Een verzorgingsstaat zonder aanzuigende werking: Nederland 1890-2025

Abstract

A welfare state without a pull effect: the Netherlands 1890-2025
This essay combines the history of labour migration to the Netherlands with the history of social security arrangements, focussing on old age pensions and unemployment benefits. Mutual insurances in these two areas had existed long before, but a political discussion arose only in the first decades of the twentieth century. These led to fledgling arrangements for old age pensions and – through trade unions – for unemployment relief. After 1945, the Dutch welfare state was built. A basic old age pension (AOW) is financed on a pay-as-you-go basis from taxes. To fully qualify one has to have lived in the Netherlands for 50 years before the age of retirement. On top of this, most retired former wage earners and their spouses receive an additional pension, which is funded through premiums deducted from their pay over the working years. This outcome was influenced by political compromises, necessary to get a political majority to establish the AOW. Labour immigration played no role in the considerations. The outcome, however, was not favourable to labour immigrants, who arrive later in their life and working career, and will not build up full pensions. Unemployment relief (WW, 1949) was based on the amount of days worked in the period before unemployment set in. From 1963 the Social assistance Act (bijstand) guaranteed basic benefits for those who had no income and did not qualify for any of the other welfare schemes. That includes unemployed after their WW-benefits run out. Earlier groups of guestworkers had returned home when they could no longer find paid jobs in the Netherlands. The last groups to arrive, Moroccans and Turks, often chose to have their families come over to the Netherlands. Especially the first generation of these labour immigrants remain overrepresented in the bijstand. There are no indications that the Dutch welfare state specifically drew labour migrants. They came because work was offered and paid better than jobs at home. But once here, the choice of guestworkers to remain and bring their families over was influenced by welfare state arrangements and the way they were adapted.