Left out: Policy Diffusion, Institutional Isomorphism, and the Exclusion of Black Workers from Unemployment Insurance
Background and Purpose:
Social workers, social scientists, and historians have long understood the US welfare state not as a purely redistributive system that protects Americans from the risks inherent in a market society, but rather as a system of stratification that reifies the social hierarchies of US society with means tested programs targeting a largely non-white and female lower class and more generous social insurance programs supporting a middle class composed largely of white, male workers. The story of how black workers came to be excluded from Old Age Insurance is well known, but the exclusion of this group from the other key social insurance program of the 1935 Social Security Act, unemployment insurance (UI), is less well documented.
Most scholars have identified the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants, a majority of black workers in the 1930s, from social insurance programs during the New Deal as a cause of the racially divided US welfare state. The most prominent explanation for these exclusions is that they originated in a Southern-dominated Congress and were designed to effectively exclude a majority of African-American workers from the new social order. Understanding the cause of these exclusions is important for social workers as the work-based social safety net continues to expand.
Methods:
This paper utilizes a mixed methods approach. To understand the actions of Congress, social insurance technical experts, and social reformers, data has been gathered from archival sources, Congressional testimony, and contemporary academic publications. To understand the trends in UI coverage internationally, a dataset has been created based on Social Security Programs Throughout the World, a biennial report of the Social Security Administration and the International Social Security Association that has been regularly published since 1937. Information from these reports is organized into country-year observations (n=839) and contains variables regarding the type of unemployment compensation program in use and the categories of workers included and excluded.
Findings:
By examining the exclusions of the US unemployment insurance program in an international context and noting the strong transatlantic ties of social insurance technical experts, the conventional story of racially motivated exclusions becomes less compelling. Instead, it is clear that the exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic servants was made at the behest of technical experts in accordance with the experience of European UI programs. The exclusion of these workers is not a case of domestic policy innovation as commonly taught, but rather an example of institutional isomorphism operating through the mechanism of policy diffusion.
Conclusions and Implications:
By taking an “off the shelf” approach to policy making, our social policy predecessors needlessly created deep and enduring patterns of racial inequality. This new understanding of how the US welfare state fractured along racial lines at its very inception serves as a warning to contemporary policy experts who continue to look towards European nations as exemplar welfare states and social workers engaged in program replication at any level.