Workfare States
Workfare States

Author: Jamie Peck

Publisher: Guilford Press

Published: 2001-02-13

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9781572306363

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This book examines the political economy of workfare, the umbrella term for welfare-to-work initiatives that have been steadily gaining ground since candidate Bill Clinton's 1992 promise to "end welfare as we know it." Peck traces the development, diffusion, and implementation of workfare policies in the United States, and their export to Canada and the United Kingdom. He explores how reforms have been shaped by labor markets and political conditions, how gender and race come into play, and how local programs fit into the broader context of neoliberal economics and globalization. The book cogently demonstrates that workfare rarely involves large-scale job creation, but is more concerned with deterring welfare claims and necessitating the acceptance of low-paying, unstable jobs. Integrating labor market theory, critical policy analysis, and extensive field research, Peck exposes the limitations of workfare policies and points toward more equitable alternatives.

From Welfare to Workfare
From Welfare to Workfare

Author: Jennifer Mittelstadt

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-03-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0807876437

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In 1996, Democratic president Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress "ended welfare as we know it" and trumpeted "workfare" as a dramatic break from the past. But, in fact, workfare was not new. Jennifer Mittelstadt locates the roots of the 1996 welfare reform many decades in the past, arguing that women, work, and welfare were intertwined concerns of the liberal welfare state beginning just after World War II. Mittelstadt examines the dramatic reform of Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) from the 1940s through the 1960s, demonstrating that in this often misunderstood period, national policy makers did not overlook issues of poverty, race, and women's role in society. Liberals' public debates and disagreements over welfare, however, caused unintended consequences, she argues, including a shift toward conservatism. Rather than leaving ADC as an income support program for needy mothers, reformers recast it as a social services program aimed at "rehabilitating" women from "dependence" on welfare to "independence," largely by encouraging them to work. Mittelstadt reconstructs the ideology, implementation, and consequences of rehabilitation, probing beneath its surface to reveal gendered and racialized assumptions about the welfare poor and broader societal concerns about poverty, race, family structure, and women's employment.

Free Labor
Free Labor

Author: John Krinsky

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0226453677

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One of former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s proudest accomplishments is his expansion of the Work Experience Program, which uses welfare recipients to do routine work once done by unionized city workers. The fact that WEP workers are denied the legal status of employees and make far less money and enjoy fewer rights than do city workers has sparked fierce opposition. For antipoverty activists, legal advocates, unions, and other critics of the program this double standard begs a troubling question: are workfare participants workers or welfare recipients? At times the fight over workfare unfolded as an argument over who had the authority to define these terms, and in Free Labor, John Krinsky focuses on changes in the language and organization of the political coalitions on either side of the debate. Krinsky’s broadly interdisciplinary analysis draws from interviews, official documents, and media reports to pursue new directions in the study of the cultural and cognitive aspects of political activism. Free Labor will instigate a lively dialogue among students of culture, labor and social movements, welfare policy, and urban political economy.

Changing Welfare, Changing States
Changing Welfare, Changing States

Author: John Clarke

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2004-05-24

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9780761942030

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`John Clarke brings a fresh, critical, "idiosyncratic" eye to the task of thinking about the ways in which states do welfare. He paints a rich and broad canvas, using a palette that blends social, cultural, political and economic perspectives. Changing Welfare, Changing States is an important addition to the welfare state literature′ - Ruth Lister, Professor of Social Policy, Loughborough University. What has happened to welfare states? Are we witnessing the end of welfare, the survival of the welfare state, or welfare states in transition? Changing Welfare, Changing States disentangles the various answers to these questions, inviting us to think differently about the remaking of the relationships between welfare, state and nation. Informed by the `cultural turn′ in the social sciences, the book reflects a commitment to the importance of rethinking social policy at a time when social, political and intellectual certainties have been profoundly unsettled. Key features of the book include: } a thought-provoking approach - encourages students to ′rethink′ welfare states. } broad coverage - engages with a range of approaches to the study of welfare states, drawing on social policy, politics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. } contributes to key debates on: globalization, neo-liberalism, changing forms of governance and conflicts over citizenship in the contemporary remaking of welfare states. Written by a leading academic in the field, the book has a flowing narrative and clear structure that makes it accessible to and popular with students and academics alike. It is an invaluable resource for undergraduates and postgraduates in the field of social policy and will also be of interest to students and researchers in related disciplines such as sociology, politics, anthropology and cultural studies.

Work and the Welfare State
Work and the Welfare State

Author: Evelyn Z. Brodkin

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1626160015

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Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare-state politics, policy, and management. This volume offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. An international group of scholars contribute organizational studies that shed new light on old debates about policies of workfare and activation. Peeling back the political rhetoric and technical policy jargon, these studies investigate what really goes on in the name of workfare and activation policies and what that means for the poor, unemployed, and marginalized populations subject to these policies. By adopting a street-level approach to welfare state research, Work and the Welfare State reveals the critical, yet largely hidden, role of governance and management reforms in the evolution of the global workfare project. It shows how these reforms have altered organizational arrangements and practices to emphasize workfare’s harsher regulatory features and undermine its potentially enabling ones. As a major contribution to expanding the conceptualization of how organizations matter to policy and political transformation, this book will be of special interest to all public management and public policy scholars and students.

The Workfare State
The Workfare State

Author: Eva Bertram

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-07-17

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0812247078

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The Workfare State recounts the history of the evolving social contract for poor families from the New Deal to the present. Challenging conventional accounts, Eva Bertram argues that conservative Southern Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s led the way in developing the modern workfare state, well before Republican campaigns in the 1980s.

Welfare to Work in Contemporary European Welfare States
Welfare to Work in Contemporary European Welfare States

Author: Anja Eleveld

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2020-01-29

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1447340132

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With welfare to work programmes under intense scrutiny, this book reviews a wide range of existing and future policies across Europe. Seventeen contributors provide case studies and legal, sociological and philosophical perspectives from around the continent, building a rich picture of welfare to work policies and their impact. They show how many schemes do not adequately address social rights and lived experiences, and consider alternatives based on theories of non-domination. For anyone interested in the justice of welfare to work, this book is an important step along the path towards more fair and adequate legislation.

Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare
Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

Author: Adrienne Roberts

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1134880200

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This book presents a feminist historical materialist analysis of the ways in which the law, policing and penal regimes have overlapped with social policies to coercively discipline the poor and marginalized sectors of the population throughout the history of capitalism. Roberts argues that capitalism has always been underpinned by the use of state power to discursively construct and materially manage those sectors of the population who are most resistant to and marginalized by the instantiation and deepening of capitalism. The book reveals that the law, along with social welfare regimes, have operated in ways that are highly gendered, as gender – along with race – has been a key axis along which difference has been constructed and regulated. It offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution that disrupts the tendency for mainstream and critical work within IPE to view capitalism primarily as an economic relation. Roberts also provides a feminist critique of the failure of mainstream and critical scholars to analyse the gendered nature of capitalist social relations of production and social reproduction. Exploring a range of issues related to the nature of the capitalist state, the creation and protection of private property, the governance of poverty, the structural compulsions underpinning waged work and the place of women in paid and unpaid labour, this book is of great use to students and scholars of IPE, gender studies, social work, law, sociology, criminology, global development studies, political science and history.

Beyond the Workfare State
Beyond the Workfare State

Author: Mick Carpenter

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781861348722

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Explores equality, discrimination and human rights in relation to employability and 'welfare-to-work' policies bringing together a range of illustrative studies that gives voice to a variety of potentially marginalised groups.

The Transformation of Welfare States?
The Transformation of Welfare States?

Author: Nick Ellison

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-04-07

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 113476569X

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This accessible work provides a ‘political sociology’ of welfare states in industrial societies, with both historical and contemporary perspectives. Ellison focuses on the social and political underpinnings of a number of welfare regimes and looks at the transformations they have undergone and the challenges they face. This book assesses current debates about the role of ‘globalization’ in welfare state change, paying particular attention to contemporary views about the capacity of embedded institutional structures to limit the effects of global economic pressures. Ellison assesses the changing nature of social policies in nine OECD countries – selected to include ‘liberal, ‘social democratic’ and ‘continental’ welfare regimes. Taking labour market and pension policies as the main areas of investigation, this volume provides ‘snapshots’ of welfare reform in each case, charting the ways in which different regimes ‘manage’ the range of challenges with which they are confronted. Ultimately, the book suggests that all contemporary welfare regimes are experiencing a level of ‘neoliberal drift’. As yet, this trend towards liberalization remains constrained in those countries with more ‘coordinated’ economies and institutionalized forms of social partnership – but the question is for how long? This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of International Politics, Sociology and Social Policy.