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Work and Welfare Benefits: Social Security, Employment and Unemployment in the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Eithne McLaughlin
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Abstract

This paper considers social security policy and structures in relation to the labour market of the late 1980s and 1990s. The paper begins by describing the labour market of the late 1980s and summarising projective descriptions of labour demand in the 1990s. The second section of the paper reports on recent research examining the labour supply behaviour of long term unemployed people, drawing out the role of social security policy and structures therein. The third section of the paper concludes that the role of social security policy is at present essentially reactive rather than proactive; that it does little to address the likely need for labour of certain kinds in the 1990s; and that efforts to address the problem of long term unemployment through social security policy have been largely misdirected. The final section of the paper briefly considers some of the ways in which social security systems can be more proactive and suggests a number of both short term and longer term policy changes which research indicates would be of benefit in the UK.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 1991 , pp. 485 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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