SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS

World War I (1914-1918) and the Great Depression (1929-1939) exposed profound weaknesses in capitalist societies.

The Depression, mainly, was a test case for what might happen should the economic system collapse.

In the United States, Canada, and, to a lesser degree of severity, the United Kingdom, the collapse of the economy in 1929 ushered in a decade of profound economic hardship.

Unemployment reached as high as 25%, bank failures and foreclosures were legion, nutrition plummeted, and even birth rates declined as young people postponed marriages.

Another essential element was the growing popularity of socialism, with its promise of production for use, not profit.

While the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 heralded the arrival of a competing political-economic system, the growth of social-democratic politics throughout the Western world signaled a profound shift in how people viewed the role of the state in social and economic life.

In his work, summarized in the critical essay “Citizenship and Social Class” (1949), Marshall did much to develop the concept of “social citizenship” rights.

In practical terms, these pointed to the government’s role in providing a range

of entitlements or a “cradle-to-grave” social “safety net”:

Fully funded public education
Public health care
Unemployment insurance

Income assistance
Old age pensions!Family/mothers’ allowances

For Marshall, social citizenship rights represented a necessary compromise between the ruling classes and working people.

If working people consent to the wage system under capitalism and continue to suffer from the ups and downs of economic cycles (see historical processes, slide 18), then a social safety net should be guaranteed as a right of citizenship.

Accordingly, today most of the 32 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have put in place a comprehensive “welfare state” featuring public expenditure and statutory law in all or most of the areas of public health care, unemployment insurance, compulsory collective bargaining, income assistance, and old age pensions.

THE WELFARE STATE AS A CREATURE OF CONFLICT

While WWI and the Depression were decisive in shifting the political culture to the left, WWII gave concrete expression to the new ideas about social and economic rights.

Three factors were critical in this respect.
1. Workers’ growing bargaining and political power.

• !  During the war, expanding industrial unionism (unions open to all wage earners, not just skilled trades) and the advancement of collective bargaining rights gave working people more clout than ever in demanding rights and improvements in the workplace.

!  Working people were increasingly organized and supported social-democratic and labor parties (esp. Canada and the UK). By the mid-twentieth century, most Western democracies were mass democracies that allowed all adults to vote.

2. Economicandpoliticalelites’continuedfearofpoliticalturmoil, working-class radicalization, and socialism.

!By the end of the 1940s, after tremendous labor upheaval, capital and labor had worked out a compromise whereby workers accepted improved wages and benefits and the expansion of the social welfare system in return for labor peace.

3. A desire on the part of both groups to secure stable economic growth in the post-WWII period (after 1945).

!The postwar “reconstruction” period witnessed a determined effort to avoid the hardships of the 1930s and enter into renewed economic growth.

!Along with this idea came the notion that the benefits of economic expansion should be shared more broadly if capitalism were to survive in the Cold War era.

THE CANADIAN WELFARE STATE

These developments coming out of the first half of the twentieth century were evident in Canada, where wartime sacrifice and the effects of the Depression had been experienced acutely.

By the 1940s, following the lead of the UK and the US, Canada began slowly building its social welfare system.

A significant voice promoting the expansion of social entitlements was the McGill University researcher Leonard Marsh, whose commissioned Report on Social Security for Canada (the Marsh Report) (1943) made big waves across the country.

Marsh argued for a system of “collective pooling” of risk – social insurance – across various social needs areas in the landmark report.

Ultimately, however, Canada would make significant strides in the field of social security:

!Unemployment Insurance (1940)!Social Assistance (the 1940s-1950s)!Family Allowances (1946)
!Old Age Security (1958)!CPP/QPP (1966)

!Medicare (1966)!Equalization (the 1950s)

ARE SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS ONLY FOR COUNTRIES THAT CAN AFFORD THEM?

The UDHR’s assertion that social and economic rights ought to be universal and indivisible has faced enormous practical hurdles.

For example, countries in the Global South – “developing” former colonies – have been systematically denied the economic means to address questions of social citizenship.

Entirely typically, such countries concentrate on economic growth at the expense of social and economic rights.

To make matters worse, until recently, development efforts such as loans on the part of IMF and World Bank, and other global institutions, have imposed conditions (low public debt, market deregulation, low taxes) that preclude the advancement of social citizenship in favor of market-based measures.

The UN Development Program’s Sustainable Development Goals initiative (2015) has made strides in addressing this problem in its efforts to combat poverty, underdevelopment, and the threat of climate change.

It’s also worth noting that some developing countries, such as Cuba, have sacrificed or forestalled political and economic freedoms in favor of developing robust welfare states.

Cuba focuses on universal education, medicine, and nutrition as a necessary precondition to the future enjoyment of other rights.