Feminist critiques are key to problematizing the workfare regime and punitive welfare.

Chapter Five: Critique of and Implications from Workfare This chapter begins by outlining the key values and assumptions that underpin workfare as an ideological project. While workfare is celebrated by its proponents as a means of ensuring self-sufficiency and self-responsibility amongst welfare recipients, discussion then turns to the negative implications social policy writers attribute to the workfare approach taken to welfare provision in the New Zealand context. The critique of workfare offered by feminists is then presented. Unlike much of the mainstream social policy literature in New Zealand, the feminist critique directly problematises workfare’s emphasis on paid employment in relation to the increasing prevalence of precarious employment opportunities. As such, this literature highlights a fundamental contradiction in modern welfare provision – how can paid employment after welfare be better for welfare recipients, when such employment is precarious? This literature also addresses a gap in precarious employment research that does not always consider the experiences of welfare recipients as a source of potentially-precarious labour, establishing a clear connection between workfare and precarious employment which this research hopes to highlight further in the New Zealand context. Why Workfare? As T. Baker and Davis (2018) see it, the approach taken to workfare is largely reliant on whether the reasons for unemployment are considered to be structural (related to the conditions of the labour market, for example) or individual (for instance, related to the behaviour of the individual). When both structural and individual circumstances are accounted for, workfare is likely to be ‘soft’; when only individual circumstances are considered causal, workfare is likely to be ‘hard’. This becomes relevant when we consider how welfare-to-work reform has been justified in the New Zealand context. There is first a moral component to reasoning in favour of workfare reform, in line with the influential work of US academic Lawrence Mead (Rainford, 2004). Workfare proponents like Mead see welfare receipt as ‘trapping’ recipients in the welfare system, encouraging recipients’ reliance on welfare and lack of self-responsibility and independence (Kingfisher & Goldsmith, 2001). Welfare recipients are perceived to be self-interested actors who lack the ‘right’ values or are ‘morally weak’, and who only operate in the ‘right way’ when incentivised to do so (Cheyne et al., 2008; Humpage & Baillie, 2016; O’Brien, 2005). Flowing from this moral component is the rhetoric of ‘welfare dependency’, which has formed the basis of much welfare-to-work reform in New Zealand since the mid-1980s (Humpage & Baillie, 2016; Lunt, 2009). Associated with oft-racialised notions of welfare recipients as ‘scrounging’, ‘work shy’, promiscuous and a ‘threat to social order’ (Lunt, 2008, 2009; Rainford, 2004; Standing, 2011b), arguments for workfare reform based on ‘welfare dependency’ as the problem assume that benefit receipt is a self-perpetuating lifestyle choice, which results in a lack of responsibility for oneself, a lack of self-reliance, an increase in passivity and a decrease in the ‘work ethic’. The ‘culture of worklessness’ that proliferates is then argued to foster dependency amongst not only welfare recipients themselves, but a generational dependency on the State amongst their families (D. Bedggood, 1999; Humpage & Baillie, 2016; O’Brien, 2005; Standing, 2011b; Woodhams, 2012). Workfare reforms introduced in response to the welfare dependency problem therefore operate to pathologise individual welfare recipients, framing them as having a figurative illness which is responsible for their need of a benefit rather than the structural factors they experience (Oak, 2015; Woodhams, 2012). In contrast, participating in paid employment is simultaneously framed as an ‘honorific’ independence (Fraser & Gordon, 1994), enabling welfare recipients to fulfil their responsibilities and moral obligations and thus be absolved of their dependency (Beder, 2000). Workfare is consequently seen as one way in which people can be integrated into society, and both function and contribute more optimally within it (Standing, 1990, 2011b). The second component to favouring workfare is the binary between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, a dichotomy fundamentally related to notions of dependency (O’Brien, 2005; Standing, 1990). Those who cannot provide for themselves are deemed ‘deserving’ and genuinely dependent, and so continue to have their welfare provided for by the State (D. Bedggood, 1999; Kingfisher, 2013), while the ‘undeserving’ – typically non-working women, Māori and Pasifika, youth, and the ‘early-retired’ (Lunt, 2008) - are associated with negative ‘dependence’ and so experience punitive welfare provision. A further feature of workfare is that the parameters of who fits where within this binary are constantly redefined, such that an increasing number of people come to fall outside of the ‘deserving’ category and are therefore subject to more punitive treatment. As noted by Humpage and Baillie (2016), for instance, the workfare agenda has now encroached upon parents with dependent children, and those who are sick or disabled, working to incentivise these groups to become individually responsible for their circumstances despite these groups traditionally being excluded from work tests and obligations due to their legitimate need of welfare support. While O’Brien (2011, p. 26) sees the deserving-undeserving distinction as having “no place in contemporary welfare systems”, and its negative implications for the public’s trust in both each other and in the welfare system as a whole are known (Humpage, 2015), this distinction is still evident in recent welfare reforms that aim to provide financial aid to those participating in-work, as the ‘deserving’, and to punish (through sanctions or reduced benefit levels) those who do not as the ‘undeserving’ (see Elizabeth & Larner, 2009; Humpage, 2015). The notion of ‘dependency’ that underpins the vast majority of welfare reform is highly problematic, not least because it is consistently unclear as to what ‘dependence’ on welfare actually means (Cheyne et al., 2008; O’Brien, 2012a, 2013). Aside from the fact that there is little to no evidence suggesting that welfare receipt encourages dependency (Hodgetts et al., 2017), Jackson (2011) also points out that New Zealand is one of the best performing countries in relation to ‘long-term dependency’ levels as defined and measured by the OECD. The most powerful critique of the dependency argument, however, is made on the basis that dependency is not the result of individuals’ self-interest or lack of work ethic, but of the structural circumstances individuals are subject to. Dependence has been shown to be a consequence of both social and economic factors (D. Bedggood, 1999), where the conditions of the labour market dictate the level of welfare ‘dependence’: people enter benefit receipt as a rational response to fluctuations in the number of labour market opportunities available, not as a response out of ‘indolence’ (Cheyne et al., 2008; Jackson, 2011; O’Brien, 2005; Standing, 1990, 2011b). In fact, as discussed by Parker and Patterson (2003), research in New Zealand found high incidence of both previous work history and motivation to work amongst benefit recipients. Available data demonstrates these arguments further. In 2010, the Ministry of Social Development published Future Liability: Estimating time on benefit and associated cost, an investigative report that measured both the future duration and future cost of benefit receipt in New Zealand. Measuring future liability as the cost of benefit (based on benefit rates) plus expected time on benefit (where duration is potentially noncontinuous and only projected up until an individual reaches 65 years of age), the Ministry of Social Development (2010) estimated the average future duration of receipt for all benefits to be between eight and 11 years. However, there were considerable differences in the estimated duration of benefit receipt by benefit type.

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