutions provide a compelling account of American exceptionalism in social policy: why the United States has a social insurance system that was late to develop and remains incomplete; spends relatively little on direct social policy; and relies on indirect and private social policy that is relatively ineffective in addressing poverty, insecurity, and inequality. Formal political institutions—including the tardiness of universal suffrage, many institutional veto points, federalism, the underdevelopment of domestic administrative authority, and a political party system founded on patronage and skewed to the right—go far to explain the formation of this unusual welfare state. Feedbacks from policies, political institutions themselves, help to explain why a few U.S. social programs, notably Social Security, remain strong, and why the U.S welfare state generally remains mired in the residual liberal model and is subject to drift. Feedbacks related to the world’s most extensive military and imprisonment policies also harm social policy.

Organized Labor and Disability in Post–World War II United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audra Jennings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

Concern for health and safety, along with the desire for higher wages and shorter workdays, inspired and shaped the organized labor movement in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The risks of work-related illness and disability were of grave importance to working people and the unions they formed to represent their interests. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the organized labor movement sought to minimize disability by making workplaces safer and working-class people’s living conditions better. Still, the movement understood disability as a common experience in working people’s lives and thus advocated for disability rights and policies to support disabled citizens’ access to health care, financial security, educational and economic opportunities, and public spaces. The organized labor movement was also an important site of disability activism, as unionized disabled workers pushed for disability rights.

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