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Privatizing Economic Security: The Fate of New Deal Liberalism and the American Welfare State

Jennifer Klein's brilliant study analyzes how and why a job-based private system of health insurance and pensions emerged and developed in tandem with the American welfare state. Adding to a growing literature that has examined the relationship between welfare capitalism and the American welfare state, For All These Rights offers fresh insights into our most pressing policy issues today. Klein's compelling introduction reminds us just how much Americans have come to rely on private welfare schemes for security and just how precarious that security is. The bankruptcies of Enron, Lucent Technologies, WorldCom, and Bethlehem Steel, among others, left tens of thousands of Americans without the company-funded health care or pension benefits promised to them. Companies had either funded benefits with stock that soon became worthless, as was the case with Enron, or they had failed to leave sufficient funds in reserve to cover retirees. The promise of security from company-funded welfare programs has become shallow indeed, and in large part, Klein argues, because the contraction of the public welfare state since the 1980s has given firms the political and ideological space to retrench on their own private programs of supplemental security. Klein's research focuses on the decades between 1910 and 1960, and this enables her to chart continuities in private provision of social benefits while highlighting how the New Deal's politics of security created new expectations among workers and new corporate strategies to temper union demands and stave off government regulation. After the New Deal, workers came to see social benefits as an employee right rather than a measure of the employer's largesse. Firms responded to the expansion of public welfare not by shrinking their own private programs, as some historians have assumed, but rather by expanding their commitment to corporate social welfare programs. Klein argues that employer provision of private pensions and medical insurance