Welfare in Ultima Borealia

The headquarters of the Ministry of Social Solidarity, Insurance, and Relief in Ullelfrborg, which administers most social welfare programs in Ultima Borealia.

Welfare in Ultima Borealia is highly comprehensive, and organised according to the Nordic and social-democratic model of the welfare state. Conventionally and legally, the Borealian welfare state is divided into three categories: social solidarity, universal programs given to sections of the whole population without means-testing which all Borealians theoretically benefit from at some point in their lives, social insurance, mandatory programs based on contributions and often having a degree of occupational segmentation, and social relief, means-tested social programs to the poor underserved by other programs.

In accordance with Ultima Borealia's dominant social-democratic welfare model, most Borealian welfare programs fall under the categories of either social solidarity or social insurance. Borealian social solidarity programs include its systems of single-payer healthcare, childcare, and elder care free at the point of use, social housing, and universal child benefits; the category of social insurance encompasses unemployment insurance and pensions for both the elderly and the disabled, although the Borealian welfare model also contains an additional universal social pension, considered social solidarity, unaffected by contributions. By contrast, social relief–principally consisting of a guaranteed minimum income–plays a small role in the modern Borealian welfare state, and today refers as commonly to social work as it does to conventional means-tested welfare benefits. The Borealian welfare state is distinct for an extremely high rate of family spending, at 12% of GDP, mostly in the form of child allowances, and, in an otherwise largely social-democratic, universalist context, for having a pension and unemployment system partially (though not entirely) segmented by occupation, conventionally anspect of more conservative, Continental welfare systems.

The modern Borealian welfare state was mostly developed in the 1940s and 1950s under successive Socialist-Communist-Agrarian coalition governments, following a wave of mass and general strikes in the late 1930s termed the Borealian Revolution. Amidst renewed class struggle from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s - termed the Years of Lead and Broken Glass - the Borealian welfare state underwent significant revision. The Borealian pension system underwent the most significant reforms; in the 1970s, the right-leaning administration of [TBD Not!Robert Muldoon] introduced occupationally and regionally-segmented pensions atop the preexisting relatively minimal social pension system, while in the 1980s, the left-leaning administration of [Insert socdem faced with a capital strike who reluctantly goes Third Way-ish here] reformed this pension system to be somewhat less generous, segmented, and more dependent on contributions. Because of its wage-levelling effect, Borealian scholars also sometimes consider the country's wage-earner funds, also introduced under [Capital Strike Guy], to be an aspect of the welfare state, but scholars usually classify it as an aspect of its labour relations system. Today, the Borealian welfare state, alongside the wage-earner funds, and broader social corporatist system of labour relations, is a lynchpin of the country's modern class compromise. Proposals to dismantle or substantially modify either such system are extraordinarily unpopular, and considered Utangard, or a third rail, in Borealian politics.