Work and the Welfare State: Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics

Chapter 4 The Policies of Workfare: At the Boundaries between Work and the Welfare State

4 The Policies of Workfare At the Boundaries between Work and the Welfare State Evelyn Z. Brodkin and Flemming Larsen I n recent decades, policies of workfare and activation have been redrawing the relationship between work and the welfare state. These policies may be understood as part of a broader project through which states are promoting the primacy of work and limiting the provision of welfare. This project is now widespread, incorporated into the social and labor market policy arrangements of developed countries around the globe. However, what looks, at first glance, like a growing project of global workfare is not a clear march toward a common mission. An evolving policy construct, workfare has moved beyond its early meaning as a policy requiring US welfare recipients to work off their benefits in unpaid assignments. Worldwide, it now operates in a variety of ways and under many different labels, among them welfare reform, welfare-to-work, work first, active labor market policy (ALMP), activation, and insertion (revenu minimum d’insertion). Further, the path toward this plurality of workfare policies has been uneven, varied, and politically contested . Even the very nomenclature is problematic, potentially obscuring more than it reveals. As Jean-Claude Barbier (2010) has suggested, workfare may best be understood as a ‘‘political référentiel,’’ a label that suggests a policy direction, but is not definitive in practice.1 Still, the workfare project is more than a discrete assortment of policies. It also is part of a broader political project that is evolving in ways that are far from simple to explain or easy to discern. In this chapter we provide an analytic map of this project, explaining what’s at stake in adjusting the boundaries between work and the welfare state and how workfare matters. We also present a general guide to the varied policies of workfare, highlighting different historical paths 57 58 evelyn z. brodkin and flemming larsen through which they have developed in the United States and parts of Europe. The issues raised here set the stage for the in-depth analyses of workfare policies and practices in the chapters to follow. On the Boundaries between Work and the Welfare State It seems fair to say that two of the major structuring institutions of modern life in the developed world are work, as constructed through the market, and welfare , as constructed through the politics of the welfare state.2 Workfare matters because of its role in determining where the boundaries between work and the welfare state are placed. The policies and practices of workfare involve politically difficult choices—among them, who deserves to be excused from work, the value of unpaid care work, and the role of the state in providing alternatives to marketderived income. The workfare project also plays a part in defining the state’s role in protecting and supporting workers. The policies and practices of workfare set the terms for what constitutes acceptable work (i.e., the kinds of work the unemployed can be required to perform), what value should be placed on work relative to other possible values (e.g., values favoring work-family balance, job satisfaction, or economic security), and what kinds of supports workers should receive. In these and other ways, workfare performs a boundary-setting function. Although neither markets nor welfare states exist in a pure form in the real world, each of these institutions structures society—and the place of work and workers within it—in distinctive ways. In principle, markets organize work by the hidden hand of supply and demand, and individuals derive their market value from their labor. For most individuals, the market value derived from work is critical to well-being: paid work is a necessity, at least for those without great inherited wealth or other nonmarket sources of income. The importance of work in the pre–welfare state era was vividly depicted by British historian R. H. Tawney , who wrote about the desperate plight of unemployed men in the sixteenth century. He famously observed that, although men were subject to physical punishment if they left their towns in search of work, ‘‘the whip has no terrors for the man who must look for work or starve’’ (Tawney 1912, 272). Unlike the market, democratic institutions, ideally, are organized around principles of political equality, with equal value accorded to each individual’s vote. In democratic states, however imperfect, citizens have opportunities to use the authority of the state to further social goals. These...