The decision to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from the 1935 Social Security Act

The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded from coverage about half the workers in the American economy. Among the excluded groups were agricultural and domestic workers-a large percentage of whom were African Americans. This has led some scholars to conclude that policymakers in 1935 deliberately excluded African Americans from the Social Security system because of prevailing racial biases during that period. This article examines both the logic of this thesis and the available empirical evidence on the origins of the coverage exclusions. The author concludes that the racial-bias thesis is both conceptually flawed and unsupported by the existing empirical evidence. The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the early program was due to considerations of administrative feasibility involving tax-collection procedures. The author finds no evidence of any other policy motive involving racial bias.     

Workers' compensation: a background for Social Security professionals

This article provides a brief history and background of workers' compensation programs for occupationally injured and ill workers in the United States. It presents the basic principle involved in workers' compensation and briefly discusses the disability benefits to which workers are generally entitled. It also discusses why there are settlements in this disability program and the availability of information about the amounts paid in workers' compensation cases for obtaining an offset for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits paid to the worker. Finally, the article explains the rationale behind the public policy on coordination of Disability Insurance and workers' compensation in the new paradigm of disability and return to work.     

人权的宪法保障解析

保障人权业已成为当代世界政治发展的主题,同时,也是社会主义民主政治建设的重要目标。人权与宪法相伴相随、密不可分。宪法作为现代民主国家的根本大法,是人权据以实现的最高准则。宪法作为人权保障书,既确认已有人权,又保障人权的实现和发展。现代宪法主要是通过合理配置权力、规定基本人权原则、确认人权内容和建立宪法保障制度来实现对人权的保障。     

Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act of 1984: legislative history and summary of provisions

This article describes the legislative history of the Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act of 1984 (Public Law 98-460), and contains a summary of the provisions in the new law. Major provisions include: standards for continuing disability reviews (CDR's) of disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries and supplemental security income (SSI) recipients who get payments based on disability or blindness; the right of a DI beneficiary or an SSI recipient to have payments continued during appeal of a CDR decision to an administrative law judge that disability or blindness has ceased; and suspension of CDR's of mentally impaired persons until the evaluation criteria for mental impairments are revised. The new law was enacted in response to problems that arose as a result of the implementation by the Social Security Administration (SSA) of a provision in the 1980 disability amendments that required periodic CDR's. In enacting the new law, Congress intended to assure more accurate, consistent, and uniform disability decisions at all levels and equitable and humane treatment not only to beneficiaries who must undergo CDR's but also to new applicants for DI benefits or SSI payments based on disability or blindness.     

National Security, Terrorism and Constitutional Balance

The 'war on terrorism' engages all the institutions of the state. A constitutional structure devoted to protection of liberty must place a paramount value on separation of powers, and a parliamentary democratic constitution should ensure that the ultimate locus of responsibility rests in the legislature, the only branch which has a direct connection to the citizens. However, in an ironic reversal of practice that prevailed before the coming of mass democracy, Parliament in the UK since the early twentieth century has largely accepted a supine role compared to the executive in matters of 'national security'. The judiciary, despite the enactment of legally enforceable human rights, has also manifestly failed to exercise its proper function of curbing abuses of state power. The result is an over-mighty executive, able to draw upon the deference of other branches of government in prosecuting the 'war on terrorism' on the battlefield and in the statute book, which has trampled on individual rights with virtually no check or counte-balance. Some principles by which the balance might be restored are suggested.     

How to Advance Social Rights without Jeopardising the Human Rights Act 1998

When the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted, governments grasped that human rights are needed as safeguards, not only against authoritarianism but also against the causes of authoritarianism. For this reason, the UDHR encompasses civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. This holistic vision of human rights was obscured during the Cold War and more recently by economic neo‐liberalism. The UK government neglects social rights, which have a very low public profile, although there is evidence that the profile of these human rights is increasing. UK domestic law and practice is inconsistent with the holistic vision of human rights and the government's binding international social rights obligations. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recommends that the UK provides for ‘the legislative recognition of social rights’ which can be approached in various ways. One way is to proceed social right by social right (for example, the rights to housing, health and education), and sector by sector (for example, the sectors of housing, health and education). This administrative law approach advances explicit social rights without implicating or jeopardising the Human Rights Act 1998.     

中国社会保障法律体系的构想

分析了中国社会保障体系的立法背景,根据法律体系构建原理描述了中国社会保障的法律体系结构,指出我国社会保障体系应由政策优先向法律优先转移。从概念研究入手,立足于国际经验比较分析,根据中国宪法原则,提出了关于中国保障法律体系内容和结构的初步设想。     

From the Wagner Act to the Human Rights Watch Report: Labor and Freedom of Expression and Association, 1935-2000*

This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines the relationship between institutional structure and human agency to understand the strategic choices made by corporations, state actors, and the labor movement. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent calls for labor law reform as a strategy for reviving the labor movement.     

Civil Service Reform as National Security: The Homeland Security Act of 2002

The events of 9/11 have influenced policy making in public administration. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, contained language that empowered the secretary of homeland security and the director of the Office of Personnel Management to establish a personnel management system outside the normal provisions of the federal civil service. Why did civil service reform succeed as part of this legislation when previous attempts at large‐scale reform had failed? A case analysis of the enactment of civil service reform in the Homeland Security Act points to theories of policy emergence and certain models of presidential and congressional policy making. In this case, civil service reform became associated with national security instead of management reform. An assessment of the rhetorical arguments used to frame this policy image offers a powerful explanation for the adoption of the personnel management reforms in the Homeland Security Act. This case has implications for understanding how policy makers might approach future management reform agendas.     

论内保工作发展趋势——走社会保安服务之路

传统内保工作体制受到市场经济的挑战,改革这种体制是大势新趋.本文认为内保工作走社会保安服务之路是社会化分工的需要,是经济发展的趋势,是西方发达国家政府鼓励发展的方向,它比传统的内保工作具有明显的优势,走社会保安服务之路是今后内保工作发展的趋势.     

Social Change and Moral Politics: the Irish Constitutional Referendum 1983

The dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has been challenged by rapid socioeconomic change. To counter emerging secularist trends, anti-abortion activists pressurized the political parties to agree to hold a referendum for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Opposition to the referendum, and party divisions, led to the active involvement by the Catholic Church and the hierarchy in the campaign. Although the amendment was passed, the intervention of the Church has not been beneficial to it as an institution. This is the first time since the establishment of the Irish state that a significant cleavage has emerged around a religious issue. The referendum reflected a change in Irish politics—new divisions had emerged, based on age, class, religion and place of residence. This change is now having an impact on the political parties.