Social Welfare and Unemployment Benefits: An Incomplete Conversation, Latin America from the 1920s to 1940s

In the early twentieth century, countries such as Britain (1911), Austria (1920), and Germany (1927) began to regulate unemployment. The United States approved the National Security Act in 1935, and Canada passed the Employment and Social Security Act in 1941. By the 1940s, unemployment insurance was the cornerstone of the welfare state across the western world. Latin American countries, however, did not follow suit. Welfare systems focused on health care and family allowances, protecting mothers and children, and subsidizing food and housing programs. They provided benefits based on people’s status as formal workers and legal families, but did not protect workers against the risk of unemployment and underemployment. By examining the lack of connection between work and state benefits, this paper shows the limits of social welfare in the region. While states adopted international standards and the conventions of the International Labor Organization, local economic, political, and social forces transformed and limited these reforms. In particular, ideas of race, gender, and class influenced how experts understood workers and the job market. They believed working people were not “ready” for unemployment benefits. Instead, they advocated transforming social and working habits and criminalized vagrancy and idleness. In addition, local political economists viewed their countries as endless frontiers: abundant land, natural resources, and jobs. From this perspective, the problem was an underdeveloped labor market. Against the backdrop of export-oriented economies, the reality of rural labor, negative ideas about the working class, experts across the region redefined unemployment and social welfare. This paper draws from a range of sources including the writings of welfare experts, labor lawyers, and political economists and documents from the International Labor Organization. It emphasizes a transnational and comparative view of Latin American welfare systems, showing how Latin Americans negotiated between conflicting influences at the international, national, and local scales.