During my tenure as a professor of comparative labour market policies between 2008 and 2013 at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, I felt struck by two major international developments that most probably are going to change the actual and future world of work in a fundamental way for a long time to come. On the one hand, far-reaching flexibilization of work and labour contracts has become a predominant trend in the last decades on both internal and external labour markets in almost all EU countries, and the United States. On the other hand, we can observe in the same period a gradual breakdown of the stable postwar social compact that resulted in collective welfare states, guaranteeing sustainable work and worker security, in most of these countries.

Both developments are interrelated and reinforce each other in a positive way. In the end, this might result in new forms of serious marginalization or precarization of large groups of workers, not only low and semi-skilled. Other major consequences might be a decoupling of loyalty of workers to the firms in which they work, degradation of work and working conditions, and, ultimately, also a decrease of productivity and quality of products and services rendered by workers.

Taken together, this appears to be too high a price for developments that, at first sight, appear gainful for economies and firms.

As a labour sociologist, I felt challenged by contributing to finding solutions to the negative consequences of flexibilization of the world of work and the related retrenchment of the welfare state. Not by walking the usual beaten track, but by applying the nowadays too often neglected path of history-oriented sociology of work. More specifically, the method applied in this book summarizes, interprets and compares in an accessible and comprehensive way the available relevant, mostly country-specific, secondary literature on this theme. This implies also the most important added value of this book. The result is a still intriguing, somewhat forgotten, chapter of paternalistic employer welfare work in the golden age of capitalism by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in the four most important industrialized countries at that time: Great Britain, The United States, Germany, and France. I hope this book is not only interesting for academics, but also for employers, workers, and policymakers.