Workers' Welfare: Labour and the Welfare State in 20th-century Australia and Canada

ANALYSING THE NATURE and effects of labour's relationship to the welfare state has been a vexed enterprise. On the one hand, labour has long been suspicious of the welfare state as a weapon to undermine working-class radicalism. On the other hand, labour has sought to support the welfare state as a means of easing the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation. This ambivalence, in part, reflects conflicting labour traditions — one committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the other to die "civilising" of capital. And it is these diverse traditions that have allowed labour to play an active role in both contesting and shaping important features of the modern welfare state. In recent years, however, labour's relationship to the welfare state has become more problematic; indeed, its status as a progressive and radical critical voice has been questioned by the emergence of alternative political movements such as feminism, gay rights and queer politics, movements of indigenous peoples, ethnic communities, environmentalism, and disability groups in both Australia and Canada. And while sections of the labour movement have sought to find common cause with these movements, these alliances have sometimes disturbed, even alienated, labour's traditional constituency. Moreover, these different politics have challenged many aspects of labour's compact with the welfare state. Additionally, extensive new right critiques of the welfare state, trade unions, and labour parties have forced labour to defend the hard won gains of a century of welfare state development, blunting any critical labour position. Labour's relationship to the welfare state is being questioned from all sides. An historical understanding of the development of this relationship may illuminate some of these contemporary dilemmas, especially if we escape from a narrow national exceptionalism. A focus on particular national or regional developments obscures broader