The Politics of ‘Minimum Wage’ Welfare States: The Changing Significance of the Minimum Wage in the Liberal Welfare Regime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract It is an indisputable reality that the English‐speaking welfare states have retreated from their distinct postwar welfare state compromises in ways that prompt many to wonder what is still liberal about the liberal welfare states. Considering developments in minimum wage institutions and politics in five liberal welfare states, this article argues that the apparent renewed politicization of the minimum wage – driven by legislative action and activist campaigns from below – is an inevitable consequence of the twin policies of labour market deregulation and workfare‐centred social policies. A larger electorate of low‐paid workers, including those in full‐time work, combined with rising concerns from the public about the extent and injustice of poverty wages are important factors drawing renewed attention to the politics and policy of minimum wages. However, I also show that policymakers have additional incentives to embrace higher minimum wages: the economic orthodoxy in favour of low minimum wages has steadily lost credibility, and legislating for wage increases enables a predistributive strategy with the potential to shift the burden of addressing inequalities from fiscally‐strained governments to employers. Drawing on policy and political developments from across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, I make the claim that the politicization of minimum wages offers genuine insight into the future battles over what is ‘liberal’ about the liberal welfare states.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".