Welfare beyond the State: Employers as Welfare Providers in Germany and the UK

Abstract

With the creation of modern mass employment, employers and companies have often provided some welfare benefits to their employees, some of which have attained a certain degree of fame. Workers at the Carlsberg brewery are entitled to free beer; employees of IT firms Google and Facebook can choose among different food outlets or gaming consoles; and some companies build whole towns to accommodate workers. Traditionally, welfare has been seen either as the exclusive domain of states and resulted in typologies like Esping-Andersen’s regimes of welfare capitalism; the outcome of specific coordination processes; or the historical moment of industrial capitalism in which employers used industrial welfare to increase their power and control over employees (Brandes 1976; Esping-Andersen 1990; Hall and Soskice 2001; Reid 1985). However, it is puzzling that little research has actually found its way into comparative political economy accounts of welfare despite well-developed literatures on the relationship between employers and employees, country-specific institutional arrangements, and the role of in-work benefits for creativity and innovation. Discussions have remained within narrowly defined areas of investigation without providing a theoretical bridge between the micro accounts of historical in-work observations and macro explanations of institutional developments of political economy and social policy.