Polityka socjalna państwa kapitalistycznego a kwestia bezrobocia

One of the major and at present most frequently made charges against social policies in developed market economies is that they stimulate unemployment, increase it and extend its duration. This charge is not new; it was made repeatedly also in the past but at the time of neoclassical revival in the 1970s and 1980s it was given new interpretations going much beyond the traditional form. The current concepts of the negative impact of social policy on unemployment can be divided into two kinds, namely into those which attempt to derive it from analysis of the influence exerted by some social ventures on personnel policy of enterprises and into those which consider their effects from the viewpoint of the employed and unemployed. The former say that a number of forms of social activity of the state hinder adjustment processes in the labour market through their impact on employment decisions taken in enterprieses, and the latter show that some social undertakings result in such behaviour as voluntary chice of being unemployed or in people’s conscious and purposeful extension of the duration of unemployment. This paper contains a synthetic presentation of these concpets and an attempt to evaluate their compatibility with the realities.