Managing during the crisis: Factors coming from inside the society

Abstract

This study summarizes the arguments and counter-arguments within the scientific debate on the welfare state issue. After the years of development of the welfare state caused by the development of the economy in the post-war years, when social rights became a new form of property, the 1970s came a period of economic crisis. The welfare state crisis comes with the economic crisis and is criticized by both the right and left of the political spectrums. This research checks whether changes in the labor market caused by the workforce transition from the environment of production to the environment of services greatly affect individuals and families. The research subject is labor migration and an increase in employment in the service sector versus a decrease in employment in the production sector caused by the arrival of the fourth and, according to some experts, the fifth industrial revolution. Other factors that are the subject of the research and are responsible for the crisis of the welfare state are the family crisis and the population’s aging. These factors individually do not threaten the functioning of the welfare state, but as a complex that creates a load in a common and synchronous time frame, they are highly dangerous for the welfare state. The main goal of this research is to point out the most serious factors coming from within a society that affects the functioning of the welfare state. The literature analysis on the welfare state, social economics, social policy, and labor migration confirmed the enormous increase in pressure on the welfare state in the last two decades. This study deals with the idea of the complete demise of the welfare state when multinational insurance companies take over its function. Another option is supplementing or replacing some parts of the welfare state with another alternative. Such an alternative is shown, for example, by the measures that were used during the C-19 pandemic in the Slovak Republic. This is mainly about the financial aid that the state distributed to entrepreneurs who were forced to suspend the operation of their businesses due to the pandemic. Such assistance had many common denominators with the Unconditional Basic Income project, which is increasingly popular in the world and is proving to be a suitable supplement to the social system and a supplement to the welfare state. The results of study could be useful both for student practice and social and scientific fields. At the end of the research, the study is dedicated to finding a solution to help the welfare state in the given situation.