(publ. W. W. Norton, 1945)
Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) is a book by William Beveridge, author of the Beveridge Report. It was first published in the UK by Allen & Unwin.
Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) is a book by William Beveridge, author of the Beveridge Report. It was first published in the UK by Allen & Unwin.
The book begins with the thesis that because individual employers are not capable of creating full employment, it must be the responsibility of the state. Full employment is defined as a state where there are slightly more vacant jobs than there are available workers, so people who lose jobs can find new ones immediately.
Unemployment should be aimed to be reduced to 3%. Beveridge claimed that the upward pressure on wages, due to the increased bargaining strength of labour, would be eased by rising productivity, and kept in check by a system of wage arbitration. The cooperation of workers would be secured by the common interest in the ideal of full employment.
The book was written in the context of an economy which would have to transfer from wartime direction to peace time. Government direction of labour (under the Essential Works Order) would cease, and workers would have a free choice of occupation.
Beveridge argued that pre-war unemployment, that hit great heights during the 1930s depression, was due to ineffective demand for industrial products, imperfect labour mobility and general labour market disorganisation. Instead, the economy should be planned, so that demand is socialised, and supply is maintained at all times.
To maintain demand, fiscal policy should be utilised. That means the Treasury's budget should gear towards increased spending when demand is otherwise down. The Social Security proposals in his better known Beveridge Report was an integral part of this.
Frictional unemployment could be remedied through the use of planning law and subsidies to draw the location of industry to the door of the labourer. The advantage of that would be fewer costs in housing and social dislocation which results from large movements of labour. Full use of employment exchanges - public employment agencies - could be used to channel mobile labour, such as younger people, where it is needed.
The evidential support for Beveridge's policy comes from the war experience. War solved unemployment by socialising demand.
The most common criticism was always that the circumstances of the war were special and people were willing to tolerate more in those times than they might have otherwise. Therefore, it could not be said that just because unemployment had disappeared during the war, it would hold in times of peace. Furthermore, soldiers drafted into the war were often in forced idleness when there was no work for them.
Nevertheless, the book was highly influential, for it melding of Keynesian economics and Fabian politics. Years later, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, quoted in Hayek on Hayek (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), would claim that Beveridge's Full Employment in a Free Society was ghost-written by Nicholas Kaldor. Hayek said of Beveridge, "[H]e wasn't the least interested in economics. He knew no economics whatever." [1]
"return to the old ways of engaging labour should be definitely made impossible. Industries like dock and harbour service, which by practising casual engagement have been the main generators of chronic under-employment in the past, have been transformed in the war. It may be assumed that the main principle of the transformation will remain in peace, that the men following such occupations will have guaranteed weekly wages, and that this will lead in due course to the organization of regular work as well as of regular wages, with men working for a single employing agency or for groups of employers, in place of taking their chance with single employers at a number of separate taking-on places. It may be hoped that in many other industries the former position in regard to the engagement of men will be transformed by the substitution of weekly for daily or hourly engagements." [2]
Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for wage labour. Labour is a commodity that supplied by labourers in exchange for a wage paid by demanding firms.
Labour law mediates the relationship between workers, employing entities, trade unions and the government. Collective labour law relates to the tripartite relationship between employee, employer and union. Individual labour law concerns employees' rights at work also through the contract for work. Employment standards are social norms for the minimum socially acceptable conditions under which employees or contractors are allowed to work. Government agencies enforce labour law.
Unemployment, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is when persons above a specified age are not in paid employment or self-employment and are currently available for work during the reference period.
Full employment is a situation in which everyone who wants a job can have work hours they need on fair wages. Because people switch jobs, full employment involves a positive stable rate of unemployment. An economy with full employment might still have underemployment where part-time workers cannot find jobs appropriate to their skill level. In macroeconomics, full employment is sometimes defined as the level of employment at which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services served as the basis for the post-World War II welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945. He was considered an authority on unemployment insurance from early in his career, served under Winston Churchill on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges, and later as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food. He was Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1919 until 1937, when he was elected Master of University College, Oxford.
United Kingdom labour law regulates the relations between workers, employers and trade unions. People at work in the UK benefit from a minimum charter of employment rights, which are found in various Acts, Regulations, common law and equity. This includes the right to a minimum wage of £8.21 for over 25-year-olds under the National Minimum Wage Act 1998. The Working Time Regulations 1998 give the right to 28 days paid holidays, breaks from work, and attempts to limit excessively long working hours. The Employment Rights Act 1996 gives the right to leave for child care, and the right to request flexible working patterns. The Pensions Act 2008 gives the right to be automatically enrolled in a basic occupational pension, whose funds must be protected according to the Pensions Act 1995.
Featherbedding is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers. The term "make-work" is sometimes used as a synonym for featherbedding.
The natural rate of unemployment is the name that was given to a key concept in the study of economic activity. Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps, tackling this 'human' problem in the 1960s, both received the Nobel Prize in economics for their work, and the development of the concept is cited as a main motivation behind the prize. A simplistic summary of the concept is: 'The natural rate of unemployment, when an economy is in a steady state of "full employment", is the proportion of the workforce who are unemployed'. Put another way, this concept clarifies that the economic term "full employment" does not mean "zero unemployment". It represents the hypothetical unemployment rate consistent with aggregate production being at the "long-run" level. This level is consistent with aggregate production in the absence of various temporary frictions such as incomplete price adjustment in labor and goods markets. The natural rate of unemployment therefore corresponds to the unemployment rate prevailing under a classical view of determination of activity.
Labour power is a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, labour power, from the physical act of working, labour. Labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly.
Frictional unemployment is a type of unemployment. It is sometimes called search unemployment and can be based on the circumstances of the individual. It is time spent between jobs when a worker is searching for a job or transferring from one job to another. Frictional unemployment is one of the three broad categories of unemployment, the others being structural unemployment and cyclical unemployment. A person may be looking for a job change for better opportunities, services, salary and wages, or because of dissatisfaction with the previous job. Strikes by trade unions also give rise to frictional unemployment.
A Beveridge curve, or UV curve, is a graphical representation of the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate, the number of unfilled jobs expressed as a proportion of the labour force. It typically has vacancies on the vertical axis and unemployment on the horizontal. The curve, named after William Beveridge, is hyperbolic-shaped and slopes downward, as a higher rate of unemployment normally occurs with a lower rate of vacancies. If it moves outward over time, a given level of vacancies would be associated with higher and higher levels of unemployment, which would imply decreasing efficiency in the labour market. Inefficient labour markets are caused by mismatches between available jobs and the unemployed and an immobile labour force.
Wage labour is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labour power under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labour market where wages or salaries are market-determined.
Labor or worker mobility is the geographical and occupational movement of workers. Worker mobility is best gauged by the lack of impediments to such mobility. Impediments to mobility are easily divided into two distinct classes with one being personal and the other being systemic. Personal impediments include physical location, and physical and mental ability. The systemic impediments include educational opportunities as well as various laws and political contrivances and even barriers and hurdles arising from historical happenstance.
Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It refers to the unemployed and underemployed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that the unemployed can be defined as those actually looking for work and that the relative surplus population also includes people unable to work. The use of the word "army" refers to the workers being conscripted and regimented in the workplace in a hierarchy under the command or authority of the owners of capital.
A job guarantee (JG) is an economic policy proposal aimed at providing a sustainable solution to the dual problems of inflation and unemployment. Its aim is to create full employment and price stability, by having the state promise to hire unemployed workers as an employer of last resort (ELR).
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. In the microeconomic theory of monopsony, a single entity is assumed to have market power over sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service, much in the same manner that a monopolist can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers.
NAIRU is an acronym for non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, and refers to a theoretical level of unemployment below which inflation would be expected to rise. It was first introduced as NIRU by Franco Modigliani and Lucas Papademos in 1975, as an improvement over the "natural rate of unemployment" concept, which was proposed earlier by Milton Friedman.
Technological unemployment is the loss of jobs caused by technological change. It is a key type of structural unemployment.
NAIBER is an acronym for non-accelerating inflation buffer employment ratio and refers to a systemic proposal for an in-built inflation control mechanism devised by economists Bill Mitchell and Warren Mosler, and advocated by Modern Money Theory as replacement for NAIRU. The concept of NAIBER is related to the idea of a Job Guarantee aimed to create full employment and price stability, by having the state promise to hire unemployed workers as an employer of last resort (ELR).
On the 1st May 2014 Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray announced plans to increase Seattle's minimum wage to $15 per hour incrementally over the next few years. Seattle was the first big city in the United States to raise its minimum wage to $15 after the rise of the "Fight for 15 movement". This policy decision resulted in Seattle having the highest minimum wage of any major city in the United States. Once Seattle raised its minimum wage many other major cities around the country also took action to increase the pay of low wage workers. There has been much debate over the effects the increases to the minimum wage have had on employment and overall economic conditions in Seattle. To determine the impacts of the policy a number of studies have been conducted; the most notable being research by the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley.