Social Rights and Human Welfare

Hartley Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317747499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An essential introduction to rights-based approaches in social policy, this text critically explores how social rights underpin human wellbeing. It discusses social rights as rights of citizenship in developed welfare states and as an essential component within the international human rights and human development agenda. It provides a valuable introduction for students and researchers in social policy and related applied social science, public policy, sociology, socio-legal studies and social development fields.

Taking an international perspective, the first part of the book considers how social rights can be understood and critiqued in theory – discussing ideas around citizenship, human needs and human rights, collective responsibility and ethical imperatives. The second part of the book looks at social rights in practice, providing a comparative examination of their development globally, before looking more specifically at rights to livelihood, human services and housing as well as ways in which these rights can be implemented and enforced. The final section re-evaluates prevailing debates about rights-based approaches to poverty alleviation and outlines possible future directions.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of social rights in theory and practice. It questions recent developments in social policy. It challenges certain dominant ideas concerning the basis of human rights. It seeks to re-frame our understanding of social rights as the articulation of human needs and presents a radical new 'post-Marshallian' theory of human rights.

Part One
Social rights in theory

1
The Social Rights of Citizenship

The term, ‘social rights’, is subject to a variety of interpretations, depending on the context. It may be applied to specialised individual entitlements specifically created by social legislation in the context of a ‘welfare state’. As such they are rights relating to social security, employment protection, housing, education, health and social care. These are rights that originated largely in the course of the twentieth century in industrialised capitalist states, but which are now also emerging in various forms and to varying degrees in developing countries. However, the term social rights may also be used in a normative sense to refer more generally to societal objectives and the levels of social protection that are, or perhaps ought to be, mutually guaranteed within all human societies. Social rights can emerge, arguably, at an informal local level through the customary expectations that people have of one another within the communities in which they live, or at a formal global level as the subject of internationally negotiated treaties, such as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Finally, the terms social rights and welfare rights may be used to refer to an arena of vocational or professional practice in which activists, development workers, advice workers and welfare lawyers engage. Such rights can be more than technical phenomena or abstract principles, but practical tools and discursive resources for campaigning, negotiation and advocacy – particularly by or on behalf of vulnerable, poor or disadvantaged people.

Inevitably, these meanings intersect and overlap, and this book will be concerned with all of them. Rights are central to social policy not only because they relate to the substantive entitlements to which the policy making process gives rise, but because they provide the basis of the principled claims that drive social policy debates and practices. Lawyers sometimes define the first kind of rights as ‘positive’ or ‘black-letter’ rights and the latter as ‘moral’ rights. Social scientists tend to recognise that all our rights are in one way or another socially or ideologically constructed. We shall be concerned throughout this book with interactions between competing conceptions of social rights and the effects of these interactions on how social rights are framed and how they work in practice.

In this introductory chapter, however, we shall start with a conceptual discussion of the social rights of citizenship. I shall discuss the way in which the concept of social rights emerged explicitly, as a defining feature of citizenship under welfare state capitalism, before reflecting on the prior origins of citizenship rights and finally, analysing recent developments affecting the nature of social rights in the welfare states of the global North. We shall broaden the discussion in later chapters to consider the place of social rights within the international human rights agenda and to reflect on the deeper origins of social rights.

The coming of welfare capitalism

Social rights according to the sociologist T. H. Marshall (1950) were the unique achievement of the twentieth-century capitalist welfare state. His exemplar was the British case. In Britain the struggle to achieve civil rights (i.e. civil liberties and property and legal rights) had by and large succeeded by the eighteenth century, and the struggle to achieve political rights (i.e. voting and democratic rights) took major strides in the nineteenth century. The establishment of social rights – that is entitlement to basic standards of education, health and social care and housing and income maintenance – was completed with the formation of the ‘modern’ welfare state after the end of the Second World War. Marshall may be accused of overgeneralisation, particularly in his characterisation of different historical periods, but this ought not to obscure the importance of his argument and the idea that the coming of the capitalist welfare state – in Britain and elsewhere – had ushered in a new form of rights for a new economic and social order. His contentions were first, that social conflicts and inequalities based on class divisions had been or could be ‘ameliorated’ through the development of citizenship, and second, that full citizenship required three components – not just civil and political rights, but social rights as well.

Beyond class society?

The first of these points finds support among many commentators and supporters of the welfare state, including those on the social democratic left (George & Wilding, 1994: ch. 4). However, T. H. Marshall was a social liberal rather than a social democrat. His use of the term amelioration had been directly drawn from the works of the nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall. It was in a series of lectures in memory of Alfred Marshall that T. H. Marshall advanced the proposition that the post–Second World War welfare state as founded in Britain represented the ‘latest phase in an evolution of citizenship which has been in continuous progress for some 250 years’ (1950: 7). In so doing, he claimed he was addressing a question raised by his erstwhile namesake some seven decades before, namely ‘whether the amelioration of the working classes has limits beyond which it cannot pass [or] whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, till by occupation at least, every man is a gentleman’ (Alfred Marshall 1873, cited in T. H. Marshall, 1950: 4–5).

The equality foreseen by Marshall, the nineteenth-century economist, was an equality of opportunities and status rather than a material equality of incomes or wealth. Technological advances he believed would ameliorate the arduous nature of manual labour, while compulsory elementary education would civilise the manners of the working classes. Marshall, the twentieth-century sociologist, similarly believed that ‘equality of status is more important than equality of income’ (1950: 33). The development of a range of social services and cash benefits financed through taxation clearly did involve an equalisation of incomes, but this was not its only or even its primary achievement:

What matters is that there is a general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilised life, a general reduction of risk and insecurity, an equalisation between the more and the less fortunate at all levels – between the healthy and the sick, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the active, the bachelor and the father of a large family. Equalisation is not so much between classes as between individuals within a population which is now treated for this purpose as though it were one class.

(Marshall, 1950: 33)

The argument then is that social rights could abolish inequality based on class difference. Social policy scholars, such as Titmuss (1958, 1968), agreed that the development and maintenance of state welfare provision constituted a moral imperative insofar as it represented the peaceful means of mitigating the unacceptable consequences of class inequality; social rights were a civilising force which compensated for the diswelfares of the industrialised capitalist system.

One British Labour politician, Anthony Crosland (1956), went so far as to argue that the development of social legislation and the rise of labour and trade union power could together shift the balance so far against the old capitalist class system as to promise the imminent realisation of a democratic form of socialism. In reality, however, T. H. Marshall’s concept of citizenship was not at all consistent with socialist pretensions. Marshall saw citizenship, particularly through the effects of a truly meritocratic state education system, as an alternative instrument of social stratification (1950: 39). Certainly, he believed the emergence of social rights signalled the extent to which laissez faire capitalism had been superseded. But the result would be a society based on status and desert, rather than contract and mere good fortune: ‘Social rights in their modern form imply an invasion of contract by status, the subordination of market price to social justice, the replacement of the free bargain by the declaration of rights’ (1950: 40). Paradoxically, shorn of any commitment to economic equality, this liberal view of social rights can be rendered consistent or can at least cohabit with a form of one-nation conservatism and its ideal of a non-conflictual or stable social order.

Unstable citizenship?

Capitalism of course never did achieve a non-conflictual social order. David Lockwood has argued that the structuring of life chances in capitalist welfare states was ‘the direct result of the institutionalisation of citizenship under conditions of social and economic inequality’ (1996: 532) and that the tension between state and market was managed by ‘the fine-tuning of social rights’ (1996: 535). The result he called a process of ‘civic stratification’, which depends on the one hand on the extent to which citizenship rights are allowed to develop and on the other the nature of the relative gains and deficits citizens might experience depending on their social status. We shall see in Chapter 4 that the administrative power of the capitalist welfare state can be implicated in the perpetuation or shaping of social divisions. Class structures have been changing, but despite the welfare state, socio-economic class status still strongly correlates with an unequal distribution of life chances (Crompton, 2008). Social inequality has lately accelerated throughout much of the developed world (OECD, 2011).

Elements of the instability of post-industrial capitalist societies can be said now to stem from consequences of individual risks, rather than active class conflict (Beck, 1992). The predominant fault line in the occupational structures of post-industrial capitalist societies is now passive in nature and lies not between ‘workers’ and ‘bosses’ or even between manual and non-manual workers, but between securely employed, highly trained and well paid ‘core’ workers on the one hand and precariously employed, low skilled and poorly paid ‘peripheral’ workers on the other (Standing, 2009, 2011). Changes in class structure have been driven by changes in the nature of capitalism itself, rather than by any direct influence of the welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1999).

For the moment, however, let us return to the second limb of T. H. Marshall’s argument, which was that civil, political and social rights are all necessary to a mature form of citizenship. Marshall recognised the sense in which citizenship based on a broad equality of rights might potentially conflict with the workings of a capitalist market economy. Nevertheless, he stressed that full citizenship need not inhibit a market economy, provided a state of equilibrium can be sustained between political, social and civil rights in what he characterised as a ‘hyphenated’ society, ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’. The hyphens in this formulation symbolise the interconnectedness of a democratic polity, a welfare state and a mixed economy, all functioning in harmony (1981). The maintenance of a flourishing ‘hyphenated’ society is therefore a matter of achieving the right balance between the constituent components of citizenship. Upon this premise, if too much emphasis is being placed in capitalist societies on our rights as producers and consumers and not enough upon our rights to participate in democratic decision making and our rights to guaranteed living standards and social provision, in as much as this creates an imbalance between the civil, political and social aspects of citizenship, it poses a potential threat to stability. Similarly, social upheavals in post-communist regimes, such as the former Soviet Union, might be regarded as a consequence of violent shifts in the equilibrium of citizenship. Under former Stalinist regimes, social rights had been guaranteed, while civil and political rights were either suppressed or neglected, but subsequently political rights were promoted at the expense of social rights and without an adequate framework of civil rights (Deacon, 1993).

Marshall’s sociological model of citizenship, though highly influential, has attracted criticism on a number of counts. First, feminists in particular have complained that his analysis failed to address social divisions other than class: his ‘image of an ideal citizenship’ (1950: 29) did not ostensibly or necessarily include women, disabled people or migrants on equal terms as indigenous, able-bodied male citizens (e.g. Lister, 2003). These are issues to which I shall return in Chapter 4. Second, though Marshall theorised the functional role of social citizenship in relation to the amelioration of social class, he failed to account for the impact which social classes have had on the development of citizenship (Bottomore, 1992). The development of civil rights and the beginnings of political rights resulted, as we shall see, from the struggles of an emerging capitalist class to wrest power from the feudal aristocracy. The more recent development of political rights and aspects of the beginnings of social rights owed much to the struggles of working-class organisations – the Chartists, the trade unions and socialist and social democratic parties. Marshall expressed the conflicts from which citizenship has emerged in terms of clashes between opposing principles rather than between opposing classes. The development and maintenance of capitalist welfare states has been analysed, from differing perspectives, by other commentators (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1990; Korpi, 1983; Offe, 1984) with reference on the one hand to political pressures applied directly through the democratic process and on the other to the influence of corporatism. Corporatism, in this context, is the process of tri-partite negotiation between the representatives of capital, labour and the state (customarily referred to as ‘social partners’). What is often involved in the development of social rights is not an impersonally established equilibrium between formal principles, but a directly negotiated compromise between substantive class interests.

A third objection is that Marshall’s account of state and market was, at best, reductionist. It may be observed that the antagonism between state and market to which social citizenship can supposedly bring equilibrium is not a simple opposition, since in some circumstances responsive market systems can and do fulfil social needs, while in others authoritarian state welfare systems can frustrate them (Hindess, 1987). What is more, there are many places on Earth where effective markets and legitimate state apparatuses upon which Marshall’s citizenship ideal depend simply do not exist (Gough et al., 2004). Finally, Marshall, at the time he presented his theory of social rights, was strangely silent with regard the contemporaneous emergence of an international human rights regime (U. Davy, 2013) and the idea of rights that are universal. And six decades later in a ‘Globalizing World’ (Fraser, 2010), his nation-based approach to social rights has, arguably been superseded (Dean, 2013).

This last argument is one to which we shall return in later chapters. But rather than look to future global trends, we need for a moment to consider where conceptions of and assumptions about ‘citizenship’ and ‘rights’ first came from and how they have evolved and changed in the capitalist welfare states where they originated.

The origins and species of rights

Rights and citizenship are intimately linked and the orthodox assumption is that their common origins lie in antiquity and the creation in the fifth century BCE of the Athenian city state, where rights of citizenship were implied through rules of self-governance adopted by a patrician male elite (Held, 1987: ch. 1). Such rights did not extend beyond the city. Nor for that matter did they extend to women and slaves within the city. Citizenship entailed membership of a distinctly exclusive political community, but also a practice based on principles and procedures. Later forms of citizenship similarly invoke principles or doctrines on the one hand and provide procedures for the making and resolution of claims on the other. Through the dialectical engagement between doctrines and claims emerge competing understandings of rights, both formal and substantive. Our rights may be determined by abstract or constitutional doctrines, or they may arise from claims or political demands. They may be framed in terms of formal freedoms or in terms of substantive entitlements.

The significance of these distinctions – between doctrinal and claims-based rights and between formal and substantive rights – may be considered in both historical and jurisprudential contexts.

Doctrines and claims: The emerging significance of property

It is important to recognise that what might once have been successfully demanded from below as claims-based rights may through processes of compromise and acceptance assume the character of doctrinal orthodoxies handed down from above, while conversely rights that are conferred by doctrinal decree may establish themselves or be adapted as a basis for formulating or articulating new claims-based demands. Historically speaking, the form of rights in ‘h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acronyms
• Preface
• Part One Social rights in theory
• Part Two Social rights in practice
• Part Three Re-thinking social rights
• Bibliography
• Index