Bad Manors and the Good Welfare State: A Nordic Perspective on Jacoby's Modern Manors and American Welfare Capitalism

FOR A LONG TIME IT HAS BEEN TOO EASYto think that the welfare capitalism of big, nonunionized employers after the New Deal had been simply marginalized, dormant, and reactive as a managerial, sociocultural, and political phenomenon relegated by organized labor and the welfare state to insignificance for the lives of most Americans. Rich with detail on prominent nonunion corporations that flourished after the 1930s, Sanford Jacoby’s new book on welfare capitalism now makes it impossible to hold those views. Instead, his Modern Manorsshows companies like Kodak, Sears Roebuck, and TRW (formerly Thompson Products) to have been a powerful force whose practices reemerged ascendant in the 1970s onward, having in the meantime exercised considerable influence over unionized sectors of the labor market and over the welfare state itself. From the beginning, employer paternalism in its many forms developed not simply as a reaction to the rise of organized labor militancy, although the threat of unionism certainly prodded many an employer in that direction. Early on, as Jacoby indicates, public criticism of concentrated wealth and antitrust forces applied additional outside pressure. Quaker ethics and Protestantism’s “social gospel” probably contributed a moral impulse to some employers’ early experiments. The rise of the professions in education, economics, social work, and psychology contributed