Employee Welfare in the Shadow of the Post-war Welfare State

Abstract

In Chap. 4, the discussion of employee welfare moves forward to the period between 1945 and 1980. In the post-war years, employee welfare matured in Fordist labour regimes and became a feature of professionalised human resource management. It was supplemented by a public sector model, which also instituted a particular form of employment relationship: permanent, lifelong and secure employment. Until around 1960, British and German companies had been broadly engaged in consolidating themselves after the war and used employee welfare to strengthen their workforce while in some cases also providing basic essential services where these had been lost. Employee welfare still resembled an industrial form, catering to a relatively homogeneous group of workers and providing for old welfare risks. In the 1960s and 1970s, economic, political and social changes affected the nature of employee welfare to become more influenced by service work. The risks in the growing service economy were different and thus new to the welfare state, including a higher share of female workers, who had different states of dependencies than men. This trend in employee welfare forms was intensified by the expansion of both welfare states and the growing affluence of workers in the post-war era. This in particular rendered some traditional employee welfare benefits impracticable, such as corporate housing programmes or general health care facilities.