For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State Paperback - 2006

First line

EARLY in the twenty-first century some of America's best-known corporations went bankrupt or teetered close to the edge of economic viability.

From the rear cover

""For All These Rights," meticulous in its historical research and forthright in its policy conclusions, is of compelling importance to all who want a richer understanding of the role of social insurance in our society. Utilizing a developmental perspective, Jennifer Klein adds to the body of provocative scholarship that explores the relationships and tensions between private and public social and health security programs. She has much to say to historians, political scientists, economists, and policy analysts, for in explaining the past she enriches our understanding of the present and prepares us for the debates that will determine the further evolution of America's private-public welfare state."--Rashi Fein, Ph.D., Professor of the Economics of Medicine, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School

"Jennifer Klein's splendid and deeply researched history of America's vast private welfare state contains many important messages for the present. Business increased its commitment to social welfare when government programs expanded. Private, not public, benefits have proved inefficient, inflationary, and unreliable. Business enterprises do not offer a stable, long-term foundation for benefits. And it is hard to hold them accountable. This is an essential book for the debate over the redefinition of the welfare state in this post-Enron age."--Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

"A brilliant and authoritative account of how today's crisis in social and economic security came to be. In a breathtakingly original journey into the heart of America's private health, welfare, and pension programs, Klein shows that the critical choices were not justabout whether we had a public or a private welfare system but what the nature of those systems would be."--Dorothy Sue Cobble, Professor of Labor Studies, Rutgers University

"A dazzling excavation of the American welfare state. Jennifer Klein offers us a grand tour--labor and industry, politics and business, solidarity and anomie, feminism and paternalism, pensions and insurance, politics and culture. The result is a formidable account of the rise and fall of economic security in the United States."--James Morone, author of "Hellfire Nation and "The Democratic Wish

"This is a wonderful book. Well-written, it combines fresh research (especially in insurance industry archives) with a careful and sensible synthesis of the existing literature on social provision through the years under consideration. "For All These Rights" will undoubtedly occupy the center of the emerging debate about America's peculiar 'public/private welfare state.'"--Colin Gordon, University of Iowa, author of "Dead on Arrival"

From the jacket flap

""For All These Rights," meticulous in its historical research and forthright in its policy conclusions, is of compelling importance to all who want a richer understanding of the role of social insurance in our society. Utilizing a developmental perspective, Jennifer Klein adds to the body of provocative scholarship that explores the relationships and tensions between private and public social and health security programs. She has much to say to historians, political scientists, economists, and policy analysts, for in explaining the past she enriches our understanding of the present and prepares us for the debates that will determine the further evolution of America's private-public welfare state."--Rashi Fein, Ph.D., Professor of the Economics of Medicine, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School

"Jennifer Klein's splendid and deeply researched history of America's vast private welfare state contains many important messages for the present. Business increased its commitment to social welfare when government programs expanded. Private, not public, benefits have proved inefficient, inflationary, and unreliable. Business enterprises do not offer a stable, long-term foundation for benefits. And it is hard to hold them accountable. This is an essential book for the debate over the redefinition of the welfare state in this post-Enron age."--Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

"A brilliant and authoritative account of how today's crisis in social and economic security came to be. In a breathtakingly original journey into the heart of America's private health, welfare, and pension programs, Klein shows that the critical choices were not justabout whether we had a public or a private welfare system but what the nature of those systems would be."--Dorothy Sue Cobble, Professor of Labor Studies, Rutgers University

"A dazzling excavation of the American welfare state. Jennifer Klein offers us a grand tour--labor and industry, politics and business, solidarity and anomie, feminism and paternalism, pensions and insurance, politics and culture. The result is a formidable account of the rise and fall of economic security in the United States."--James Morone, author of "Hellfire Nation and "The Democratic Wish

"This is a wonderful book. Well-written, it combines fresh research (especially in insurance industry archives) with a careful and sensible synthesis of the existing literature on social provision through the years under consideration. "For All These Rights" will undoubtedly occupy the center of the emerging debate about America's peculiar 'public/private welfare state.'"--Colin Gordon, University of Iowa, author of "Dead on Arrival"