During the Great Depression of the 1930s firms laid off workers, cut wages and abandoned their welfare programmes.
It is the object of endless lectures about taxes and wages that are too high, welfare and pension benefits that are too generous, east German states that have become subsidy junkies and a labour market that is irredeemably sclerotic.
Single mothers leaving welfare tend to earn low wages, from which they have to pay all the costs of child care.
ECONOMIST: The working poor need help, and in all kinds of ways
Much of the money made by the state firms is being soaked up by payments for welfare functions, including the wages of laid-off workers.
In Europe, insiders have permanent jobs with nigh-impregnable security, high wages, guaranteed pensions and a still generous welfare state that they know how to exploit.
Welfare benefits are higher than average wages in many countries.
Minimum wages, they argue, can save money on welfare spending.
Mr Stoiber says he will reduce the burden of welfare contributions to less than 40% of average wages.
Employers, who normally share with the worker welfare costs amounting to nearly 42% of gross wages, would pay a flat-rate contribution of 25% on jobs up to euro400, reduced to 12% for mini-jobs (cleaners and au pairs, for example) in private households.
That will scupper the government's pledge to bring health and other social-welfare contributions below the equivalent of 40% of gross wages.
On March 4, 1913, President William Howard Taft signed a bill establishing the United States Department of Labor -- an agency charged with promoting the welfare of American workers and ensuring their efforts are rewarded with fair wages and real protections.
The string of measures was a strange mixture of well-meaning steps at social reform, half-baked schemes for quasi-socialist industrial planning, regulation to protect consumers, welfare programs to help the hardest hit, government support for the cartelization of industry, higher wages for some, lower wages for others, on the one hand government pump priming, on the other public economy.
FORBES: Kaiser's Postulate: Bringing Free Market Economics to South America
He said opposing the 1% benefits cap meant Labour "believe welfare claimants should see a bigger rise than the 1% that public sector workers will get on their wages - which they support".
应用推荐