Conclusion

Abstract

We have seen in Social Security and Wage Poverty that some nations have been grappling for many years with the economic, moral and social dilemmas which capitalism, as a form of production and accumulation, raises for policy makers and low-paid wage workers. Social Security and Wage Poverty suggests that debates about, and the practice of, the state supplementing wages is related to the ways capital accumulation is a socially embedded process in which the priorities of capitalism — profitability and growth — are, at least in its liberal varieties, inconsistent with the needs of many wage working people and, as a consequence, its own longer-term strategic needs. In other words, state wage supplements need to be understood in political economic terms as they are central to understanding those issues — the social relations of the production, distribution and consumption of resources (Mosco, 1996) — which are the foci of political economy. As we have seen, and despite often bland references in political party general election manifestos to the need to review social security policies, the chequered history of wage supplements has been linked to a range of issues which have been held to be crucial to the ways in which liberal economies operate, or should operate. At various times, wage supplements, especially the means-tested variety, have been seen as both the friend and enemy of economic liberalism.