For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State

Jennifer Klein

Published by Princeton University Press 2003

For All These Rights

Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State

Jennifer Klein

Volume 42 in the series Politics and Society in Modern America

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400835669

Overview
Contents

About this book

The New Deal placed security at the center of American political and economic life by establishing an explicit partnership between the state, economy, and citizens. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, most people depend overwhelmingly on private health insurance and employee benefits. The astounding rise of this phenomenon from before World War II, however, has been largely overlooked. In this powerful history of the American reliance on employment-based benefits, Jennifer Klein examines the interwoven politics of social provision and labor relations from the 1910s to the 1960s. Through a narrative that connects the commercial life insurance industry, the politics of Social Security, organized labor's quest for economic security, and the evolution of modern health insurance, she shows how the firm-centered welfare system emerged. Moreover, the imperatives of industrial relations, Klein argues, shaped public and private social security.

Looking closely at unions and communities, Klein uncovers the wide range of alternative, community-based health plans that had begun to germinate in the 1930s and 1940s but that eventually succumbed to commercial health insurance and pensions. She also illuminates the contests to define "security"--job security, health security, and old age security--following World War II.

For All These Rights traces the fate of the New Deal emphasis on social entitlement as the private sector competed with and emulated Roosevelt's Social Security program. Through the story of struggles over health security and old age security, social rights and the welfare state, it traces the fate of New Deal liberalism--as a set of ideas about the state, security, and labor rights--in the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond.

Author / Editor information

Jennifer Klein is Assistant Professor of History, at Yale University.

Reviews

"Jennifer Klein's splendid and deeply researched history of America's vast private welfare state contains many important messages for the present. Business increased its commitment to social welfare when government programs expanded. Private, not public, benefits have proved inefficient, inflationary, and unreliable. Business enterprises do not offer a stable, long-term foundation for benefits. And it is hard to hold them accountable. This is an essential book for the debate over the redefinition of the welfare state in this post-Enron age."—Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

"A brilliant and authoritative account of how today's crisis in social and economic security came to be. In a breathtakingly original journey into the heart of America's private health, welfare, and pension programs, Klein shows that the critical choices were not just about whether we had a public or a private welfare system but what the nature of those systems would be."—Dorothy Sue Cobble, Professor of Labor Studies, Rutgers University

[T]his book provides a fresh and compelling interpretation of some of the critical junctures in the development of old-age pensions and health insurance. This carefully argued and documented book is also invaluable for anyone wrestling with the question of 'what next?' for social security and health-care reform in the United States.---Marie Gottschalk, International Review of Social History

"This is a wonderful book. Well-written, it combines fresh research (especially in insurance industry archives) with a careful and sensible synthesis of the existing literature on social provision through the years under consideration. For All These Rights will undoubtedly occupy the center of the emerging debate about America's peculiar 'public/private welfare state.'"—Colin Gordon, University of Iowa, author of Dead on Arrival

What makes this splendid book so enlightening is Klein's ability to see multiple actors in motion and to grasp how several complex dynamics intersected in the crucial years between 1920 and 1950. Policy makers, political actors, union leaders, rank-and-file workers, associations, employers, insurers: all played a key role in the path--determining decisions taken in these crucial years. Klein handles all of these actors with a sure hand. . . . By brilliantly illuminating the historical roots of today's growing crisis, she makes an enormous contribution.---Joseph A. McCartin, American Historical Review

"A dazzling excavation of the American welfare state. Jennifer Klein offers us a grand tour—labor and industry, politics and business, solidarity and anomie, feminism and paternalism, pensions and insurance, politics and culture. The result is a formidable account of the rise and fall of economic security in the United States."—James Morone, author of Hellfire Nation and The Democratic Wish

For scholars of the welfare state, this book provides a fresh and compelling interpretation of some of the critical junctures in the development of old-age pensions and health insurance. This carefully argued and documented book is also invaluable for anyone wrestling with the question of 'what next' for social security and health-care reform in the United States.---Marie Gottschalk, International Review of Social History

[Klein] pull[s] no punches. By bringing political economy back in, [she] offer[s] the most complex and satisfying explanation to date of America's exceptional trajectory toward the public-private welfare state. . . . [This book] will have a lasting impact on the way policy scholars see the public-private welfare state.---Beatrix Hoffman, Journal of Policy History

"For All These Rights, meticulous in its historical research and forthright in its policy conclusions, is of compelling importance to all who want a richer understanding of the role of social insurance in our society. Utilizing a developmental perspective, Jennifer Klein adds to the body of provocative scholarship that explores the relationships and tensions between private and public social and health security programs. She has much to say to historians, political scientists, economists, and policy analysts, for in explaining the past she enriches our understanding of the present and prepares us for the debates that will determine the further evolution of America's private-public welfare state."—Rashi Fein, Ph.D., Professor of the Economics of Medicine, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School

Winner of the 2004 Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, Business History Conference

Winner of the 2004 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	iii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Mass Marketing Private Insurance: The Origins of a Private Employee Benefits System, 1910–1933 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
Chapter 2. Industrial Pensions: Efficiency and Security Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
Chapter 3. The New Deal Struggle: Insurers, Employers, and the Politics of Social Security, 1933–1940 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	78
Chapter 4. Organizing for Health Security: Community, Labor, and New Deal Visions for Health Care and Health Policy, 1930s–1940s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
Chapter 5. Economic Security on the Home Front: Health Insurance and Pensions during World War II Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	162
Chapter 6. Managing Security: The Triumph of Group Insurance and the State’s Legitimation of the Public-Private Welfare State, 1940–1960 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
Chapter 7. Epilogue: The Limits of Private Security, 1960s–1990s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	258
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341

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