Social Security Act Research Paper

History: The Social Security Act of 1935 was an omnibus bill, containing 11 titles authorizing 7 distinct programs, only 1 of which (Title II) was the program we commonly think of as Social Security (DeWitt, 2010). Social Security Act was signed into law on August 14, 1935. It was thanks to the work of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet appointed committee of Economic security that it was created. The act provided families with securities such as unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, and means-tested welfare programs (Martin and Weaver, 2005). The great depression is what sparked the act and it was intended to provide immediate relief for families (Martin, 2005). In fact, many workers and their employers in 1930s America did not want to be covered under the Social Security system and would have been relieved to have been in the cohort of the excluded. Remember that in the 1930s, the Title II program was an unprecedented new form of social provision, in which workers were asked to buy social insurance from the federal government—with employers paying half the cost. Money would be taken out of a …show more content…
Among the excluded groups were agricultural and domestic worker (DeWitt, 2010). It wasn’t until 1940 that the government defined what an agricultural job was. They ultimately decided that regulations excluded from agricultural work (and hence included for participation in Social Security) jobs in industries such as cotton and rice gins; milk bottling, delivery, and sales; growing, harvesting, processing, and packing gum naval stores; chicken hatcheries; raising animals for fur; and several other agricultural-type occupations. The bureau also defined any job that was not in fact agricultural in nature (such as a mechanic, bookkeeper, carpenter, and so forth) as nonagricultural, even if it was performed entirely on a farm (Schurz, Wyatt, and Wandel 1937,