After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment

Abstract

The current crisis of the welfare state has many roots -- global economic trends, massive movements of refugees and immigrants, popular hostility to taxes, the weakening of trade unions and labor parties, the rise of national and "racial"-ethnic antagonisms, the decline of solidaristic ideologies, and the collapse of state socialism. The family-wage ideal was inscribed in the structure of most industrial-era welfare states. That structure had three tiers, with social-insurance programs occupying the first rank. In the labor markets of postindustrial capitalism, few jobs pay wages sufficient to support a family single-handedly; many, in fact, are temporary or part-time and do not carry standard benefits. Feminists, therefore, are in a good position to generate an emancipatory vision for the coming period. They, more than anyone, appreciate the importance of gender relations to the current crisis of the industrial welfare state and the centrality of gender equity to any satisfactory resolution.

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