Reinventing the Welfare State. Ursula Huws
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Reinventing the Welfare State
FireWorks
Series editors:
Gargi Bhattacharyya, Professor of Sociology, University of East London
Anitra Nelson, Associate Professor, Honorary Principal Fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne
Wilf Sullivan, Race Equality Office, Trade Union Congress
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Reinventing the Welfare State
Digital Platforms and Public Policies
Ursula Huws
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
Copyright © Ursula Huws 2020
The right of Ursula Huws to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4183 5 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4184 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0708 3 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0710 6 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0709 0 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
To our grandchildren, in the hope that they will grow up in a better world
Contents
2 What Has Happened to the Twentieth-century Welfare State?
3 What Has Happened in the Labour Market?
4 What Has Happened to Gender Equality?
5 Recalibrating the Mechanisms of Redistribution
6 A Universal Basic Income that is Genuinely Redistributive
8 Digital Platforms for Public Good
Series Preface
Addressing urgent questions about how to make a just and sustainable world, the Fireworks series throws a new light on contemporary movements, crises and challenges. Each book is written to extend the popular imagination and unmake dominant framings of key issues.
Launched in 2020, the series offers guides to matters of social equity, justice and environmental sustainability. FireWorks books provide short, accessible and authoritative commentaries that illuminate underground political currents or marginalised voices, and highlight political thought and writing that exists substantially in languages other than English. Their authors seek to ignite key debates for twenty-first-century politics, economics and society.
FireWorks books do not assume specialist knowledge, but offer up-to-date and well-researched overviews for a wide range of politically aware readers. They provide an opportunity to go deeper into a subject than is possible in current news and online media, but are still short enough to be read in a few hours.
In these fast-changing times, these books provide snappy and thought-provoking interventions on complex political issues. As times get dark, FireWorks offer a flash of light to reveal the broader social landscape and economic structures that form our political moment.
Preface
The first draft of this book was written in a great hurry in the summer of 2019. I had recently finished a major research project on the extent and characteristics of platform labour in Europe, the results of which seemed to me to have profound implications for the future of employment and to confirm earlier doubts about the viability of the social model that has underpinned European welfare states since the Second World War. Even more broadly, the findings also raised questions about the organisation of daily life in the digital age. In combination, such questions opened up major concerns about the future of the welfare state, both in relation to its ability to provide safety nets for the vulnerable, promote equality and manage redistribution, and in relation to the kinds of services it provides to citizens and how they are delivered. I wanted to share these concerns with a wider audience, in the hope of contributing to a broad-based dialogue about how they could be addressed by public policies.
At that moment, British politics were in turmoil, dominated by divisive debates about Brexit. It seemed very likely that a general election was imminent, and with it a writing of manifestos and an opening up of discussions about what sort of society British people might want to inhabit in the future. It seemed an opportune moment to contribute to these conversations, enabling them to be informed by some of the results of this research. There was a risk, I thought, that some socialist policies, in seeking to reverse the effects of austerity and move towards a more equal society, might be aiming for a ‘return to the 1970s’, or even a ‘return to 1945’, which would fail to address the very real social and economic challenges of a digital global economy and the breakdown of solidarities between labour market ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ that my