The Puzzle of Dutch Welfare Solidarity and the Politics of Old Age Pension Reform (1945-1975)

During the first three decades of the post-war period, the Netherlands developed a system of welfare provision that by most standards belonged to the most equitable and solidaristic in the world. It did so under the patronage of Christian democratic governments, which are generally viewed as being predisposed to rejecting solidaristic welfare reform. The purpose of this article is to explain why the Dutch Christian democrats came to adopt such a solidaristic welfare stance during the formative post-war period of welfare state expansion. Rather than attributing this stance to electoral or strategic considerations, this article focuses on the formative role of the Christian democratic labour union movement in persuading these parties to gradually adopt a more solidaristic welfare stance.In de eerste drie decennia van de naoorlogse periode ontwikkelde Nederland een stelsel van sociale voorzieningen dat naar de meeste maatstaven tot het meest rechtvaardige en solidaristische ter wereld behoorde. Dit stelsel kwam tot stand met steun van christendemocratische regeringen, waarvan over het algemeen wordt aangenomen dat zij geneigd zijn solidaristische welzijnshervormingen af te wijzen. Het doel van dit artikel is om te verklaren waarom de Nederlandse christendemocraten een solidaristische welvaartskoers zijn gaan varen in de naoorlogse periode, een tijdvak dat gekenmerkt werd door uitbreiding van de verzorgingsstaat. In plaats van deze houding toe te schrijven aan electorale of strategische overwegingen, richt dit artikel zich op de christendemocratische vakbeweging. Deze speelde een invloedrijke rol in het overreden van christendemocratische partijen om geleidelijk een meer solidaristische welvaartshouding aan te nemen.

Manufacturing Consensus? New Zealand Press Attitudes Toward the Labour Movement in 1890

<p>This thesis investigates the attitudes of New Zealand newspapers to the social and economic tensions exacerbated by the emergence of a newly assertive labour movement in 1890, culminating in the August-November Maritime Strike, and the 5 December General Election. Through detailed analysis of labour reporting in six newspapers (Evening Post, Grey River Argus, Lyttelton Times, New Zealand Herald, Otago Daily Times, Press) this thesis examines contemporary conceptions of New Zealand society and editors’ expectations of trade unions in a colony that emphasised its egalitarian mythology. Although the establishment of a national press agency in 1880 homogenised the distribution of national and international news, this study focuses on local news and editorial columns, which generally reflected proprietors’ political leanings. Through these sites of ideological contest, conflicting representations of the ascendant trade union movement became apparent. While New Zealand newspapers sympathised with the striking London dockers in 1889, the advent of domestic industrial tensions provoked a wider range of reactions in the press. Strikes assumed a national significance, and the divisions between liberal and conservative newspapers narrowed. To varying degrees both considered militant action by organised labour a threat to the colony’s peace and prosperity – sentiments that pervaded their reporting. The New Zealand Maritime Strike confirmed these prejudices and calcified the perception of organised labour’s malevolence. Despite the year’s upheavals, this thesis contends that the press struggled to comprehend labour’s political ambitions, ignoring the unprecedented mobilisation of thousands of new voters, shifting public opinion, and the transformative impact of electoral reform. Distracted by the mainstream political obsession with land reform and convinced that public prejudices, stoked by their own reporting, would obviate a labour presence in the new parliament, the victory of the Liberal-labour coalition confounded the publishing establishment.</p>

Manufacturing Consensus? New Zealand Press Attitudes Toward the Labour Movement in 1890

<p>This thesis investigates the attitudes of New Zealand newspapers to the social and economic tensions exacerbated by the emergence of a newly assertive labour movement in 1890, culminating in the August-November Maritime Strike, and the 5 December General Election. Through detailed analysis of labour reporting in six newspapers (Evening Post, Grey River Argus, Lyttelton Times, New Zealand Herald, Otago Daily Times, Press) this thesis examines contemporary conceptions of New Zealand society and editors’ expectations of trade unions in a colony that emphasised its egalitarian mythology. Although the establishment of a national press agency in 1880 homogenised the distribution of national and international news, this study focuses on local news and editorial columns, which generally reflected proprietors’ political leanings. Through these sites of ideological contest, conflicting representations of the ascendant trade union movement became apparent. While New Zealand newspapers sympathised with the striking London dockers in 1889, the advent of domestic industrial tensions provoked a wider range of reactions in the press. Strikes assumed a national significance, and the divisions between liberal and conservative newspapers narrowed. To varying degrees both considered militant action by organised labour a threat to the colony’s peace and prosperity – sentiments that pervaded their reporting. The New Zealand Maritime Strike confirmed these prejudices and calcified the perception of organised labour’s malevolence. Despite the year’s upheavals, this thesis contends that the press struggled to comprehend labour’s political ambitions, ignoring the unprecedented mobilisation of thousands of new voters, shifting public opinion, and the transformative impact of electoral reform. Distracted by the mainstream political obsession with land reform and convinced that public prejudices, stoked by their own reporting, would obviate a labour presence in the new parliament, the victory of the Liberal-labour coalition confounded the publishing establishment.</p>

Abolition of Exchange Controls

This chapter explores the abolition of exchange controls, which transformed the British economy by ushering in a new era of mobile capital flows. Following the IMF’s 1976 bailout of the UK and the advent of North Sea oil, sterling began to appreciate precipitously. While this helped to discipline the British economy and reduce inflation, it also pushed British exporters to the brink of collapse. Governments during this period thus faced a choice between embracing the strong pound to tackle inflation and combating the pound’s rise in order to maintain political legitimacy. The governments of both Callaghan and Thatcher sought to navigate carefully between these two options. By getting rid of exchange controls, these governments hoped that investment would flow out of Britain, causing a moderate fall in the price of sterling. This would make Britain’s exports more competitive without generating a spike in inflation that would likely result from an overt sterling devaluation. The Callaghan administration was held back from totally abolishing controls by a resistant trade union movement. Thatcher, however, was able to fully scrap these controls due to the historic defeat of the trade unions in the 1979 Winter of Discontent. In addition, Thatcher sought to reassure global financial markets that this policy was not an attempt to lower sterling’s value, but was rather driven by a genuine faith in laissez-faire principles. The abolition of exchange controls should thus be understood as a palliative strategy to protect governing legitimacy by providing temporary relief to Britain’s export sector.

The Politics of Unionisation in Hong Kong: An Interview with Dr Bill Taylor

Unions in Hong Kong played an important role in the historical develoopment of civil society and labour rights long before the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese sovereignty in 1997. But what are the possible impacts of the new union movement in Hong Kong today? KEYWORDS: labour activism; unionism; Hong Kong studies; social movement; industrial relations

Union Membership as a Moderator in the Relationship Between Living Wage, Job Satisfaction and Employee Engagement

In many developing countries, lower-level employees are working in workplaces that pay them poverty wages. The need for workers to earn a living wage has long been argued, both within the trade union movement, employers and society, along with the link with job satisfaction and employee engagement. The present study aims to explore the relationship between living wage, job satisfaction and employee engagement, as well as union membership as a moderator in these relationships. A quantitative research approach was employed in this study, and Loess curves were used to graphically predict the relationship between study variables. There were significant relationships between a living wage, job satisfaction and employee engagement. The results indicated that the relationships between the variables were cubic and not linear. Union membership was the moderator in the relationship between living wages and employee involvement. Union membership moderated the cubic relationship between living wages and employee engagement. Union membership also moderated the cubic relationship between living wages and job satisfaction.

The PATCO Strike and the Decline of Labor

In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan decisively broke the illegal strike of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers, which had been organized by their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Because of its timing, its notoriety, and its impact in encouraging private sector employers to follow Reagan’s example and break strikes, the PATCO debacle contributed significantly to the continuing decline of the labor movement in the decades following 1981. The breaking of PATCO took place at a crucial inflection point in US labor history. Changing political, ideological, and economic trends made unions vulnerable as the 1980s began. In this volatile context, the PATCO strike garnered unprecedented attention and enormous influence. The walkout, which started on August 3, 1981, took place in every US state and territory, and Americans watched it play out in real time on live television. They saw President Reagan warn strikers that since they were government workers their walkout was illegal, issuing an ultimatum that they would be fired in forty-eight hours if they did not return to work. Then they saw Reagan fire more than eleven thousand strikers who defied his order, replacing them with military controllers and hastily trained substitutes, all with strong public backing. This event shocked rank-and-file unionists, frightened union leaders, and encouraged private sector employers to emulate Reagan in their own dealings with unions. Thus, following the PATCO strike, numerous private sector employers took advantage of weak protections for strikers in US labor law to break strikes in their industries. Workers’ willingness to strike in order to advance or defend workplace standards plummeted thereafter. Declining labor militancy in turn exacerbated the continuous decline in union membership after 1981, leaving the union movement in a deepening crisis by the early 21st century.

Organising Against Precarity: The Life of a South African Labour Broker Worker

This article presents Khongelani Hlungwani’s experiences of working as a labour broker worker and his struggle to become a permanent worker in Gauteng, South Africa. His account provides a lens through which to understand the shopfloor divisions between permanent and labour broker workers. These divisions are, as Hlungwani’s account demonstrates, compounded by a trade union movement that largely sidelines the interests of precarious workers in favour of permanent workers. This has led many workers, like Hlungwani, to be distrustful of trade unions. Thus, when new labour rights were introduced in 2015, which provided an impetus for labour broker workers to organise, many, like Hlungwani, chose to do so outside of trade unions. The article demonstrates how it was possible, in the South African context, to utilise the institutional power of new labour rights to build associational power outside of trade unions. The article provides insight into both the strength and the fragility of these forms of organising through an account of the strike that Hlungwani participated in in solidarity with unionised workers at his workplace.

Middle-class interests, redistribution and the postwar success and failure of the solidaristic welfare state

According to the conventional view of over three decades of research on the welfare state, the postwar success of solidaristic welfare reform depended on the left’s ability to ‘tailor’ to middle-class interests or at least ‘synthesize’ working- and middle-class demands. This article offers a different perspective on the dynamics of postwar solidaristic welfare reform. It argues that key middle-class groups such as skilled wage earners often had a strong incentive to oppose such reform but were not always well-positioned to do so. The article distinguishes between two main avenues through which they could exert political influence and argues that their ability to mobilize against solidaristic welfare reform depended primarily on the structure of the labour union movement. The article illustrates its claims by contrasting the postwar success of solidaristic old-age pension reform in Belgium and the Netherlands with its failure in Britain and Germany.