Thirty years ago, the great national debate was how to help ordinary, workaday Americans achieve the good things in life. Today, we are preoccupied with—and increasingly divided over—how to cope with the problems of poor and dependent Americans, most of whom cannot or will not work at the jobs available. Mead provides overwhelming and disturbing evidence that passive poverty—the failure of most of the poor to work at all—reflects defeatism more than lack of opportunity. In this controversial book, Mead proposes concrete steps to overcome the inertia of the nonworking poor trapped in the welfare system. If the poor return to work, he suggests, American politics would focus once again on the problems of the working Americans.

The problem of mass unemployment in western Europe has persisted since the early 1980s. Clearly the policies implemented by national governments and the EU have not been successful in adequately tackling this important social, economic and political issue. The New Politics of Unemployment provides a thorough comparative analysis of the present situation. It looks at how the orthodox unemployment policies of contemporary governments have failed and what new policies might be introduced. A number of radical unemployment policies, from Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the EU, are outlined. These are investigated with a view to identifying the conditions under which they might become standard components of national and EU strategies to bring down unemployment. This book is the first comparative study of the politics of policy innovation in the area of unemployment. It will be an important addition to the literature of European public policy and important reading for students of comparative European politics and economics.

The first comparative study of the politics of policy innovation in the field of unemployment. The contributors provide a thorough and lucid analysis of past government failures, and look to possible future strategies.

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Integrating archival and documentary materials with an analysis of the sources of political support for work-welfare programmes, this work examines the reasons behind the lack of effective training and work programmes for the unemployed in Great Britain and the United States.