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John Bertram Andrews was an American economist, social reformer, labor expert, the founder of the American Labor Legislation Review and the author of "Principles of Labor Legislation" and "History of Labor in the United States. "
Background
John Bertram Andrews was born on August 2, 1880 in South Wayne, Wisconsin, United States. He was the youngest of four children (two girls and two boys) of Philo Edmund and Sara Jane (Maddrell) Andrews. His father, born in Illinois to parents who had migrated from New York and Massachusetts, had moved in 1852 to Wisconsin, where he taught school before settling on a farm. John's mother, whose parents had come from England and Pennsylvania, was a native of Wisconsin.
The boy grew up on the family farm and at fifteen joined the Freewill Baptist Church, in which his father was active.
Education
He was educated at local schools, at Warren Academy, where he excelled in oratory, and at the University of Wisconsin, from which he received the B. A. degree in 1904.
Returning to Wisconsin for further graduate work under Prof. John R. Commons, he earned the Ph. D. in history and economics in 1908. The following year he took an M. A. in economics at Dartmouth.
Career
Andrews remained a devoted disciple of Commons and collaborated with him on several books, including Principles of Labor Legislation (1916), which became a standard text.
In December 1908 Commons secured Andrews an appointment as executive secretary of the new American Association for Labor Legislation, which Commons, Richard T. Ely, and others had established to transform the social welfare proposals of labor experts into progressive legislation. As assistant secretary Commons selected another former student, Irene Osgood, who became Andrews' wife.
Under Andrews's direction, the Association worked for new or improved laws to provide compensation for industrial accidents, promote industrial safety, and institute unemployment, old age, and health insurance. A report on phosphorus poisoning in the match industry that Andrews prepared in 1908 for the United States Bureau of Labor launched the American industrial hygiene movement.
The report broadened the definition of industrial accidents to include occupational disease and led in 1912 to federal legislation prohibiting the use of poisonous white phosphorus in matches. To publicize the Association's views, Andrews in 1911 founded the American Labor Legislation Review; he continued to edit it until his death, when it ceased publication. Andrews did his most significant work in the social insurance movement.
He took the lead in this field in 1912, when he appointed a commission to investigate the feasibility of health and unemployment insurance. The commission's report (1915) recommended compulsory health insurance, to be modeled on the programs then operating in Germany and England and to be financed by contributions from employer, employee, and the government. Designed to include all wage earners below a stipulated income level, the proposed legislation called for medical and cash benefits, to be distributed through local mutual funds.
The American Association for Labor Legislation secured the introduction of its model bill in the California and New York legislatures. The bill came under immediate attack from physicians, fearful of government interference, and from some labor leaders, similarly fearful of state action in the welfare field and convinced that the physical examinations given under a health program would be used to dismiss workers active in unionization.
Yet the most vigorous opposition came from employers, private insurance companies, and (in California) Christian Scientists. A wartime campaign branding health insurance as socialistic, immoral, and pro-German ultimately sent the bill to defeat in both states. In the wake of this bitter fight Andrews increasingly shied away from European models for a social insurance program. Instead he developed, with Commons, an American approach that emphasized voluntarism rather than government control.
His old-age program called for voluntary pension plans, and he geared his unemployment program not to the payment of benefits to the out-of-work but to the prevention of unemployment through employment exchanges, public works programs, production planning, market analysis, part-time employment, and the development of a slack-season trade. Andrews also proposed industrial training, restrictions on child labor, insurance for unemployables, and new immigration policies.
The most distinctive part of his plan was a measure, originally devised by Commons, that would require each employer to set aside funds in individual company reserves. He reasoned that a natural reluctance to part with money in the fund would provide incentive for the employer to regularize employment. Because his voluntaristic approach accorded with American ideals of individualism and private enterprise, Andrews had considerable influence on private and state social insurance programs, and later on federal legislation.
In 1919 he was the United States delegate to the International Labor Conference in Geneva, and two years later he participated in President Harding's Unemployment Conference. As a lecturer on labor legislation at Columbia for many years, he worked closely with Joseph P. Chamberlain, draftsman of numerous social welfare laws proposed initially by Andrews. The main features of his unemployment program were enacted into law in Wisconsin in 1932.
In New York, however, Andrews met considerable opposition from Abraham Epstein, who along with Isaac Rubinow and other welfare advocates favored government-controlled social insurance programs. After a protracted battle between the competing factions, the New York legislature in 1935 decided in favor of a pooled-fund unemployment insurance plan (as against the individual reserves envisaged in the Andrews plan)--the first state in the nation to adopt such a program. Partly in deference to his critics, and partly because of the long controversy in New York, Andrews moved more cautiously on the national scene.
In 1930 he drew up a model federal unemployment bill, based on the "American plan, " which gave the states considerable latitude in enacting either the individual-reserve fund or pooled-fund schemes. The bill won the support of Senator Robert F. Wagner, one of the foremost advocates of labor legislation, and, with few major revisions, became part of the Social Security Act of 1935.
He died at the age of sixty-two at the Post-Graduate Hospital in New York City following an operation, and was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York.
Achievements
Andrews belonged to a generation of social scientists and specialists who translated the theories of the classroom into the laws and administrative regulations of local, state, and federal governments. He was one of the major figures in the formative years of the American social insurance movement, as well as a noteworthy pioneer in American labor legislation.
He founded the American Labor Legislation Review with the purpose of recording advances in social reforms. Together with John R. Commons, he was the author of Principles of Labor Legislation (1916) and History of Labor in the United States (1918).
