Mutual Benefit Societies Research Articles

Legal Boundaries, Organizational Fields, and Trade Union Politics: The Development of Railway Unions in the US and the UK

AbstractThroughout the nineteenth century, powerful railway unions in the USA and the UK cultivated an expansive system of voluntary sickness, death, unemployment, and superannuation benefits. By the early twentieth century, the movements had diverged: while the British Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants relinquished its commitment to voluntarism in favor of state healthcare and pensions, the American Railway Brotherhoods persisted along voluntarist lines, resisting social insurance in favor of exclusive schemes for their white male membership. What accounts for these diverging orientations? I highlight the importance of organizational forms as a lens for understanding comparative trade union strategy, emphasizing the role of law in designating legitimate forms of working-class association. I demonstrate that governing elites in both countries promoted voluntarism as a benign form of working-class organization throughout much of the nineteenth century. Consequently, I argue, early American and British trade unions adopted benefits in part because they enabled them to mimic the far more respected and legitimate friendly and fraternal mutual benefit societies. Toward the end of the century, the context had changed: while alternative organizational avenues were opened for trade unions in the UK, benefits presented an ongoing organizational lifeline for American unions. In defining and redefining the boundaries of legitimate forms of workers’ associations, legal decisions in both countries shaped not only trade union organizing strategies in the short run but also their positioning in broader social struggles.

The role of mutuals and community‐based insurance in social health protection systems: International experience on delegated functions

AbstractThe institutional architecture for the provision of social health protection varies across countries, as do the actors and organizations involved. In some countries, mutual benefit societies and community‐based health insurance organizations (CBHI) play a role in this area. In the 1990s, these were promoted particularly as a means of extending social security coverage, especially in sub‐Saharan Africa. In the current context, the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, as well as renewed political will to realize universal coverage, has led to a questioning of the role of mutuals/CBHI. However, the literature on the roles they play in national social security systems remains limited. For this scoping review, 49 documents were analysed, covering 18 countries worldwide, focused on the delegation of functions to mutuals/CBHI in national social health protection systems. The results reveal the dynamics of the delegation of functions within social protection systems over time and their implementation processes. These provide areas for reflection that can inform policy processes.

Pre-welfare state provision and adverse selection: enrolment in a Swedish nationwide health insurance society

Mutual benefit societies evolved as the major provider for sickness, accident and life insurance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major problems facing insurers was the risk of adverse selection, i.e. that unhealthy individuals had more incentives than healthy individuals to insure when priced for the average risk. By empirically examining whether longevity among insured individuals in a nationwide mutual health society was different from a matched sample of uninsured individuals, we seek to identify the presence of adverse selection. We find no compelling evidence showing that unhealthy individuals were more likely to insure, or reasons to believe that problems related to adverse selection would have been a major reason for government intervention in the health insurance market in Sweden.

The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans and Philhellenes, 1912–1913 by Peter S. Giakoumis

Reviewed by: The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans and Philhellenes, 1912–1913 by Peter S. Giakoumis Fevronia K. Soumakis (bio) Peter S. Giakoumis, The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans and Philhellenes, 1912–1913. Rochester, NY: Starry Night Publishing, 2020. Pp. iii + 686. 18 illustrations. Paper $24.00. Peter S. Giakoumis’s The Forgotten Heroes of the Balkan Wars: Greek-Americans andPhilhellenes, 1912–1913 is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the history of Greek America. Giakoumis sheds light on the little-known contributions of Greek American soldiers who returned to Greece to [End Page 469] fight in the Balkan Wars between 1912 and 1913. At the conclusion of those wars, the Greek kingdom nearly doubled in size and population through the incorporation of Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Epirus, Crete, and the eastern Aegean islands. In his 1964 history The Greeks in the United States, Theodore Saloutos describes the events leading up to the mobilization of approximately 45,000 men who returned to Greece to fight (Saloutos 1964, 96–117). Giakoumis expands upon Saloutos’s work by situating Greek American volunteers and philhellene supporters within the broader political and military context of the Balkan Wars. Giakoumis did not set out to write a monograph. Rather, his purpose was to uncover the voices and experiences of Greek American soldiers during the war. In doing so, he relies on extensive documentation: his book is a compilation of reprinted newspaper articles, photographs, reports, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and quotations from secondary sources. The author brings to life the “forgotten heroes” of Greek immigrant life as well as the unfolding social and political events in Greece and the United States. The history of the soldiers’ involvement in the Balkan Wars is told overwhelmingly through primary source documents and historical timelines. The book is divided into eight chapters with eight appendices that comprise nearly one-quarter of the book. The first chapter presents newspaper excerpts that detail world events leading up to the Balkan Wars. In the second chapter, the author explores Greek communal life in the United States between 1900 and 1913. Spyros Matsoukas, “the inspired apostle and patriotic missionary” figures prominently in the Greek-language newspapers: Matsoukas arrived in the United States from Greece in 1909 and embarked on an ambitious fund-raising tour that raised thousands of dollars toward the “regeneration and rehabilitation” of Greece, including the purchase of a battleship (35). In the same year, the first Greek American military clubs were established in major cities in anticipation of an impending war with Ottoman Turkey. These military units were made up of Greek military veterans as well as those without prior military training. They received ample coverage in the American press, as for instance on 9 October 1910, when the St. Louis Dispatch ran the headline “Greeks Arming and Drilling in St. Louis, Strange New Colony Ready to Attack Turkey—Subscribe for a Battleship—Greeks all over Southwest Co-Operate” (40). In addition to showcasing the activities of military units as reported by Greek-language and other American newspapers, Giakoumis rightly focuses on the important work of the Panhellenic Union in mobilizing Greek American volunteers during the Balkan Wars. The Union was established in New York in 1907 as a mutual benefit society and a centralized vehicle for uniting [End Page 470] and harnessing the financial capacities of Greek immigrants. The remainder of chapter 2 captures Greek immigrant life in many parts of the United States through the lens of the American press, focusing in particular on Greek Americans’ initial settlement, establishment of businesses and churches, and other important activities. Giakoumis asserts that, as war loomed on the horizon, there were three notable components that defined the Greek American response: “1. They raised over $400,000 USD. 2. Greek-American soldiers set out to fight in the war, even though a fair number of them did not have prior military service. 3. Most of them returned to the U.S. after the war” (103). On 17 September 1912 the Greek government issued mobilization instructions ordering Greek veterans, reservists, and men of military age to return to Greece to fight. Many Greeks in the United States...

The Role of Mutuals for Proximity-Based and Cooperative Welfare: The Case of Italian Mutual Benefit Societies

The outbreak of the Covid pandemic kicked off an extraordinary phase of challenges and needs as well as for the resources invested in welfare at the various levels of government, from the EU to local administrations. In this ongoing scenario, non-public actors such as Mutual Benefit Societies have taken a leading role in capitalizing on practices tested during the 2008 crisis and on the results achieved in terms of social innovation, codesign practices, and multi stakeholder governance. This article investigates the role of health and social welfare mutualism in generating virtuous interlocks and synergistic logics, capable of providing emerging needs with integrated responses, and discusses the growing relevance of cooperative mutualism as a possible ally in the renewal of welfare systems.

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

An overview on the history of actuarial calculus in Portugal until the late 19th century

Pension funds, namely survivors' pension funds were established in Portugal in the late 18th century, in mutual benefit societies. The first Portuguese life assurance companies were created in the first half of the 19th century but their activity was not very extensive. Only in the 20th century did both institutions become actuarially-based. In this paper, we provide an overview of the development of actuarial calculus in Portugal until the late 19th century, in order to contextualise the scientific progress of those institutions, mainly the former. This paper lays the groundwork for further research on the history of actuarial calculus in Portugal.

Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott

Reviewed by: Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal by Shennette Garrett-Scott Francille Rusan Wilson Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal. By Shennette Garrett-Scott. Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 273. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-231-18391-8; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-0-231-18390-1.) Shennette Garrett-Scott’s history of black women’s participation in the world of banking and finance from emancipation to the New Deal is richly detailed and nuanced. Employing a sophisticated intersectional analysis, Garrett-Scott argues that black women, their families, and their communities faced three mutually reinforcing barriers to fulfilling their dreams of economic security and meaningful citizenship: the U.S. financial system; gendered and class-based norms of domesticity and respectability; and the racist regimes of Jim Crow. Garrett-Scott makes a significant contribution to African American, economic, and women’s history in her deft explications of the ways race, gender, and class combined to make “complicated entanglements” with American capitalism (p. 4). She carefully explores the complex and sometimes conflicting ideals of the women bankers, clerks, depositors, and investors at the heart of her study who built and sustained the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, for more than three decades. In so doing, Garrett-Scott offers important insights into the myriad ways that American financial institutions both encouraged and subverted the desires of black citizens to fully participate in wealth building from emancipation to the 1930s. Garrett-Scott’s insistence that freedwomen and their daughters used both formal and informal banking and insurance structures, such as mutual benefit and benevolent societies, also broadens the traditional scope of histories of banking in the United States to include black women as hopeful developers of new insurance products, as bank founders, and as discerning and often cautious consumers. Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal supplies the wider context of southern black women’s often fraught relationships with banking and insurance products by beginning in the 1850s and using the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL, founded in 1869) as its central case study. Garrett-Scott expertly mines rich sources in the records of southern mutual benefit societies, fraternal organizations, black banks, and personal papers to recover women’s activities and ideals. In the early 1880s a young energetic and entrepreneurial normal school graduate, Maggie Lena Draper Mitchell Walker (1864–1934), became an officer of her IOSL lodge and a clerk for the central governing body. Over the next two decades, Walker rose to be the IOSL’s most respected official and made black women’s economic empowerment central to the organization’s purpose as its leader from the turn of the twentieth century to the dawn of the New Deal. Under Walker, the IOSL continued as a fraternal order and insurance company, under regulation in every state that had a lodge, and it pushed further [End Page 212] into the world of finance by establishing the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903. It was one of hundreds of black banks but the first to be chartered by a woman. At the same time, southern insurance and bank regulators increased their scrutiny of small undercapitalized financial institutions. Garrett-Scott keeps her focus on Walker’s balancing efforts to keep the IOSL’s communitarian principles for evaluating lenders’ worthiness while adopting a more stringent analysis of risk and reserves demanded by regulators. The St. Luke Bank and the IOSL became the largest private employer of black women in Richmond, but its prosperous niche in Richmond’s lively black economy also made it a target. An audacious attempt to compete directly with white Richmond merchants by opening an IOSL department store was short-lived. The Great Migration expanded the IOSL’s membership to more than 85,000 people nationwide with millions of dollars invested in deposits and insurance on the eve of the Depression, yet as Garrett-Scott observes, black financial success did not prove to be a panacea that alleviated the strictures of Jim Crow. In...

Private Health Insurance in France: Between Europeanization and Collectivization.

In France, private health insurance (PHI) has an exceptionally high level of coverage and accounts for 13.7% of health expenditures. A complementary and voluntary scheme, it has been historically dominated by nonprofit, mutual benefit societies. Over the past 20 years, however, the market share of for-profit insurance companies has increased by 47%. Financialization of the field developed, and competition based on new risk management strategies also increased. The broad aim of this paper is to characterize and to elucidate the causes of this trend. More specifically, we are interested in how and to what extent a series of supranational and national policies contributed to this situation. Our data come from three sources. We first reviewed documents published by health insurers, government reports, and newspaper articles. We then conducted two semistructured interview campaigns between September 2017 and May 2018. The first mostly covered private and public actors and their involvement in European Union (EU) policymaking (n = 21). The second series of interviews was conducted with another group of actors directly involved at the French level (n = 16). Our findings support preliminary observations. PHI in France, we argue, is indeed facing a development of competition and marketlike instruments. Four major policies (two EU directives and two national reforms) played a significant role in this outcome. Surprisingly, however, it has never been the purpose of legislators and policymakers: while EU directives created a regulatory framework for insurance activities within the Single Market, policies adopted at the national level initially aimed at improving health coverage. We show that it is the interactions and the noncoordination among all of these policies that explain their unexpected outcome. The trend described in this paper is twofold. The first is Europeanization, as PHI in France is increasingly affected by EU legislation. Since this framework tends to favor larger firms and for-profit companies, a reduction in statutory coverage can no longer be considered a quasi-neutral transfer from (publicly owned) social security to nonprofit providers. At the same time, PHI is shifting toward collectivization: as competition increases, complementary health coverage is becoming gradually standardized and based at the corporate level. Together, these changes are likely to reduce freedom of choice and individual welfare, an assumption supported by studies published on the most recent period.

La política matrimonial sobre los empleados públicos en Indias y los montepíos oficiales en las postrimerías del período colonial

Uno de los motivos principales de los montepíos oficiales coloniales creados en el siglo XVIII fue asegurar de manera prioritaria a esposas e hijos de los empleados públicos con destino en Ultramar. Son objetivos del presente trabajo analizar las condiciones que establecen los montepíos para el beneficio de las pensiones a viudas y huérfanos, y la normativa relativa a las interdicciones regias que afectaba directamente a los matrimonios de los socios en los montes y al régimen de viudedad. Se han consultado algunos reglamentos generados por aquellas instituciones, así como distintas leyes y reales órdenes, que supusieron más obstáculos que beneficios para los afiliados y las viudas y huérfanos de ministros y otros empleados de rangos inferiores. Se destaca el recurso ampliamente utilizado por el colectivo para obtener una pensión o ayuda por vía de gracia, a través del estudio de una serie de peticiones y expedientes consultados en el Archivo General de Indias.

Increasing emotional intelligence to decrease healthcare expenditures: How profitable would it be?

While numerous studies document the impact of emotional intelligence on health, no study has estimated the associated economic impact. As a result, the return on investment that could be expected from investing in improving emotional intelligence is unknown, and emotional intelligence research does not always make the expected impact on public policies. In this study, we examine how profitable it would be for governments or insurances to invest in improving people's emotional intelligence (EI). 9616 members of a Mutual Benefit Society completed a measure of EI that we coupled with their healthcare expenditures. Results first show that every 1% increase in intrapersonal EI corresponds to a 1% decrease in healthcare expenditures. Findings also show that the return on investment of increasing intrapersonal EI would vary as a function of people's educational level: the lower the level of education, the higher the expected return.

The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas ed. by María-Isabel Porras-Gallo and Ryan A. Davis (review)

Reviewed by: The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas ed. by María-Isabel Porras-Gallo and Ryan A. Davis Howard Phillips María-Isabel Porras-Gallo and Ryan A. Davis, eds. The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2014. viii + 282 pp. Ill. $99.00 (978-1-58046-496-3). “Spanish influenza had nothing ‘Spanish’ about it,” insisted an indignant Spanish medical historian nearly twenty years ago.1 Indeed, she might have added that even the label “Spanish” was a misnomer, being the product of the absence of censorship in neutral Spain during World War I, which allowed accounts of the outbreak there to be reported worldwide and not understated, as was the case when it came to describing its impact on countries at war. Yet, given the accusatory implication of the label, suggesting that Spain was primarily responsible for the pandemic, several Spanish historians have, since the 1990s, sought to establish just how severe the pandemic really was in that country. Written in Spanish, however, their findings remain little known in the English-speaking world; it is one of plusses of the volume under review that it makes a selection of their work available in English for the first time. In addition, the two medical historians who edited the volume have not limited the book’s coverage to Spain. Two of the specially commissioned thirteen chapters in the volume deal with Portugal, four with the ex-Iberian colonies of Brazil and Argentina, and two (rather incongruously) with Canada and English-language works of fiction featuring the 1918–19 pandemic as their subject. How the last two—illuminating though they are—fit into the book’s Iberian theme is not explained, neither is why they were included, given that both had already been published as journal articles. Maybe the fact that one (on the gendered nature of the anti-epidemic response in Montreal) originally appeared in French persuaded the editors to expand their efforts to overcome English-speakers’ unilingualism, which is such a barrier in a transnational topic par excellence like the “Spanish” flu. Given that only one other chapter is identified as having been translated into English, the ability of the Spanish-speaking authors to write in passable English (presumably with the editors’ assistance) is to be applauded. Apart from the opening chapter—which is not grounded in a national experience, and instead trains a twenty-first century biochemical eye on the 1918–19 pandemic as an example of an emerging infectious disease—the ten chapters that do focus on the Iberian or ex-Iberian world examine a wide array of responses to its presence. Some do so by looking at the pandemic in particular cities like Pamplona and Alicante in Spain and Belo Horizonte and Salvador in Brazil; others are broader in geographical scope, investigating, for instance, contemporary medical debates in Brazil on the aetiology of the epidemic or the way in which the experience of combating the epidemic in Portugal helped shape that country’s subsequent public health policies. Responses to the epidemic of three central but little-examined national institutions, the Church in Portugal, the army in Spain, [End Page 175] and the press in Spain and Brazil, are also put under the spotlight, though the analysis of the latter is at times overdetermined by the authors’ immersion in discourse theory. Sentences like “The discursive nucleus of prophylaxis as the surreptitious replacement for the voice of alarm presents an etymological angle” (p. 208) will need a second translation, this time into comprehensible English. Notwithstanding such occasional opacity, the volume extends not only the geographical range of the English-language historiography of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, but also its thematic scope through its application of hitherto little-used lenses like the Church, the army, the press, mutual benefit societies, feminism, and latter-day fiction. What it does not do, however, despite its claim to the contrary, is to demonstrate “the importance of the Iberian Peninsula as the point of connection, both epidemiologically and discursively, between Europe and the Americas in a context...

A nationally representative study of emotional competence and health.

Emotional competence (EC; also called "emotional intelligence"), which refers to individual differences in the identification, understanding, expression, regulation, and use of one's emotions and those of others, has been found to be an important predictor of individuals' adaptation to their environment. Higher EC is associated with greater happiness, better mental health, more satisfying social and marital relationships, and greater occupational success. Whereas a considerable amount of research has documented the significance of EC, 1 domain has been crucially under investigated: the relationship between EC and physical health. We examined the relationship between EC and objective health indicators in 2 studies (N1 = 1,310; N2 = 9,616) conducted in collaboration with the largest Mutual Benefit Society in Belgium. These studies allowed us (a) to compare the predictive power of EC with other well-known predictors of health such as age, sex, Body Mass Index, education level, health behaviors (diet, physical activity, smoking and drinking habits), positive and negative affect, and social support; (b) to clarify the relative weight of the various EC dimensions in predicting health; and (c) to determine to what extent EC moderates the effect of already known predictors on health. Results show that EC is a significant predictor of health that has incremental predictive power over and above other predictors. Findings also show that high EC significantly attenuates (and sometimes compensates for) the impact of other risk factors. Therefore, we argue that EC deserves greater interest and attention from health professionals and governments.

Le Yiddishland newyorkais: la mémoire enracinée (The Yiddishland New Yorker: the Ingrained Memory)

More than two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA between 1880 and 1910. Most of them settled in New York City, in the immigrant district of the Lower East Side. As they were uprooted, they tried to recreate a new version of their shtetl, the villages in which most Jews had been forced to reside in Eastern Europe. The Lower East Side thus became their new Yiddishland, their home, where most institutions were modeled after the original ones. Though American Jews had already provided for most necessary institutions like synagogues or schools, what they had established did not match Russian Jews’ habits – besides the fact that Yiddish played a major part in their lives, and was totally ignored by most American Jews. Thus the new immigrants built their own synagogues, schools, and mutual benefit societies. Yiddish culture was vibrant, thanks to Yiddish theatre and the Yiddish press that flourished for decades. Today, though most Jews left the Lower East Side long ago, there remain a few synagogues and shops that have become the symbols of an everlasting Jewish identity, traces of a cherished past, marked by hardship but also the joy of having finally found freedom after centuries of persecution. The Lower East Side has become the place where part of American Jewish history took place, and as such, is a sacred place. Hasia Diner called it the ‘Jewish Plymouth Rock’, underlining the idea that it is the foundation of the American Jewish community, that combines both American and Jewish identities. Jewishness in Europe has been wiped out in many countries, and the descendants of these Russian immigrants can no longer turn to their ancestors’ European ‘home’. It is the Lower East Side that plays the part of the alte heime (the old country), and as such, makes up part of their identity. Memory and identity are deeply rooted in the ‘sacred geography’ of the Lower East Side.

Michael Joseph McGivney − Założyciel Rycerzy Kolumba

Father Michael McGivney was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, USA, on August 12, 1852. His parents, Patrick and Mary (Lynch) McGivney, had arrived in the great 19th century wave of Irish immigration. Michael from an early age manifested a desire to be a priest, and despite the many difficulties of the economic situation was ordained a priest on December 22, 1877. Newly ordained Father McGivney began working in a parish in New Haven. The young vicar worked vigorously and with great commitment, battled alcoholism and intensively worked with youth and prisoners. The primary motivation for the Order was to be a mutual benefit society. As aparish priest in an immigrant community, McGivney saw what could happen to a family when the breadwinner died and wanted to provide insurance to care for the widows and orphans left behind. He himself had to temporarily leave his seminary studies to care for his family when his father died. In the late 19th century, Catholics in USA were regularly excluded from labor unions and other organizations that provided social services. In addition, Catholics were either barred from many of the popular fraternal organizations, or, as in the case of Freemasonry, forbidden from joining by the Catholic Church itself. McGivney wished to provide them an alternative. He also believed that Catholicism and fraternalism were not incompatible and wished to found a society that would encourage men to be proud of their American-Catholic heritage. On March 29, the Connecticut legislature granted a charter to the Knights of Columbus, formally establishing it as a legal corporation. The Order's principles in 1882 were “unity” and “charity”. The concepts of “fraternity” and “patriotism” were added later. Today, there are more than 1.8 million members. Membership is limited to “practical Catholic” men aged 18 or older. Councils have been chartered mainly in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, and from 2006 in Poland and from 2013 in Ukraine and Lithuania. The Knights of Columbus is the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organization. Father Michael McGivney fell sick with pneumonia in January 1890 while serving as pastor of St. Thomas Church in Thomaston, Conn. After months of attempted “cures” and laboring to carry on his pastoral duties, he died on August 14, two days past his 38th birthday. His funeral in his home parish in Waterbury was attended by throngs of faithful who recognized his virtue and sanctity. In March of 2008, Pope Benedict XVI bestowed the title “Venerable” on Father Michael McGivney.

The Economics, Culture, and Politics of Hospital Contributory Schemes: The Case of Inter-war Leeds

The funding of hospitals in inter-war Britain was transformed by the development of a range of schemes designed to raise money from patients in return for more or less assured access to treatment. Drawing on the nineteenth-century traditions of mutual benefit societies and thrift agencies as well as the culture of trade unions, co-operative societies, and friendly societies, they brought together small contributions to pool risk and costs for the workers. However, despite important recent research which has gone some way to opening up the operation of these schemes to greater scrutiny and understanding, their social, cultural, and political make-up have received limited attention and we know very little about who joined, how the schemes operated on a day-to-day basis, and the extent to which they became politicized in the increasingly class-ridden inter-war years. This article considers these themes through a case study of the Leeds and District Workpeople's Hospital Fund. Drawing on annual reports, the L...

Asymmetric Information and Countermeasures in Early Twentieth-Century American Short-Term Disability Microinsurance

ABSTRACT American workers and employers a century ago formed microinsurance funds to provide sick pay to temporarily disabled workers. This article analyzes a 1908 survey of several hundred such microinsurers. Theoretically, a single cross-section may yield evidence of asymmetric information, but cannot enable the separation of moral hazard and adverse selection effects. However, microinsurance fund managers and outside observers believed they did see separate such effects and so microinsurers created separate countermeasures to mitigate these problems. This article finds prima facie evidence of asymmetric information and suggestive evidence of the separability of informational asymmetries and the effectiveness of such countermeasures. INTRODUCTION Formation and management of microinsurance funds by ordinary workers who were not insurance professionals was the rule rather than the exception for much of the history of health and disability insurance. Early twentieth-century American workers operated hundreds of such sickness funds, in every region and in a variety of industries. These funds recognized the potential for sick pay to induce a moral hazard in their members that led to additional claims and paid days off, as well as the potential for adverse selection when membership was voluntary. In addition to such ex post strategies as close monitoring of claimants, disability microinsurers employed particular ex ante methods to limit claims that have not been carefully examined. This article examines ex ante efforts to discourage opportunistic behavior by structuring insurance contracts so as to mitigate inherent incentives toward moral hazard and adverse selection. Workers had operated microinsurance funds for centuries. Many guilds had provided sickness benefits to members since the Middle Ages. By the turn of the twentieth century, friendly societies in Britain provided wage replacement benefits to perhaps two-thirds of workingmen (Riley, 1997). In the United States skilled workers organized the first sickness benefit societies in the eighteenth century, and after the Civil War the idea of mutual sickness insurance had spread to industries such as cotton textiles and ferrous metals (Murray, 2007a, pp. 73-77). Nor does this organizational form belong exclusively to the past. The legal setting for Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations, recently adopted by American automakers and unions, was based on laws regarding mutual sickness benefit societies (Murray, 2007b). West Africans tired of waiting for government programs to appear have begun their own mutual sickness societies that cover over 200,000 people (Lacey, 2005). The notion of mutual microinsurance against the costs of ill health is not a peculiarly American idea, then, but it is one that Americans built upon to create the largest extragovernmental network of health insurance in the world. The beginnings of that network can be traced back to the sickness funds of the early twentieth century. DISABILITY MICROINSURANCE FUNDS In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans were constantly forming associations to deal with collective problems (Volume II, Part 2, Chapter 5). Recognizing the feasibility and efficiency of mutual sickness microinsurance societies, Americans organized groups to finance and operate them. By 1920 or so, these microinsurance funds covered a third of the industrial labor force--a share that grew from the late nineteenth century as the labor force itself grew absolutely by some 27 million (Murray, 2007a, p. 91). As shown by Emery and Emery (1999), Emery (1996), Beito (2000), and Murray (2007a), mutual sickness funds, sponsored by fraternal societies, employers, and labor unions, provided most short-term wage disability insurance in the United States until the mid to late 1930s, and did so effectively. A typical microinsurance fund could count its membership in the dozens. …

Oligarquias em sociedades de socorros mútuos (1854-1940)

The article deals with “oligarchies” in mutual benefit societies. Comparing these friendly societies from Rio Grande do Sul with other associations, or other places, or other times, one can see that it is difficult to set that they are “democratic” associations. This is going to be proved by the analysis of the leadership, electoral procedures, and general assemblies.

Religion and Development from Below: Independent Christianity in South Africa

AbstractMost of the literature on African independent churches (AICs) in South Africa has not paid much attention to their economic and developmental role. In contrast, this article will show how AICs are involved in important economic activities such as voluntary mutual benefit societies, savings clubs, lending societies, stokvels (informal savings funds), and burial societies that control millions of South African rand. In light of firsthand empirical research, this article investigates these kinds of activities, and analyses independent churches’ developmental role. This will allow us to better understand how these communities play a strong and supportive function among Africans in a deprived economic situation. In a period of socio-political transformation in South Africa, AICs are able to answer the needs of the people and their hunger to rebuild an identity. My major critique of classical research on AICs is the failure of the literature to address ‘social change’ in a theoretically adequate way, as something more than just descriptions of ‘traditional’ social structures away from interpretations of modernity.

« Nous protégeons l'infortune »: Les origines populaires de l'économie sociale au Québec (review)

Reviewed by: « Nous protégeons l'infortune »: Les origines populaires de l'économie sociale au Québec Geoffrey Ewen « Nous protégeons l'infortune »: Les origines populaires de l'économie sociale au Québec. Martin Petitclerc. Montreal: VLB éditeur, 2007. Pp. 278. $27.95 This book examines mutual benefit societies in Quebec, primarily among French Canadians, from the 1850s to the 1920s. A topic familiar to those interested in working-class practices in the United States and Britain, it has until now drawn relatively little sustained attention in Quebec. This is not an institutional study but an attempt to understand how these organizations fostered a culture of solidarity and resistance to the dominant liberalism of the day. Mutual benefit societies provided working-class men with a strategy to cope with some of the social consequences of industrialization. By paying initiation and monthly fees, members received a range of benefits. Most paid funeral expenses and provided a lump sum or pension to surviving wives or children, and some offered income in the case of unemployment, sickness, or old age. This was an alternative to the condescending and humiliating private charity offered by the churches and the middle class. Petitclerc agrees with other scholars that they acted as fictional families. In an age when many urban workers were rural-urban migrants or immigrants with few relatives near at hand, they supplied material assistance and a social network such as extended family had supposedly offered in the past. Petitclerc discusses the values that characterized pure mutualism in the nineteenth century. As class-conscious organizations often organized on craft or occupational lines, many were jealous of their [End Page 175] autonomy and, at least initially, restricted membership to wage earners or craftsmen. These were egalitarian non-profit organizations. Dues and benefits were set at equal amounts for each member, regardless of age. They cherished participatory democracy. Debates at monthly meetings initiated workers into the democratic process. Involvement in the administrative work of the society was mandatory. Solidarity was promoted by obliging members to try to find work for those who were unemployed. They visited the sick, to ensure that claims were legitimate to be sure, but also to offer moral support. Discipline was maintained by fines levelled against those who missed a meeting or the funerals of fellow members. The author argues that there was a sharp distinction between the practices that characterized these societies in the nineteenth century, compared to those that were adopted after 1900. In the early twentieth century many centralized their administration and depended on fulltime paid administrators rather than rank-and-file participation. They adopted new actuarial practices developed by private insurance companies that were promoted on the grounds that they would ensure a sounder financial base than older pay-as-you-go practices: This included graduated dues based on age and unequal benefit payments. These organizations focused more on life insurance and tended to avoid sickness benefits. The result was that many lost much of their original democratic and egalitarian character, and so they did less to strengthen the bonds of solidarity. Much of this characterized the movement elsewhere in North America, but two aspects distinguished it in Quebec. First, the Catholic Church was suspicious of secular organizations that included non-Catholics and recalcitrant Catholics. The author provides an excellent discussion of the tensions between one large society, the Union Saint-Joseph, and the archbishop of Montreal who demanded rule changes, an exclusively Catholic membership, and the appointment of chaplains who could attend and address their assemblies. Second, the Quebec government waited until 1899 to provide for a corporate legal identity that would facilitate the functioning of these organizations and their ability to use the courts. This was decades after similar legislation was passed in other North American jurisdictions such as Ontario and more than a century after it was in place in Britain. The issue of how widespread these societies were among wage earners is important to any assessment of their influence. Unfortunately there are no hard figures on membership in the nineteenth century. Thirty to forty societies were established in the [End Page 176] 1860s, and Petitclerc gives the impression that there was sustained growth (see...