"Our biggest pains come from irregular work. The worker's strength becomes irregular and non-working days become a habit; idleness leads to intemperance; the uncertainty of employment leads to carelessness about the future. All this leads to extreme misery and many mental and physical weaknesses that poverty creates."
So wrote Charles Stuart Loch, Professor of Economics and Statistics at King's College, London and Secretary of the Society of Charities, in his 1883 book How to Help the Destitute. Deeply convinced of the differences between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, Loch considered "irregular work" - occasional employment - to be the curse of the late Victorian economy, which "demoralized" the worker and caused him to fall away from the moral framework and regress to innate tendencies: "laziness", "intemperance", "carelessness" and, finally, extreme misery.
It was a worldview embodied in the old "poor laws". According to the provisions of the law on the poor from 1834, those seeking social assistance were imprisoned in so-called workhouses, and if they were physically able, they were subjected to hard work. At the beginning of the 20th century, instead of detention, the condition for providing assistance was a property assessment (which was much cheaper), but the stigmatization of people seeking social assistance remained, as well as the attitude that people are poor because they do not want to work and therefore they have to force it.
A century and a half after Loh, not only did "irregular work", which we now euphemistically call the "flexible labor market", again become a feature of the economy, but the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was brought back into the political debate, along with the idea of poverty as a product individual moral failure.
November marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of what is probably the most important report on poverty and unemployment, Social Security and Related Services, better known as the Beveridge Report. Economist and liberal politician William Beveridge faced the "5 great evils" that plague society: poverty, disease, ignorance, neglect and laziness. Drawing largely on the debates of the time, Beveridge argued for government intervention to achieve full employment, social security for the unemployed, a national health service, universal secondary education and a national social housing programme. That report laid the foundation for the welfare state in Britain after the Second World War.
But significant as the Beveridge Report was, it was still based on the old Poor Law understandings of work and poverty. The very treatment of unemployment as "idleness" reveals how much Beveridge relied on Victorian moralistic notions. He wanted to rationalize the labor market in order to make the best use of labor. He opposed collective bargaining and "restrictive" union practices, while simultaneously fighting unemployment and "irregular work."
Beveridge initiated the creation of a welfare system that helped combat what was seen as "welfare dependency" - the failure to live independently - at minimal public cost. "Beveridge's attack on idleness," notes public policy professor Noel Whiteside, "was essentially a moral crusade against the waste of human capacity, undermining his desire to synchronize personal well-being with economic efficiency." The moralistic attitude towards poverty thus persisted not only in the Beveridge Report, but also in the post-war welfare state.
During the 1980s, the Keynesian consensus on which Beveridge's vision of economic rationality was built was crumbling. The labor market has been deregulated, public services privatized, union resistance crushed, while the welfare state has been degraded. In this new era, the rational use of labor will be provided by the market, not the state.
Even in the new economic era, the old idea of poverty as a moral, not a political issue, where poverty is a consequence of individual behavior and not society's politics, has survived. From New Labour's crusade against "problem families" to George Osborne's condemnation of "lazy people who will sleep through life on benefits", the division of the poor into those deserving and those not deserving of help (which has never fully disappeared) has been renewed.
In most of the history of public policies, the thought of "human development" is absent, the idea that the role of the state should not be reduced to resource rationalization, various coercions on the poor and maintenance of minimum social assistance - but that it should enable people to live a full life.
The idea of human development is deeply embedded in philosophy and psychology, but much less so in politics. This does not mean that this concept is ignored in politics. Much of the political discourse is actually an implicit debate about how best to ensure that development. There were times, say in the years immediately after World War II, when this question sounded much more urgent, and the answers were clearer.
But the topic of human development is rarely discussed, and when it is, its meaning is often distorted and limited. Communitarians, for example, such as the American philosopher Michael Sendel, generally pay much attention to the idea and importance of communities in fostering human development. Their view of communities, however, is often narrow and exclusive, and their understanding of human freedoms is limited. On the other hand, libertarians sometimes talk about development in terms of greater individual freedoms, ignoring the fact that this requires a developed community and that labor is something more than a resource available for exploitation.
The importance of the idea of human development is that it allows us to connect the individual with society, leading us to think of both material improvement and the social connections that give life meaning. It can also lead us to reconsider political priorities. Many of the neglected areas of contemporary public policy - a good state-funded child care system, a sustainable public transport system, a decent framework for social care for the elderly - are essential to any idea of development.
Perhaps the current moment of political chaos and disintegration does not seem favorable for starting this debate. But just such a moment can be ideal for reorienting the framework within which we think about public policies. Eighty years after the Beveridge Report, it's about time.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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