A hand up or a slap down? Criminalising benefit claimants in Britain via strategies of surveillance, sanctions and deterrence

an article by Del Roy Fletcher (Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield, England) and Sharon Wright (University of Glasgow, Scotland) published in Critical Social Policy Volume 38 Issue 2 (May 2018)

Abstract

British policy-makers have increasingly sought to intensify and extend welfare conditionality. A distinctly more punitive turn was taken in 2012 to re-orientate the whole social security and employment services system to combine harsh sanctions with minimal mandatory support in order to prioritise moving individuals ‘off benefit and into work’ with the primary aim of reducing costs.

This article questions the extent to which these changes can be explained by Wacquant’s (2009) theory of the ‘centaur state’ (a neoliberal head on an authoritarian body), which sees poverty criminalised via the advance of workfare.

We present evidence of an authoritarian approach to unemployment, involving dramatic use of strategies of surveillance (via new paternalist tools like the Claimant Commitment and the Universal Jobmatch panopticon), sanction and deterrence. This shift has replaced job match support with mandatory digital self-help, coercion and punishment.

In relation to Work Programme providers, there is a contrasting liberal approach permitting high discretion in service design.

This article makes a significant original contribution to the field by demonstrating that Wacquant’s analysis of ‘workfare’ is broadly applicable to the British case and its reliance on a centralised model of state action is truer in the British case than the US.

However, we establish that the character of British reform is somewhat different: less ‘new’ (challenging the time-tethered interpretation that welfare reform is a uniquely neoliberal product of late modernity) and more broadly applied to ‘core’ workers, including working-class white men with earned entitlement, rather than peripheral workers.

Full text (PDF 22pp)

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Active labor market programs - employment gain or fiscal drain?

an article by Alessio JG Brown (IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany) and Johannes Koettl (The World Bank, Washington DC, USA) published in IZA Journal of Labor Economics Volume 4 Number 1 (2015)

Abstract

This paper provides a new perspective by classifying active labor market programs (ALMPs) depending on their objectives, relevance and cost-effectiveness during normal times, a crisis and recovery. We distinguish ALMPs providing incentives for retaining employment, incentives for creating employment, incentives for seeking and keeping a job, incentives for human capital enhancement and improved labor market matching. Reviewing evidence from the literature, we discuss especially indirect effects of various interventions and their cost-effectiveness. The paper concludes by providing a systematic overview of how, why, when and to what extent specific ALMPs are effective.

JEL codes: J08, J22, J23, J38, E24

Full text (HTML)

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Pre-employment training for the unemployed: A case study of a call centre foundation programme

an article by Julian Clarke (Nottingham Trent University, UK) published in Local Economy Volume 29 Number 1-2 (February/March 2014)

Abstract

This paper examines a single pre-employment training programme for the unemployed.

The training aimed to prepare unemployed participants for work on the front-line of telephone call centres.

Drawing on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the paper analyses one area in particular; the training participants received to enhance their soft skills, particularly as they relate to the concept of ‘aesthetic’ labour.

Through providing an in-depth account of the training the paper offers a critique of the programme and identifies the potential drawbacks associated with offering this form of ‘employability’ training for those who face many barriers to employment.

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Appointment Time: Disability and Neoliberal Workfare Temporalities

an article by Karen Soldatic (Curtin University, Australia) published in Critical Sociology Volume 39 Number 3 (May 2013)

Abstract

My primary interest in this article is to reveal the complexity of neoliberal temporalities on the lives of disabled people forced to participate in workfare regimes to maintain access to social security measures and programming.

Through drawing upon some of the contemporary debates arising within the social study of time, this article explicates what Jessop refers to as the sovereignty of time that has emerged with the global adoption of neoliberal workfare regimes.

It is argued that the central role of temporality within the globalizing project of neoliberal workfare and the positioning of disability within these global macro-structural processes requires the sociological imagination to return to both time as a theme and time as a methodology.

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When is a volunteer not a volunteer?

The standard answer to that question used to have something to do with the press-gang – not that I actually remember the days when able-bodied men hid rather than be taken away to man His Majesty’s ships.

The answer nowadays seems to have a lot to do with Mandatory Work Activity or young people or even, dare I say it, libraries.

Define: volunteer
Noun, a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task.

Verb, freely offer to do something.

There’s nothing in there about whether or not you get paid although in present-day usage it is generally the case that those who volunteer do so with the expectation that the freely means without expectation of monetary reward.

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is to point you at Phil Bradley's weblog which starts off by highlighting an article about Lewisham library volunteers on workfare scheme!!

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