Workfare: A Geopolitical Etymology

Abstract

The author traces the origins, evolution, and contested meanings of the ‘keyword’ workfare (work + welfare) in the United States which, in the space of 30 years, has evolved from a technocratic term deployed in the process of intrawelfare reform, through to powerful signifier of a systemic, postwelfare ‘alternative’. Discursive struggles around workfare are shown to have played a decisive role in reencoding the language of poverty politics, as ‘old’ discourses of needs, decency, compassion, and entitlement have been discredited, while ‘new’ (or more accurately reworked) discourses of work, responsibility, self-sufficiency, and empowerment have been forcefully advanced. This process is a geopolitical one in the sense that local models and stories of workfare have been absorbed—in a transformative way—into the new orthodoxies of policy discourse and practice. The ascendancy of local workfare (represented as the ‘solution’ to the ‘welfare mess’) over federal welfare (itself now a political attack term) has been associated not only with a rolling back of the language, routines, and systems of welfarism, but also with the rolling forward of radically new institutions and vocabularies of regulation. Although it continues to be contested, workfare is becoming the regulatory antonym of welfare; the programme is becoming programmatic. The paper presents a political-economic contextualization of workfare discourse.