Reprinted from The Common Good, no 6, Advent 1997
From Welfare to Work?
Within this climate of reformist enthusiasm it is worth noting that welfare-to-work programmes are not new. Ever since unemployment became a significant problem in New Zealand in the 1970s, governments have sought to move people from unemployment to employment. In the 1970s and early 1980s this was known as Ôactive labour market policyÕ and took the form of public sector job creation schemes in which local bodies, community groups, church agencies, and others were subsidised to employ thousands of people who would otherwise have been unemployed. These schemes were phased out in the mid-1980s on the grounds of expense and excessive intervention in the labour market. They seem like policies from another era now, but when compared with the latest welfare-to-work proposals, particularly workfare, some important issues arise. Two, in particular, are worth considering.
Unemployment
The first has to do with official interpretations of why people are unemployed. In the recessions that followed the oil shocks of the 1970s the response to unemployment was to create jobs by subsidising wages in the public sector and, to a lesser extent, in the private sector as well. Underlying this policy was an acknowledgement that people were unemployed because there were not enough jobs to go round. In the middle of the 1980s this interpretation lost favour. The job schemes were abolished and a single training scheme, Access, was introduced. This represented a significant change in the official interpretation of why people are unemployed. Unemployment ceased to be regarded (in official circles at least) as a structural problem in which the economy was to blame for not providing enough jobs, and became an individual problem: the unemployed lacked the right skills to get work and so had to undergo training in order to correct what was regarded as an individual problem.
This individualised interpretation of unemployment has continued into the nineties in the imagery of ÔdependencyÕ that characterises so much of the welfare reform debate today. It is part of a shift, which we also see elsewhere in the world, in the way in which welfare in general is perceived. It is no longer regarded as a collective response to misfortunes and hardships brought about by events, like economic downturns, that lie outside a personÕs control. Welfare is now seen as a sop for the lazy, the bludger, the promiscuous teen mother. The focus is on the individual and his or her own conduct and not, for example, on the failure of the economy to produce jobs, or indeed on the possibility that modern market economies might require a certain level of unemployment in order to function ÔefficientlyÕ.
The rhetoric of dependency proposes an image of those receiving state assistance as getting something for nothing, and failing to live up to the obligations that come with receiving taxpayerÕs money. This is a powerful image, although it ignores several important facts. It ensures work testing is stringent enough that benefit recipients can get their benefits cut unless they take work that is offered, or can prove that they are actively looking for a job. It also ignores the fact that solo parents receiving the DPB already have a job. Nevertheless, by means of this rhetoric it has become politically acceptable, indeed popular, to require individuals to meet their obligations by undertaking work for the dole.
That individuals should work for their keep, insofar as they are able, is not in dispute. St Paul said as much. More recently the United States National Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed that Ôall people, to the extent that they are able, have aÉ duty to workÉÕ They also state, however, that Ôall people have a right toÉ productive work, to just wages, to decent working conditionsÉÕ
Workfare
This brings us to the second contrast between old work schemes and workfare. Those employed in the wage subsidy schemes worked for the same local bodies, community groups and church agencies that those in workfare will work for. But, and it is a big but, in general, they were paid award wages under collective contracts negotiated by unions. Those who participate in workfare will do so for the equivalent of an unemployed benefit that is barely at the level of subsistence. ItÕs difficult to see, therefore, how workfare can provide productive work at just wages.
The issue turns on what kind of work we are talking about: workfare can either provide genuine jobs or make-work. If it offers genuinely productive work then payment of a proper wage is surely in order, for two reasons. First, there is an issue of fairness. Why should one person be paid the dole for doing work that someone else would be employed to do and for which they would be paid a proper wage? Secondly, there is an issue of displacement. Workfare may provide an incentive for putting people in real jobs out of work and replacing them with welfare workers. Overseas research indicates that this has indeed happened in some workfare schemes. For example, one study in Canada found that workfare workers built a golf course, dug ditches and built a health spa at the same time that more than fifty percent of park maintenance workers were laid off. Another study found that a group of New York sanitation workers, having been laid off, became eligible for welfare and within two months were back performing the same tasks as before but for a Ôwelfare wage.Õ
What if workfare simply offers make-work jobs? The former wage subsidy schemes were strongly criticised by a range of government departments, including the Treasury, for their (at times) make-work content. Indeed, such criticisms formed part of the rationale for abolishing these schemes. It would be ironic, therefore, if a new set of make-work schemes got approval from these same departments.
A third category of work could be involved. This might be called public good work, involving tasks such as cleaning up beaches, making tracks through the bush, and so forth. This is work that the whole of society benefits from, so there is a strong argument to be made that we, as a society, should pay for it through our taxes. And, because it is genuinely productive work, there is also a strong argument to be made that we should pay a decent wage for it rather than getting it on the cheap.
The United States Bishops state that: ÔAll people have a right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages, to decent working conditions, as well as to organise and join unions and other associations.Õ Let us judge workfare in this light.