A hand up or a slap down? Criminalising benefit claimants in Britain via strategies of surveillance, sanctions and deterrence

Abstract

British policy-makers have increasingly sought to intensify and extend welfare conditionality. A distinctly more punitive turn was taken in 2012 to re-orientate the whole social security and employment services system to combine harsh sanctions with minimal mandatory support in order to prioritise moving individuals 'off benefit and into work' with the primary aim of reducing costs. This article questions the extent to which these changes can be explained by Wacquant's (2009) theory of the 'centaur state' (a neoliberal head on an authoritarian body), which sees poverty criminalised via the advance of workfare. We present evidence of an authoritarian approach to unemployment, involving dramatic use of strategies of surveillance (via new paternalist tools like the Claimant Commitment and the Universal Jobmatch panopticon), sanction and deterrence. This shift has replaced job match support with mandatory digital self-help, coercion and punishment. In relation to Work Programme providers, there is a contrasting liberal approach permitting

Fulfilling the ‘British way’: beyond constrained choice—Amazon workers' lived experiences of workfare

“…The testimony of Amazon's temps prompts a re‐consideration of the model of the triangular relationship between employer, agency and employee. The intervention of the state and the workfare architecture executed through Jobcentre Plus and the ubiquitous sanctions regime (Fletcher and Wright, ) challenge the triad of actors formulation. At the bottom of the labour market, these third‐party intermediaries are part‐integrated into state welfare/workfare institutions, obliging us to reconceptualise the interrelationships between actors as quadrilateral rather than triangular.…”

“…In the 1980s when de‐industrialisation, crisis, re‐structuring and government policy caused mass job loss, the neo‐liberal turn brought stigma to the unemployed. For the first time, benefits were curtailed and penalties imposed (Fletcher and Wright, : 325). The introduction of ‘Restart’ interviews (1986) initiated formalised conditional welfare, ushering in the prolonged transition from the right to welfare to the compulsion of workfare observable in many Western countries (Trickey and Lødemel, : 43).…”

“…Advisers could legally instruct jobseekers to take specific actions deemed necessary for finding work. Thus, the principle of behavioural conditionality, with threats of sanction for failure to comply, was established (Fletcher and Wright, ).…”

“…The Welfare Reform Act (2012) marked a qualitative leap in punitive conditionality, a decisive turn to workfare. Fletcher and Wright (: 332) detail the sanctions tariff; failure to apply for jobs or refusing Mandatory Work Activity brings 91 days benefit exclusion for a first or second ‘offence’ and 182–1095 days for a third. For those in work, Universal Credit (UC) supplanted WTC, and Claimant Commitments replaced JSAs as the new standardised, instrument of back‐to‐work conditionality for all UC, JSA and ESA‐WRAG claimants (Dwyer and Wright, ).…”

“…A crucial feature is mandatory registration on the Job Match platform, digital monitoring by which advisers monitor claimants' activities. Fletcher and Wright () draw on Bentham's metaphor for his model prison—the Panopticon—to describe a surveillance system which harvests data to justify sanctions. Now claimants are obliged, on pain of sanction, to evidence 35 hours‐a‐week job search; a part‐time worker employed for 10 hours must now document 25 hours job search.…”