Business Confidence, Employer Initiative, and the Politics of Social Protection: Explaining the Rise of Unemployment Insurance in France, 1944-1958

In virtually all advanced capitalist democracies today, the risks associated with meeting basic needs when without employment are mitigated by social insurance programs. Yet the establishment of these insurance programs was no foregone conclusion. In an effort to better understand how and why such protections developed, this dissertation draws on an extensive array of archives to examine the creation of unemployment insurance in France between 1944 and 1958. My research leverages diachronic variation within this case in order to understand the drivers and mechanisms of change. It does so by comparing two sub-cases: 1) conflict in 1944-1945, when France saw the creation of a national Social Security regime that included all major social insurances except unemployment insurance, despite many calls for its inclusion; and 2) conflict in 1958, when the country saw the creation of a national unemployment insurance regime. I argue that the creation of unemployment insurance in postwar France was driven by the agenda of employers. While the balance of class forces heavily influenced the overall character of economic and social policies implemented in each period, the evolution of unemployment policies and protections corresponded very closely to the demands of employers, even when the political balance was not tipped in their favor. In the earlier period, business was politically marginalized, yet state actors molded the policy agenda to allay the concerns of employers because the government saw no option but to re-establish the confidence of business in order to stimulate investment in private economic activity. In the later period, while organized business had re-gained significant strength, employers abandoned their long-standing opposition to unemployment insurance and instead led the charge for its creation as a side-payment to trade unions and the left, who stood to loose substantially from the government's wider business-friendly reform agenda.