Unemployment Insurance

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Nackerud
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Unemployment Insurance ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Federal State ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Insurance Program ◽  
Old Age Assistance ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
Critical Coverage

In response to massive unemployment, in 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt charged members of the Committee on Economic Security to create a “cradle to grave” social-security system. The resultant Social Security Act of 1935 had the Unemployment Insurance (UE) program as its cornerstone. While Congress and the general public were more interested in old-age assistance, members of the Committee on Economic Security and their staff felt the Unemployment Insurance program was the most important element of the entire legislation. The program was designed to address unemployment caused by economic conditions and to regulate industrial employment. The Unemployment Insurance program, a federal–state partnership, has a number of critical coverage criteria. The importance of the Unemployment Insurance program and the complexity of interpreting both federal and state laws cannot be overstated.

The Social Security Program of the United States

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Social Security Program ◽  
Unemployment Compensation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Old Age Assistance ◽  
State Unemployment

The Federal Social Security Act, which may be regarded as the central core of the social security program, is an omnibus act, containing the following features: (1) a national, compulsory oldage insurance plan, covering all employees except certain exempted groups; (2) two measures designed to stimulate the states to enact state unemployment compensation laws, namely, (a) a uniform nation-wide tax upon employers, against which a credit is allowable for contributions made to approved state unemployment compensation plans, and (b) subsidies to the states to cover the administrative costs of unemployment compensation; and (3) grants-in-aid to the states for old-age assistance, pensions for the blind, aid to dependent children, child welfare, maternal and child health, vocational rehabilitation, and public health activities. It is estimated that each of the two forms of social insurance will apply to about 25,000,000 wage-earners, and, when the maximum rates become effective in 1949, will involve annual contributions of nearly $3,000,000,000. This amount is approximately equal to the normal annual expenditure of the federal government prior to 1930. In addition, the grants-in-aid to the states were estimated by the actuaries of the President's Committee on Economic Security to reach a total of a half-billion dollars annually within a few years.History of the Federal ActWhen, in a message to Congress on June 8, 1934, the President indicated that he would submit a program of social insurance for consideration at the following session, the Wagner-Lewis unemployment insurance bill and the Dill-Connery old-age assistance bill were pending. Shortly afterwards, the President, by executive order, created the Committee on Economic Security, consisting of the Secretaries of Labor (chairman), Treasury, and Agriculture, the Attorney-General, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administrator. This committee appointed Professor Edwin E. Witte, of the University of Wisconsin, as executive director, and proceeded to build up a staff of actuaries and experts to study the whole problem of economic insecurity, and to prepare recommendations.

A New Deal for the Alien

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cybelle Fox
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Assistance Programs ◽  
Aid To Dependent Children ◽  
The Social ◽  
Disparate Treatment ◽  
Old Age Assistance ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
European Immigrants

This chapter focuses on the Social Security Act and the disparate treatment of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the administration of Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, and Old Age Assistance. Though framed as legislation that would help the “average citizen,” scholars have shown that the Social Security Act in fact excluded the vast majority of blacks from the most generous social insurance programs, relegating them to meager, decentralized, and demeaning means-tested programs. European immigrants, by contrast, benefited from many of the provisions of the Social Security Act, and in at least some respects, they benefited more than even native-born whites. The net result of these policies was that blacks were disproportionately shunted into categorical assistance programs with low benefit levels, European immigrants were disproportionately covered under social insurance regardless of citizenship, and Mexicans were often shut out altogether.

Constructive Welfare: The Social Security Act, the Blind, and the Origins of Political Identity among People with Disabilities, 1935–1950

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-138
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Erkulwater
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Social Security Administration ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
The 1960S

In contemporary America, identifying as a person with a disability is one of the many ways in which people acknowledge, even celebrate, who they are. Yet several decades ago, few persons with disabilities saw their condition as an identity to be embraced, let alone to serve as the basis for affinity and collective mobilization. The transformation of disability from unmitigated tragedy to a collective and politicized identity emerged in national politics, not in the 1960s or 1970s, as is commonly thought, but in the 1940s. During those years, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) set out to galvanize the nation's blind men and women, most of them poor and unemployed, to demand the economic security and opportunity enjoyed by sighted Americans. This aspiration for equal citizenship led the NFB into protracted contests with the Social Security Administration (SSA) over aid to the poor and sharpened the organization's resolve to represent the nation's civilian blind. Long before disability rights activists declared “nothing about us, without us,” the NFB insisted that only the blind, not sighted social workers or experts in blindness, were entitled to speak on behalf of the blind. Pioneering an organizing strategy and a critique of American liberalism later embraced by activists of the Left, the NFB rose to become one of the most effective civil rights and antipoverty organizations of its time. Today, however, its story has been largely forgotten.

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