ABSTRACT
How and why did different countries organise programs of cash support for people who were unable to work at the turn of the last century? In this chapter, I focus on Norway and Sweden where the so-called Workers’ Question began to attract attention in the early 1880s.1 By that time, the Workers’ Question was established on the political agenda, and parliaments in both countries decided to appoint public inquiry commissions in order to investigate possible social-policy initiatives. By the beginning of the 1890s, the commissions had presented proposals for sickness-insurance legislation. However, the two proposals differed widely. In line with the German sickness-insurance law, the Norwegian commission suggested mandatory insurance for the working class, while the Swedish commission suggested a voluntary sickness-insurance program financed through state subsidies to existing sickness and burial funds.2 The proposal presented by the Swedish commission was discussed in the Parliament in 1891, and, in the same year, a law on voluntary sickness insurance was enacted in Sweden. In contrast to Norway, the question was solved in a unanimous spirit. In Norway, the proposals made for mandatory class-based sickness insurance caused severe political conflict in 1897, and no insurance legislation was to be enacted until 1909.
