How and why are European welfare systems and the labour market changing? How do they affect the daily lives of those facing unemployment or precarious work? Anne Gray shows how the idea of unemployment benefits as a right is evolving into a regime closer to American 'workfare'. She explains how this policy forces the unemployed into low paid, temporary or part-time jobs associated with the new 'flexible' labour market. Drawing on unemployed people's own accounts of their experiences - in the UK, Germany, France and Belgium - Gray illustrates the job market as seen from the dole queue. Exploring the changing nature of work in Europe, Gray reveals why is there a shortage of full-time permanent jobs, what is to be done, and what the future holds for labour market regulation in Europe. Providing clear explanations about shifts in welfare policy, this book is ideal for trade unionists, activists and students, and makes an important contribution to wider debates on globalisation and the future of work.

Virtually everyone agrees that our health care system needs reform. But what kind of reform? Some want a return to the system that prevailed in the 1950s. Others would like to see the adaptation of the government-run systems prevalent in other countries. The latter, national health insurance or single-payer health insurance, appears to be gaining ground in the United States. Before Americans find themselves participating in a health care system that has failed in every country it was adopted, we should be asking ourselves whether such a system is effective and efficient. In Lives at Risk, the authors examine the critical failures of national health insurance systems without focusing on minor blemishes or easily correctable problems. In doing so, the purpose is to identify the problems common to all countries with national health insurance and to explain why these problems emerge. Most national health care systems are in a state of sustained internal crisis as costs rise and the stated goals of universal access and quality care are not met. In almost all cases, the reason is the same: the politics of medicine. The problems of government-run health care systems flow inexorably from the fact that they are government-run rather than market driven.

This book describes the tremendous impact of housing policy, which oftentimes discourages communities and inhibits family stability. The book traces housing history from the Victorian Era in London to the present. It gives special attention to Washington, D.C., presenting various grassroots programs that have grown to provide community support in severely impoverished areas. The Unintended Consequences gives important firsthand accounts of federal urban initiatives and explains the importance of nurturing community. Historical analysis is blended with interviews with public housing residents and officials to supplement the firsthand account of primary author James Banks. This book is appropriate for urban planners, policy makers, advocates for the urban poor, as well as students of sociology and urban studies in the United States.

By virtue of a quiet revolution over nearly a hundred years, Britain has evolved into a home-owning society. The impact of this on British society has been barely understood, but it has helped to shape the Blair 'workfare' state and to draw Britain firmly towards the English-speaking world while distancing the country from other European nations. Taking a policy-analysis approach and drawing from the burgeoning comparative literature, this textbook explores what has happened to British housing since 1900. Providing more than an account of British housing, the book reinterprets the housing system in a way that is sensitive to the historical and cultural contexts of British policy and society. Examining the nature of 'housing' and how it helps to shape society, Lowe sets British housing in its global context. Written in an accessible style, Housing Policy Analysis leads the reader through the basic concepts to more challenging themes. It will be important reading for students of housing studies, social policy, public policy and applied social studies.

"Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World" represents the second stage of an ongoing research project studying the relationship between social security and labor. In the first volume, Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise revealed enormous disincentives to continued work at older ages in developed countries. Provisions of many social security programs typically encourage retirement by reducing pay for work, inducing older employees to leave the labor force early and magnifying the financial burden caused by an aging population. At a certain age there is simply no financial benefit to continuing to work.
In this volume, the authors turn to a country-by-country analysis of retirement behavior based on micro-data. The result of research compiled by teams in twelve countries, the volume shows an almost uniform correlation between levels of social security incentives and retirement behavior in each country. The estimates also show that the effect is strikingly uniform in countries with very different cultural histories, labor market institutions, and other social characteristics.

Under Siege is one of the first books of its kind. It vividly describes the devastating consequences of living in a public housing community damaged by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, government cutbacks, and other alarming structural transformations that currently plague the United States and Canada. Walter DeKeseredy and his colleagues build on the rich theoretical perspectives developed by feminist scholars-as well as those constructed by Jock Young, Robert Sampson, and William Julius Wilson-as they present both the qualitative and quantitative results of a case study of six public housing estates located in an impoverished urban area. This groundbreaking book provides an in-depth analysis of predatory crime victimization, intimate partner victimization, public racial and sexual harassment, and the relationship of all these harms to the residents' perceptions of their neighborhood social disorganization/collective efficacy. Under Siege is uniquely valuable both for its rich theoretical basis and for its transparent presentation of the authors' research methodology. It is a thought-provoking sociological contribution that offers progressive strategies for ameliorating both poverty and crime in North American public housing complexes.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in children born out of wedlock. Such a situation is of great concern because the poorest demographic group in America is children in single-parent families, which puts great strain on the welfare rolls and adversely impacts the economy. And one should not neglect the influence on the children, who often go through life without a father. Everyone who fathers a child is obligated to at least contribute financially to child support, rather than dodge that responsibility. Consequently, the government has increased its efforts in child support enforcement by establishing paternities through DNA tests and attempting, with the aid of state and local agencies, to apprehend so-called 'dead-beat dads'. This book presents background information on paternity establishment and its process, while describing several relevant federal programs and policy options. Included are analyses of genetic testing and the legislative history of this issue. With the increase in single-parent families and the problems they face, the topic of paternity establishment holds great importance to today's society, and this book is a valuable tool in understanding the facts around the issue.

Sure to raise the hackles of many across the nation is any mention of welfare and federal entitlement programs. All agree that no one should be on welfare, but the question is what to do about those who really need the income provided by the federal government. In 1996, welfare reform legislation enacted the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which is a block grant provided to the state with a chief purpose of ending the dependence of needy families on government assistance. Among the principal groups impacted by the welfare reform legislation are female headed families with children. Recent analyses have revealed that single mothers are more likely to be working than in the past and that welfare receipt among poor families with women at the head has declined. Despite these trends, single mothers' net income has shown no increase, suggesting that full-time work may not be enough to eliminate poverty and welfare dependency among female families. This book reports on several current trends in the economic status of female headed families, providing an overview of federal programs and their effects along with several useful charts based on Census Bureau information. The combination of statistics and evaluation make for an important contribution to the study of initiatives to defeat poverty and income deficiencies in a significant part of the population.

This book offers a clear and coherent guide to working with families for practitioners and students in social work, health, counselling and related professions. It brings together recent thinking on the historical and contemporary constructions of the family in such a way as to provide a helpful framework for practitioners working in a variety of settings in the field. It offers up-to-date information on political, legislative and theoretical frameworks, and it reviews and illustrates a wide range of approaches and practice skills for working with families with different problems in different contexts.

"The text is filled with good advice, practical examples, and provides a strong grounding in TFM, as well as its theoretical underpinnings. It is useful for students and practitioners alike. The text is accessible and well-written. . ."
--RESOLVE, Family Mediation Canada

"This is an important text, making complex ideas easily accessible and thought provoking. It will certainly become essential reading for family mediation practitioners and of interest to therapists. . . "
--Magazine for Family Therapy & Systemic Practice, UK

Therapeutic Family Mediation is a practice-based text grounded in a therapeutic family mediation (TFM) model created by the authors. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the model, complete with clinical examples and practice strategies. The authors include a detailed review of the model's five stages, accompanied by a discussion of theoretical underpinnings, practice techniques, the mediation of parenting and financial plans, the importance of cultural diversity, and research trends based on a thorough review of the literature. Contemporary issues associated with family mediation in the 21^st century are employed to illustrate the model in action with a full-length case presentation.

• Guides the reader through the authors' five-step model: Intake/Assessment, Pre-Mediation, Negotiation, Termination, and Follow-Up
• Outlines the use of parenting plans and financial plans
• Explores patterns of conflict and monetary issues
• Explains the process of drafting contracts
• Provides the tools necessary for assisting high-conflict couples and culturally diverse couples

Designed as a practical hands-on manual or text for students and professors of social work, Therapeutic Family Mediation will also prove highly useful to mental health practitioners, legal professionals and mediators, couples going through divorce, and community workers specializing in family services.

Howard H. Irving, Ph.D., is a professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Social Work, and cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law. He was the Co-Director of the Joint Law and Social Work Program. Dr. Irving has been a practicing family mediator for the last 25 years. In the past few years, he has developed an international reputation, giving courses and speeches in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Hong Kong.

Michael Benjamin, Ph.D., is a family sociologist, with specialized training in family mediation and family and marital therapy. He has been involved in family mediation for the past 20 years as a theorist, researcher, trainer, teacher, author, and practitioner, both privately and through the family court. Dr. Benjamin practices as a marital and family therapist, a custody and access assessor, and a research consultant.

Social security is one of the largest and one of the most popular programs administered by the United States government. It is also under significant pressure to reform: given projected increases in both individual life expectancy and the sheer number of retirees, the current system faces the possibility of an eventual overload. Alternative proposals have emerged, ranging from reductions in future benefits to a rise in tax revenue to various forms of investment-based personal retirement accounts.
As this volume suggests, the distributional consequences of these proposals are substantially different, and may disproportionately affect those groups who depend on social security to avoid poverty in old age. Together, these studies persuasively demonstrate that appropriately designed investment-based social-security reforms could effectively reduce the long-term burden of an aging society on future taxpayers, increase the expected future income of retirees, and mitigate poverty rates among the elderly.

High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, "American Project" is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex. Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives. "American Project" explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

With her analysis of the thirty-year campaign to reform and ultimately to end welfare, Gwendolyn Mink levels a searing indictment of anti-welfare politicians'assault on poor mothers. She charges that the basic elements of the new welfare policy subordinate poor single mothers in a separate system of law. Mink points to the racial, class, and gender biases of both liberals and conservatives to explain the odd but sturdy consensus behind welfare reforms that force the poor single mother to relinquish basic rights and compel her to find economic security in work outside the home. Mink explores how and why we should cure the unique inequality of poor single mothers by reorienting the emphasis of welfare policy away from regulating mothers to rewarding the work they do. Every mother is a working mother, the bumper sticker proclaims, but the work mothers do pays no wages. Mink argues that women's equality depends on economic support for caregivers'work. Welfare's End challenges the ways in which policymakers define the problem they seek to cure. While legislators assume that something is wrong with poor single mothers, Mink insists that something is wrong with a system that invades their rights and negates their work. Showing how welfare reform harms women, Mink invites the design of policies to promote gender justice.

As a nineteenth-century think tank that sought answers to France's pressing "social question," the Musee Social reached across political lines to forge a reformist alliance founded on an optimistic faith in social science. In "A Social Laboratory for Modern France" Janet R. Horne presents the story of this institution, offering a nuanced explanation of how, despite centuries of deep ideological division, the French came to agree on the basic premises of their welfare state.
Horne explains how Musee founders believed--and convinced others to believe--that the Third Republic would carry out the social mission of the French Revolution and create a new social contract for modern France, one based on the rights of citizenship and that assumed collective responsibility for the victims of social change. Challenging the persistent notion of the Third Republic as the stagnant backwater of European social reform, Horne instead depicts the intellectually sophisticated and progressive political culture of a generation that laid the groundwork for the rise of a hybrid welfare system, characterized by a partnership between private agencies and government. With a focus on the cultural origins of turn-of-the-century thought--including religion, republicanism, liberalism, solidarism, and early sociology--"A Social Laboratory for Modern France" demonstrates how French reformers grappled with social problems that are still of the utmost relevance today and how they initiated a process that gave the welfare state the task of achieving social cohesion within an industrializing republic.

Analyzing the critical juncture of family-centered policy and practice, this book places the universal institution of the family in a global context. By including a conceptual framework as well as practice components, the authors offer an original multimodal approach toward understanding family-centered policy practice from an international perspective. It provides grassroots strategies for activists and practical guides for both students and practitioners and includes cutting-edge interpretations of the impact of globalization on families, social workers, and other helping professionals and advocates.

"They have done a superb job of defining the issues of home visiting, addressing the new issues as well as updating previous concerns, and condensing the vast literature into manageable bites. It is well documented, cited, and draws from a wealth of experience and research of the authors."

--Mimi A. Graham, Institute of Science & Public Affairs, Florida State University

"My overall impression to this book is WOW! This second edition is an overwhelming improvement to a previously well-written and unique book. This book has filled a specific need in the literature for human services; the revision is expanded as well as an improved version of the material."

--Denice Goodrich-Liley, School of Social Work, Boise State University

In a single volume, this book provides scholarly information about the history and philosophies of home visiting as well as practical information about interviewing and hiring home visitors, establishing positive relationships with clients, developing helping skills, and addressing the needs of high-risk families. Significantly updated since the first edition (1990), the authors have comprehensively identified and described issues relevant to supporting a wide range of families through home visiting, whether based in early childhood or educational programs, social work settings, clinics, and hospitals.

Recent evaluations of home visiting are summarized and practical suggestions for evaluating local programs are also included. This is an easy to read and essential resource for both beginning and experienced home visitors, trainers and supervisors of home visitors, and directors of home visiting programs.

"They have done a superb job of defining the issues of home visiting, addressing the new issues as well as updating previous concerns, and condensing the vast literature into manageable bites. It is well documented, cited, and draws from a wealth of experience and research of the authors."

--Mimi A. Graham, Institute of Science & Public Affairs, Florida State University

"My overall impression to this book is WOW! This second edition is an overwhelming improvement to a previously well-written and unique book. This book has filled a specific need in the literature for human services; the revision is expanded as well as an improved version of the material."

--Denice Goodrich-Liley, School of Social Work, Boise State University

In a single volume, this book provides scholarly information about the history and philosophies of home visiting as well as practical information about interviewing and hiring home visitors, establishing positive relationships with clients, developing helping skills, and addressing the needs of high-risk families. Significantly updated since the first edition (1990), the authors have comprehensively identified and described issues relevant to supporting a wide range of families through home visiting, whether based in early childhood or educational programs, social work settings, clinics, and hospitals.

Recent evaluations of home visiting are summarized and practical suggestions for evaluating local programs are also included. This is an easy to read and essential resource for both beginning and experienced home visitors, trainers and supervisors of home visitors, and directors of home visiting programs.

Our current social security system operates on a pay-as-you-go basis; benefits are paid almost entirely out of current revenues. As the ratio of retirees to taxpayers increases, concern about the high costs of providing benefits in a pay-as-you-go system has led economists to explore other options. One involves "prefunding", in which a person's withholdings are invested in financial instruments, such as stocks and bonds, the eventual returns from which would fund his or her retirement. The risks such a system would introduce - such as the volatility in the market prices of investment assets - are the focus of this offering from the NBER. Exploring the issues involved in measuring risk and developing models to reflect the risks of various investment-based systems, economists evaluate the magnitude of the risks that both retirees and taxpayers would assume. The insights that emerge show that the risk is actually moderate relative to the improved return, as well as being balanced by the ability of an investment-balanced system to adapt to differences in individual preferences and conditions.

Bill Clinton's first presidential term was a period of extraordinary change in policy toward low-income families. In 1993 Congress enacted a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working families. In 1996 Congress passed and the president signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This legislation abolished the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and replaced it with a block grant program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It contained stiff new work requirements and limits on the length of time people could receive welfare benefits.Dramatic change in AFDC was also occurring piecemeal in the states during these years. States used waivers granted by the federal Department of Health and Human Services to experiment with a variety of welfare strategies, including denial of additional benefits for children born or conceived while a mother received AFDC, work requirements, and time limits on receipt of cash benefits. The pace of change at the state level accelerated after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation gave states increased leeway to design their programs. Ending Welfare as We Know It analyzes how these changes in the AFDC program came about. In fourteen chapters, R. Kent Weaver addresses three sets of questions about the politics of welfare reform: the dismal history of comprehensive AFDC reform initiatives; the dramatic changes in the welfare reform agenda over the past thirty years; and the reasons why comprehensive welfare reform at the national level succeeded in 1996 after failing in 1995, in 1993?94, and on many previous occasions. Welfare reform raises issues of race, class, and sex that are as difficult and divisive as any in American politics. While broad social and political trends helped to create a historic opening for welfare reform in the late 1990s, dramatic legislation was not inevitable. The interaction of contextual factors with short-term political and policy calculations by President Clinton and congressional Republicans --along with the cascade of repositioning by other policymakers --turned "ending welfare as we know it" from political possibility into policy reality.

Evidence-Based Counselling and Psychological Therapies assesses the impact of the international drive towards evidence-based health care on NHS policy and the provision of the psychological services in the NHS.
An outstanding range of contributors provide an overview of evidence-based health care and the research methods that underpin it, demonstrating its effect on policy, provision, practitioners and patients. Their thought-provoking chapters look at a variety of relevant issues including:
* generating and implementing evidence
* cost-effectiveness issues
* practical guidelines
* practitioner research
Evidence-Based Counselling and Psychological Therapies is essential for mental health professionals and trainees concerned with this movement which is having, and will continue to have a huge impact on the purchasing, provision and practice of health care.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

Whether one talks about the family support movement, the early childhood movement, or child abuse prevention, program planners struggle with defining their target populations and structuring their interventions. This volume documents the efforts of the William Penn Foundation and its Child Abuse Prevention Initiative. By chronicling the efforts of this unique initiative and its groundbreaking research, the authors provide many useful lessons for practitioners, funders, policymakers and researchers. These lessons are particularly useful as child abuse prevention efforts seek to move beyond isolated demonstration efforts and toward a universal system of support for all parents. Through the lessons learned from the successes and failures of the foundation, this book has many implications for prevention efforts underway across the country, and forms a reservoir of knowledge on how to assess child abuse prevention in urban communities.

Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that the unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state.

Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in the private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence, Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care.

Labor, Gottschalk asserts, missed an important opportunity to develop a broader progressive agenda. She challenges the movement to establish a position on health care that addresses the growing ranks of Americans without insurance, the restructuring of the U.S. economy, and the political travails of the unions themselves.

Welfare reform was supposed to end welfare as we know it. And it has. The welfare poor have been largely transformed into the working poor but their poverty persists. This hard-hitting book takes a close look at where we've gone wrong and where we might go next if we truly want to improve the lot of America's underclass.

Tracing the roots of recent reforms to the early days of the war on poverty, A Poverty of Imagination describes a social welfare system grown increasingly inept, corrupt, and susceptible to conservative redesign. Author David Stoesz details the new ideas, hatched in conservative think tanks of the eighties and elaborated through state experiments in welfare reform, that provided the outline for the 1996 Federal Welfare Act. Welfare-to-work and other behavioral objectives were the basis of these reforms; and an informed skepticism about such approaches is at the heart of Stoesz's book. Investigating the causes of the ongoing failure of welfare assistance, Stoesz focuses on the economic barriers that impede movement out of poverty into the American mainstream.

Stoesz suggests that a form of "bootstrap capitalism" would allow individuals and families to participate more fully in American society and achieve upward economic mobility and stability. This proposal, emphasizing wage supplements, asset building, and community capitalism, sets the stage for the next act in poverty policy in the United States. With its valuable insights on the American welfare system and its positive agenda for change, this book makes a significant intervention in our ongoing struggle to come to terms with widespread poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth.

This volume represents the most important work to date on one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. Although social security is facing enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. "Privatizing Social Security" fills this void by studying the methods and problems involved in shifting from the current system to one based on mandatory saving in individual accounts.
"Timely and important. . . . ["Privatizing Social Security"] presents a forceful case for a radical shift from the existing unfunded, pay-as-you-go single national program to a mandatory funded program with individual savings accounts. . . . An extensive analysis of how a privatized plan would work in the United States is supplemented with the experiences of five other countries that have privatized plans." --"Library Journal"
"[A] high-powered collection of essays by top experts in the field."--Timothy Taylor, "Public Interest"

Workers' compensation was arguably the first widespread social insurance program in the United States and the most successful form of labor legislation to emerge from the early Progressive Movement. Adopted in most states between 1910 and 1920, workers' compensation laws have been paving seen as the way for social security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and eventually the broad network of social welfare programs we have today.
In this highly original and persuasive work, Price V. Fishback and Shawn Everett Kantor challenge widespread historical perceptions, arguing that, rather than being an early progressive victory, workers' compensation succeeded because "all" relevant parties--labor and management, insurance companies, lawyers, and legislators--benefited from the legislation. Thorough, rigorous, and convincing, "A Prelude to the Welfare State: The Origins of Workers' Compensation" is a major reappraisal of the causes and consequences of a movement that ultimately transformed the nature of social insurance and the American workplace.