ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews provisions for unemployment, industrial injuries and diseases, long-term disability and widows and orphans, and touches briefly on the need for rehabilitation and retraining and on provisions for maternity costs. Effective provision for each of the contingencies can be made from relatively small contributions, since the number of persons who need help at any one time represents only a small fraction of the population. Persons suffering from long-term total disabilities which render them in effect unemployable should be transferred from unemployment insurance to social assistance based on a means test, for the provision of a maintenance income, or else to disability insurance. Provision for the victims of industrial injuries was so seriously inadequate that towards the end of the nineteenth century and early in the present century workmen’s compensation laws were passed in some of the leading industrial countries. The problems of compensation are more complex when injuries are permanent and involve either partial or total incapacity.
