Towards a Sustainable Welfare State: The Role of Universal Basic Services

The idea of pooling resources and sharing risks to provide universal services according to need not ability to pay was at the heart of the post-war settlement. However, decades of market ideology and deep spending cuts have left most services starved of power and resources. Universal Basic Services (UBS) offers a principled framework for policy and practice that aims to ensure everyone has access to life’s essentials. Based on need theory it combines universality with sufficiency to provide a secure social foundation for all within planetary boundaries. Needs are met in different ways, combining collective and individual measures, as illustrated by examples of childcare, housing and food. UBS can be combined with an income guarantee to ensure no-one’s income falls below an agreed level of sufficiency. Cash and services, which represent a ‘social wage’, are best understood as two sides of the same coin, supporting rather than competing with one another.

LAUNCHING THE THIRD TRACK OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: REASONS, DEVELOPMENTS AND CHALLENGES

The article addresses the progress of the European integration in such fields as social, wage, insurance and fiscal policies. The author analyzes key stages of, and major factors contributing to, the advancement of policy coordination and building up common policies in the fields mentioned. The author sees the integration these spheres as a ‘third track’ of the European integration, which follows the first two ones, i.e. the economic integration and launching the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and has the potential to become the next priority direction of the European integration process. The article describes the phenomenon of the ‘third track’ of the European integration and assesses major risks and challenges that may arise in the context of the further progress of the integration effort in this field. Three scenarios of the latter bearing on its eventual implications for Europe are presented, along with a consideration of implications for Ukraine in terms of this country’s aspirations for EU membership.

Introducing a Safety Net: The Effects of Neoliberal Policy on Welfare, Poverty, and the Net Social Wage during the Greek Crisis

The combined effects of internal devaluation and fiscal consolidation policies implemented in Greece between 2010 and 2019 are reflected in substantial levels of income contraction and unequal distribution of the financial burden. Neoliberal policy responses are examined through a safety net that allocates scarce fiscal resources to persons in extreme need, subject to high primary budget surplus targets. The safety net operates in this manner when social pressure upon the worker class intensifies. Further, the essay explores two supplementary aspects. First, a modified measure of poverty using the conventional approach of differentiated income poverty lines is considered. Second, net social wage variations are examined. Results indicate Greek workers have suffered substantially and that neoliberal policies have placed disproportionate burdens on persons most in need.

Mutuality of Obligation and the Social Wage

This chapter draws on the analysis in the previous chapters to illustrate how the courts’ conception of the relationship between law and social practices influences approaches to employment status and, relatedly, the effectiveness of labour law when it comes to securing or coordinating the provision of a ‘social wage’. It does this through the lens of the concept of ‘mutuality of obligation’. The first section explores the concept of ‘mutuality of obligation’ as it is conceived today. The second section then traces the development of this concept over time. The third section concludes with some observations about how the conception of law’s ontology we find implicit in the case law relates to the so-called ‘crisis’ we see today in labour law’s personal scope.

Wages, Salary, and Remuneration—Towards a Social Wage

This chapter traces the development of minimum wage legislation through the early to mid-twentieth century. It demonstrates the significance of the concept of ‘remuneration’ in shaping the legal environment in which workers’ right to payment was coming to be conceived. The first section begins with a discussion of this concept, tracing it from its origins in the concept of the salary. The second section builds on this analysis to explore the role of these concepts—the wage, the salary, and remuneration—in experiments in wage regulation. The third section explores the link between these different concepts and the emerging relational model of the contract of employment. The fourth section shows how these changes influenced the way in which minimum wage legislation came to be conceived in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in the context of the wages councils system of the 1940s. The fifth section then explores the broader implications of these changes, returning to the example of dock work and the various ‘decasualization’ policies of the era.

Varieties of capitalism, increasing income inequality and the sustainability of long-run growth

We model US household debt accumulation during the neoliberal boom (1990–2007) as a response to emulation effects and the decline of the social wage, which has ‘privatised’ an increasing share of the costs of providing for services such as health and education. The debt dynamics of the US economy are then studied under alternative assumptions about the configuration of distributional variables, which is shown to differ across varieties of capitalism that have ‘neoliberalised’ to different degrees. A key result is that distributional change alone will not make contemporary US capitalism financially sustainable due, in part, to the paradoxical nature of inequality as a spur to household borrowing, and hence a source of both demand-formation and financial fragility. Achieving sustainability requires, instead, more wide-ranging reform.

The Welfare State and The Market Economy: The Austrian experience as a Social Market Economy (SME)

This paper concentrates on the recent development of the welfare state and social wage in Austria. Our empirical review is concerned with the net benefits or net social wage received by the Austrian working population. Net social wage is defined as the difference between the social benefits received and taxes paid by the working class. This measurement will enable us to find out whether the working population has received a net gain (or net social wage) and whether this net gain has expanded over time. The paper offers a study of the trends of the “social wage” in France in the last decades before the Great Recession. It addresses two major questions. The first question is whether the expansion of social expenditures has posed any drag on capital accumulation and economic growth in this country. The second question is whether the increasing ideological challenges from the right and the competitive pressures of globalization have led to the retrenchment of the French welfare states in recent decades.