ABSTRACT
Income maintenance policy is not a set of interventions designed to prevent social and medical problems. The idea of and demand for income maintenance policy originates from the industrial and political changes of the nineteenth century and was a conscious effort to deal with the destitution of the poor, uprooted and landless on their transition from working the land to entering the market as ‘free’ industrial workers. All societies need forms for reproduction in terms of mechanisms to sustain the physical and mental capacity of the workforce and their families, including the sick, children and the elderly (1). In rural society, production and reproduction were closely interwoven in units of the family, the farm and the system of craft guilds. This link needed to be broken, as industrialization needed an ever-increasing free mobile workforce. New institutional arrangements were needed to ensure the material and economical reproduction of the workforce when the integration of production and reproduction in the rural society was broken. At the same time the perceived threat from the growing masses of the poor led to explicit efforts to integrate them into society. In most European countries social insurance became the predominant response to this, and was one of many possible routes to the modern welfare state. Others could have been more democracy with universal suffrage, better public education or policies for full employment, but these policies came much later (2).
