‘Wage-earner centred’ implied two things: a social policy that applied more or less to male
earners or bread-winners and an associated sphere of unpaid welfare services by married
women. Moreover, the male bread-winner’s mode of employment was the standard em-
ployment relationship, characterized by four assumptions: work as dependent work with a
single employer, or as full-time job, a salary higher than the subsistence level, a continuous,
as well as a sufficiently long employment history, a life course following the education-
work-retirement track, and, the income and social policy status of the earner’s wife and
children derive from and are dependent upon the male breadwinner status (Mückenberger
1985, in: Bleses/Seeleib-Kaiser 2004:18). From these assumptions, the wage-earner ap-
proach derives some rules concerning the entitlement to social benefits: before receiving
them, someone must have been in employment; they are based on the level of previous
earnings; and, while someone is receiving benefits, he or she should demonstrate his will-
ingness to work (this does not apply to retirement benefits). While these rules define enti-
tlement for those who have been and are able to work, only those who do not meet such
criteria should resort to other forms of benefits, i.e. tax-financed social assistance. The cor-
ollary is that this social policy model can only function as long as the majority of the work-
ing population is in a standard employment relationship (implying also that women stayed
home for care) and employment is freely available (Bleses/Seeleib-Kaiser 2004: 18f.).
From these assumptions and rules we can clearly recognize the aims at the core of Conti-
nental welfare states: familialism and securing current standards of living. The focus on
bread-winners ensured that women tended to look after their children (although it did not
exclude them from work completely) and the link between previous earnings and benefits
ensured that those receiving benefits could more or less rely on an income in case of old-
age, long-term illness or unemployment. The brief discussion of the wage-earner principle
has indicated that some crucial conditions need to be met in order to make the system work
properly. Since the end of the welfare state’s ‘Golden Era’, some of these conditions have
certainly been eroded, which was mirrored in the literature by a focus on its ‘crisis’. After
having zoomed in on the core principles of the Continental welfare state and the specific
implications of the wage-earner approach for German social policy, I now take a closer look
at adjustment pressure and how these characteristics influence the reactions of Continental
welfare states.
2.2 Pressures on Contemporary Welfare States
By the end of the 20th century, it had become indisputable that modern welfare states had
come under pressure to adapt their institutional make-up in response to changes of a politi-
cal, social and economic nature. This concern has also been reflected in the comparative
welfare literature since the mid-1990s (Van Kersbergen 2000). One basic problem of Con-
tinental welfare states (and other welfare state types) is that the post-war conditions, under
which the welfare state was created and its programmes were developed and implemented,
no longer hold (Van Kersbergen 2000: 21). To recapitulate the more specific sources of