BiblioVault - Books about Unemployment insurance

Becoming Entitled

Relief, Unemployment, and Reform during the Great Depression

Abigail Trollinger

Temple University Press, 2020

In the 1930s, the unemployed were organizing. Jobless workers felt they were “entitled" to a new kind of government protection—the protection from undeserved unemployment and the financial straits that such unemployment created. They wanted dignified forms of relief (including work relief) during the Depression, and unemployment insurance after.

Becoming Entitled artfully chronicles the emergence of this worker entitlement and the people who cultivated it. Abigail Trollinger focuses largely on Chicago after the Progressive Era, where the settlement house and labor movements both flourished. She shows how reformers joined workers and relief officials to redeem the unemployed and secure government-funded social insurance for them. Becoming Entitled also offers a critical reappraisal of New Deal social and economic changes, suggesting that the transformations of the 1930s came from reformers in the “middle,” who helped establish a limited form of entitlement for workers.

Ultimately, Trollinger highlights the achievements made by reformers working on city- and nation-wide issues. She captures the moment when some people shed the stigma that came with unemployment and demanded that the government do the same.

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Reducing Workweeks

Fred Best, foreword by Herbert J. Gans

Temple University Press, 1988

International competition and variable economic conditions have brought the threat of layoffs to the doorsteps of workers and managers in all sectors of our economy. One response to this problem is Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing. This new and promising program reduces the human and economic costs of layoffs by providing partial unemployment benefits to employees who have their workweeks reduced as an alternative to layoffs. Fred Best provides a balanced and thorough assessment of this policy in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing maintains the income and fringe benefits of all workers at near full-time levels, enabling firms to maintain the skills and working relations of their employees and preventing undue hardships among those who would otherwise lose their jobs.

Best summarizes the history and effectiveness of these programs in terms of their economic and human impacts on employers, employees, government, and the economy. He presents key insights on how worktime and worker management cooperation can become powerful tools for combating joblessness and increasing economic performance. This definitive account of an important experiment in work hours will be of critical importance to managers, workers, policymakers, economists, and those concerned with employment issues.

In the series Labor and Social Change, edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni.

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Unsocial Europe

Social Protection Or Flexploitation?

Anne Gray

Pluto Press, 2004