Work and Welfare: Towards a Post-productivist Welfare Regime.

ROBERT E. GOODIN [*]

Among the many ways in which welfare regimes differ, one is how they articulate the demands of work and welfare. Such a framework not only renders more coherent the familiar 'three worlds of welfare capitalism' but also highlights another option: a 'post-productivist' welfare regime, which combines generous social benefits and a relaxed attitude towards work requirements, aiming at 'autonomy' as its core value. Analysis of OECD data circa 1993 shows that a work-welfare classification successfully locates most of the countries in their traditional regime types. It also shows the Netherlands as an instance of the new regime type, effectively promoting the three key components of post-productivist autonomy: income adequacy, temporal adequacy and minimimal conditionality.

Different welfare regimes differ in many important respects. One which has come to recent prominence, among welfare theorists and practitioners alike, is the way in which they articulate the demands of work and welfare. [1] Liberals rally to the slogan, 'Work, not welfare'. Under a liberal welfare regime, people are supposed to earn their living on the labour market, and public welfare programmes are supposed to serve only as a residual fall-back. [2] The corporatist slogan is, 'Welfare through work'. This is Titmuss's 'industrial achievement' model, wherein a family's welfare entitlements are based on workplace contributions that the (typically male) breadwinner and his employer have made to the social insurance scheme throughout his working life. [3] The social democratic slogan is, 'Welfare and work'. Under a social democratic regime, welfare benefits are treated as citizens' rights; but citizens have a corresponding responsibility to make productive contributions whenever they reasonably can, and social d emocratic governments adopt 'active labour market policies' to help them do so. [4]

Importantly different though all of those approaches are, equally important is what they all have in common. They are all essentially 'productivist' . [5] They are all centrally concerned to ensure a smooth supply of labour to the productive sectors of the formal economy, and they are all anxious that the welfare state not get too badly in the way of that. In terms of an aphorism standardly presented as a plain truth of a priori logic, 'Without work there can be no welfare.' If no one produces anything, there will be nothing for government to redistribute to anyone. It would be simply self-defeating for government, in pursuit of social welfare objectives, to undermine the productive sector of the economy too badly. [6]

Of course, no welfare regime -- not even the liberal one -- accords absolute priority to economic productivity in the 'equity--efficiency tradeoff'. [7] Still, all the standard models of the welfare state see economic productivity as a great constraint to be reckoned with. They are all sensitive to the 'productivist problematic' in that sense. They all must, in one way or another, reassure themselves that productivity will not be too badly undermined by their social welfare policies.

Another broad class of 'post-productivist' models would take a fundamentally different attitude towards work and welfare. [8] Their slogan (in hyperbolic form, as slogans inevitably are) might be, 'Welfare without work.' [9] Under a post-productivist welfare regime, as under a social democratic one, people's welfare entitlements would be strictly independent of their participation in paid labour. [10] But unlike social democrats, post-productivists would make no extraordinary efforts to get people into work alongside that. [11]

Post-productivists would take a relatively relaxed attitude to relatively large numbers of people drawing welfare cheques rather than pay cheques for relatively protracted periods. Of course, not everyone could do so. Like everyone else, post-productivists need enough people to work in the productive sectors of the economy to finance public transfers to those not. Post-productivists are not anti-productivists. Their point is simply that economic productivity can be sustained at moderately high levels on the basis of far less than full employment, full-time for absolutely everyone of working age.

Post-productivists mostly see this as a matter of social choice, collectively opting for a more relaxed life. [12] Some of them say it is also a matter of economic necessity, supposing that there is and will remain a serious oversupply of labour in advanced capitalist economies. [13] That further claim may or may not be true: unprecedentedly high employment rates such as have been experienced in the United States in recent years might seem to belie that claim. But even if advanced capitalist economies can (at least in some periods) use all the labour they can get, the central post-productivist claim is simply that they need not. Economic productivity can be sustained perfectly well without trying to put everyone into full-time work.

The 'post-productivist problematic', thus construed, is very different from the productivist one. On the 'work' side of the ledger, the problem is presented more as one of rationing jobs than of filling them. [14] On the 'welfare' side of the ledger, the problem is presented as one of decoupling income from paid labour, securing a decent level of income for those who (by choice or necessity) fail to secure one for themselves in the ordinary labour market. [15]

Different welfare regimes are characterized by their differing priorities and core value commitments. Liberals focus on values of efficiency, corporatists on stability and social democrats on equality. [16] The core post-productivist value commitment is to autonomy. [17]

There are of course many ways to understand that notion, and many ways in which social arrangements might enhance or undermine it. [18] One person or group's autonomy can sometimes only be promoted at the expense of another's; [19] one aspect of a person's autonomy can sometimes be promoted only at the expense of some other aspects of that same person's autonomy; and so on. What sort of metric we might use in calibrating such autonomy-autonomy trade-offs has yet to be specified in any detail. Still, rough intuitive understanding of the notion is sufficient to allow us to say with some confidence that certain arrangements are more conducive than others to a fair share of autonomy all around.

Even if we cannot specify with any precision what exactly is required for autonomy, we can specify certain things that preclude people from being self-legislating agents with 'the capacity to reflect upon their lives and shape them'. [20] Dire economic necessity is clearly one among them. It is a boringly analytical truth that 'necessity is the enemy of choice', and hence of autonomy. So too is interpersonal domination, in its various forms. No one can be self-legislating who is utterly subject to the will of another.

Post-productivists build on such partial analyses of autonomy in framing their central policy concerns. They strive to secure people's autonomy by ensuring that people receive an income adequate to their needs, on terms which impinge minimally on their freedom of action. That later condition implies that their income must not be made 'conditional' on anything else: people must have an adequate income in their own right, independently of household attachments, of labour force participation, or of jumping through any bureaucratic hoops. [21]

'Impinging minimally on their freedom of action' also implies that people's income should come to them in such a way that leaves them with sufficient 'discretionary time' in which actually to make use of it. Time is the ultimately scarce good; and time is a crucial component in the fully-specified production function for any other good. [22] People can be, and often are, 'time poor' as well as 'money poor'. [23] Controlling how people spend their time is an important element of social control and a significant barrier to their full autonomy. [24] Post-productivists are acutely sensitive to all these issues.

These, then, are the three principal policy priorities which follow from post-productivists' concern with autonomy. First, they want income adequacy. Secondly, they want temporal adequacy. And thirdly, they want both to be provided in a way which involves minimal conditionality.

Such post-productivist priorities have never been fully and formally embraced by social policy makers anywhere in the world. Still, intimations can be found. I shall suggest that - on the work-welfare side of the social equation - the Netherlands in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided a fair indication of what post-productivism might look like in practice. [25] Those who suppose that the post-productivist ideal is impossibly Utopian should look to the Netherlands in that period and think again. [26]

The strategy of this article is as follows. First, I shall sketch one very simple way of operationalizing a work-welfare typology of welfare regimes and show that that typology effectively replicates all the coventional welfare-regime clusters. Refining the 'work' variable in the next section makes the Netherlands stand out even more clearly in post-productivist ways. Looking at the performance of that unique exemplar of the post-productivist regime, it seems to have proven unusually successful at promoting 'autonomy' along all the dimensions of concern to post-productivists, ensuring both income adequacy and temporal adequacy in ways which are minimally conditional and hence autonomy-respecting. The article proceeds to a brief discussion of how that came about in the Netherlands and what has happened there since (which might best be seen as a shift from a 'basic-income post-productivist regime' to a 'participation-income post-productivist regime'). It ends by recalling, however, that interesting though the case of the Netherlands may be, it is the larger work-and-welfare and associated time-and-money way of looking at welfare states - post-productivist potentially among them - that is of central concern.

OPERATIONALIZING A SIMPLE WORK-WELFARE TYPOLOGY

In comparative welfare state research, regime types are ordinarily identified through the use of multiple indicators, blended together in many complex ways. Esping-Anderson, for example, grounded his famous 'three worlds' categorization on seven basic indicators, which were themselves composites of up to three others. [27]

Against that background of complexity, it is gratifying how neatly those same countries sort themselves into fundamentally the same groupings on the basis of just two very simple 'work--welfare' dimensions. As a first cut, let me take the very simplest indicator along each of those dimensions. The 'welfare' measure which I shall use is the oldest one we have of social welfare regime types: the …