social security

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Social Security Board member R.R. Hopkins (seated) and U.S. Census Bureau Director William L. Austin checking the ages of applicants for benefits against official census reports, 1937.

Harris & Ewing, Inc./Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-hec-21983)

social security, any of the measures established by legislation to maintain individual or family income or to provide income when some or all sources of income are disrupted or terminated or when exceptionally heavy expenditures have to be incurred (e.g., in bringing up children or paying for health care). Thus social security may provide cash benefits to persons faced with sickness and disability, unemployment, crop failure, loss of the marital partner, maternity, responsibility for the care of young children, or retirement from work. Social security benefits may be provided in cash or kind for medical need, rehabilitation, domestic help during illness at home, legal aid, or funeral expenses. Social security may be provided by court order (e.g., to compensate accident victims), by employers (sometimes using insurance companies), by central or local government departments, or by semipublic or autonomous agencies.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) uses three criteria to define a social security system. First, the objective of the system must be to grant curative or preventive medical care, to maintain income in case of involuntary loss of earnings or of an important part of earnings, or to grant a supplementary income to persons having family responsibilities. Second, the system must have been set up by legislation that attributes specified individual rights to, or that imposes specified obligations on, a public, semipublic, or autonomous body. And third, the system should be administered by a public, semipublic, or autonomous body.

In its statistics the ILO includes provisions according to which the liability for the compensation of employment injuries is imposed directly on the employer, although such schemes do not strictly meet the third criterion above. For this reason employer liability is included here.

An alternative but wider term for social security in the countries that are members of the European Union is social protection, which includes voluntary schemes not set up under legislation. In some countries the term social security is used in a narrower sense. For example, in the United Kingdom only statutory benefits in cash are regarded as social security. The term social services is used to cover social security; health, education, and housing services; and provisions for social work and social welfare. In the United States the term social security is restricted to the federal social insurance system (OASDI) as distinct from state benefits and “welfare,” which in Europe would be called social assistance. In some countries (for example, Denmark and the United Kingdom) the reduction of poverty historically has been a central aim of social security policy, and the concept of maintaining income has been grafted on at a later stage. In other countries, such as France, measures to deal with poverty have been seen as quite separate from the income maintenance aims of social security.

A report published in 1984, prepared by 10 international experts appointed by the director of the ILO, set out the ultimate aims of social security.

Its fundamental purpose is to give individuals and families the confidence that their level of living and quality of life will not, insofar as is possible, be greatly eroded by any social or economic eventuality. This involves not just meeting needs as they arise but also preventing risks from arising in the first place, and helping individuals and families to make the best possible adjustment when faced with disabilities and disadvantages which have not been or could not be prevented. . . . It is the guarantee of security that matters most of all, rather than the particular mechanisms such as contributory or tax financing, the insurance or service model of delivery, or the ownership of facilities (public/private, profit/non-profit) by which that guarantee is given. . . . The means should not be confused with the ends.

Approximately 140 countries have some type of social security scheme. Nearly all of these countries have schemes covering work-related injury and old-age and survivors’ pensions. Well over half have provisions for sickness, and nearly half have provisions for family allowances. The least commonly provided schemes are for unemployment, though at least 40 countries have them.

Because general social security schemes based on compulsory insurance did not come into being until the last two decades of the 19th century, it has often been argued that social security in its modern form has been a response to industrialization, which caused large numbers of people to become dependent for their security solely on earnings from employment. Indeed many families became dependent on one male earner and thus on his capacity to find work, to undertake it, and to remain in it. Moreover, industrialization led to the migration of people toward centres of work, thus separating them from the support given by the wider family. In addition, the development of compulsory education prolonged the period during which children were dependent on their parents; later the system of enforced retirement created dependency at the other end of life. This situation is contrasted with an often idealized image of the extended rural family with access to land, on which both husband and wife worked, children started work early, and old people continued to work until they became too frail or disabled to do so. On the basis of this oversimplification, some theorists have proposed that social security developed out of a need peculiar to industrial societies and that there is less need or no need for social security programs in the rural areas of developing countries today.

It is true that support from the extended family, often enforced by local custom and religious beliefs, contributes to the survival of peasant societies. But by no means do all the rural populations of developing countries have access to land, and many people work for wages in agricultural estates and mines. Moreover, peasant farmers are subject to formidable risks of crop failure, quite apart from the risks associated with the shorter average life span that characterizes developing countries. Although there is a need for social security in rural societies, the importance of specific risks may vary from region to region. Moreover, the irregular incomes in cash and kind emanating from agriculture do not lend themselves to the payment of regular social insurance contributions. Thus, what may be lacking in rural societies is the economic and administrative base for providing such security. Furthermore, provision for sickness and old age is not generally seen as the highest priority by peasant farmers overwhelmed by problems of weather and debt.

While the advent of industrialization has undoubtedly added to the need for social security by breaking up the extended family and leading to urban poverty, it is by no means the sole reason why the system evolved. Two of the first three countries to make provision for old-age pensions were primarily agricultural societies—Denmark in 1891 and New Zealand in 1898. The Danish scheme was clearly an attempt to alleviate rural rather than urban poverty. And it is notable that the first province in Canada to develop compulsory health insurance (1962) was Saskatchewan, which was overwhelmingly agricultural. These cases indicate that statutory social security may evolve for a variety of reasons. Moreover, it depends to a considerable degree on the economic level attained by the groups that might be covered and the administrative capacity of the country to operate such a scheme. It is certainly the case that, as countries become wealthier, there is greater willingness to defer consumption by paying insurance contributions or taxes.