Poverty as a situation of disability: Social workers’ reticence to back active solidarity income beneficiaries’ requests for disabled adults allowance

Abstract

Social service support for beneficiaries of the French RSA (minimum income scheme) is based on reducing their problems to a series of situations blocking their “plans to return to employment”. These situations are defined in practice by the specific “programs” toward which professional may orient beneficiaries. This notion is quite close to that of “situation of disability”, as it is used in social conceptions of disability. It is the support for a specific handicapology, rooted in a representation of social service work in rupture with the traditional notion of support for disabled persons, those unfit for work. It is characterized particularly by a refusal to sort beneficiaries into overarching categories, and a change in the meaning given to people's material and cultural destitution, which is not treated as a consequence of unemployment or as a disability, but as a disabling situation responsible for their withdrawal from the employment market. These professional norms are manifest in a strong resistance when beneficiaries express the desire to seek AAH (disabled adult allowance). This reticence is explained by the simultaneous transformations of both the administrative division of social support work and the social trajectories of the social workers charged with this work. AAH requests place professionals in a paradoxical situation: their general role to support people in their administrative procedures comes into contradiction with their mission to “support toward employment”, which they find radically incompatible with the posture of assistance implied by the recognition of even a partial unfitness for work.