Employment and Poverty, second edition

(Trades Union Congress, £7.50, ISBN 1 85006 583 7).
This paper concludes that “the clear correlation between a country’s social protection spending and its poverty rate, and the lack of a correlation between poverty rates and employment rates indicates equally clearly that employment cannot be the whole answer to poverty. Workless families in the UK are far more likely to be poor than their counterparts in other European countries, and this must be related to the level of social protection in different countries,” (p.11). So “welfare-to-work policies, however effective, cannot substitute for adequate social protection spending,” (p.9). The major casualties of a welfare-to-work policy are those children living in households where parents are not available for work, for whatever reason ,” (p.13)).

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