The aff’s employment scheme is not neutral but rather serves to obscure and depoliticize radical alternatives of care.
Dr. Francesco Laruffa ’20; PhD, visiting scholar at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy of the University of Bremen with a Postdoc Mobility Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation; “What is a Capability-enhancing Social Policy? Individual Autonomy, Democratic Citizenship and the Insufficiency of the Employment-focused Paradigm”; 1/2/20; acronyms expanded; https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2019.1661983; NT-ML
In conclusion, providing people with jobs may be an inadequate measure of social advancement as are increase of GDP or income (Koggel Citation2003, 168), especially if the goal of maximizing the participation in the labour market is motivated by the increase of economic output rather than by a real concern for people’s quality of life. In particular, merely increasing citizens’ workforce participation may be insufficient and misleading if the goal is the expansion of their political agency. Indeed, inclusion in the labour market obscures more radical forms of empowerment aimed at achieving broader social and political changes, especially within the economy and the workplace—which in the employment-focused paradigm remain largely de-politicized.