ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the emergence in the late nineteenth century of significant differences in employers’ approaches to workers’ welfare and concomitantly their attitudes towards the state. It shows how and why the main employer positions on state welfare developed from the 1880s, and trace the process through which an employer consensus gradually developed by the mid-1940s. Consistent with the liberal model, employer organisation in the United Kingdom (UK) remained fragmented for most of the twentieth century. The fragmented nature of UK employer organisation was important in the development of social policy before World War II because important differences between employers on the issues remained unmediated. The socio-economic and political impact of the Second World War has sometimes been presented as generating a transformative dynamic in British social policy exemplified by the near-universal acclaim given to William Beveridge’s famous 1942 report. On unemployment and sickness insurance, the 1940s reforms involved rationalisations which all business could unequivocally welcome.
