Welfare-to-Work

Abstract

Abstract The focus in this chapter is on strict schemes of welfare conditionality that force and at times trap people in precarious work and in-work poverty. There is growing evidence that schemes are becoming increasingly punitive and, in this way, they force individuals into exploitative work and in-work poverty instead of supporting them to find a route out of poverty through paid work. Welfare-to-work schemes thereby often turn the unemployed or underemployed poor into working and exploited poor. By deploying coercive conditionality, legal rules push people into precarious work and generate state-mediated structures of injustice. These schemes can be viewed as having an appearance of legitimacy, as their stated purpose is to promote employment and hence social inclusion and also support people out of poverty. However, they create patterns that are very damaging for large numbers of people, while employers benefit from this situation. The problem here is not that activation policies or non-standard work arrangements can never be legitimate. The claim is that the state creates and sustains a system that can be viewed as legitimate in its aims but problematic when it becomes particularly punitive whilst also forcing the poor into exploitative employment relations that are (mostly) lawful, making exploitation standard and routine. Even though welfare-to-work schemes and non-standard work arrangements, taken separately, might not be necessarily unjust, the overall structure that forces people into workplace exploitation is unjust.