Social Stratification, Welfare, and Social Policy Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Elisabeth Anderson from NYU Abu Dhabi presents "Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State".

This is an in-person only event.

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Abstract

The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But regulatory welfare actually began a half century earlier with the passage of child labor laws. Middle-class reformers in Europe and the U.S. defined child labor as a threat to social order, built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks, and instituted new employment protections that initiated the partial decommodification of "free" labor. Later in the century, now with the help of an organized working class, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions.  Through seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes, Agents of Reform (Princeton University Press, 2021) moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with individual agency to produce pathbreaking institutional change.