A New Service Class in the Public Sector? The Role of Femonationalism in Unemployment Policies

Abstract

This article aims to explore the content embedded in the figuration of ‘foreign-born unemployed women’ and how discourses of gender equality are used to create an emerging racialised service class within the Swedish public sector. Influenced by the concept of femonationalism, the article explores how the introduction of the Extra Services unemployment reforms facilitates the creation of a service class whose purpose is to make it possible for the regular workforce to continue to function despite cutbacks and the neoliberal management of professional care work in the public sector. The study identifies a shift in the discourse, where, while migrant women continue to be represented as victims in public discourses concerning unemployment, they are also represented as being lazy and unwilling to work, qualities that legitimate the need for more repressive interventions towards the group, often described as feminist interventions that will rescue migrant women and their children.

Policing time – creating labour: the temporal control of the unemployed

“…Through several distinct state policies and social programmes, the unemployed often work for periods where they are not paid or do work that does not guarantee future work (Mulinari 2018). Being free from the policing of the social workers and labour market secretaries and getting a salary (which was not much higher than the social security they had in the past) was an important aspect of why the women identified the programme as different to other activities they have participated in.…”

Gendered Activation at the Expense of Gender Equality? Activation and Gender Equality as Competing Logics in the Swedish Welfare State

“…Mulinari, 2018; Vesterberg, 2015). While the interviewees in our empirical material did not give voice to clear claims of racial discrimination in terms of treating participants differently based on race, our material points to an example of the systemic reproduction of racist discourse within social and labor market policies (Mulinari, 2018). To gain more knowledge on how racist discourses are further operationalized, a more in-depth analysis of the day-to-day activation is needed.…”

“…As previous research has pointed out (Larsson, 2015;Martinsson et al, 2016;Mulinari, 2018;Vesterberg, 2016), there is often a paradoxical discourse around migrant women in Swedish labor market policy. On one side, migrant women are victimized and described as exposed due to discrimination: it is like this; many people think when they see the [municipal] website that diversity is a nice thing … but when we come with our Somali women who not only have a hijab but a chador and then it's 'nooo … we don't want that kind of diversity' (MX).…”

“…Class permeates the labour market programs since they solely target unemployed individuals living on social assistance, meaning poor people who are not established in the social insurance system. As discussed by Hübinette and Lundström (2014); Sager and Mulinari (2018), Mulinari (2018), gender equality policy in Sweden is connected to a sense of national identity that excludes migrants from the very notion of gender equality, as they are constructed to be patriarchal and not interested in change. Thus, by adopting an intersectional approach in our study, we highlight how activation may differ for migrant women.…”

Gender Equality and Beyond: At the Crossroads of Neoliberalism, Anti-Gender Movements, “European” Values, and Normative Reiterations in the Nordic Model

“…Paula Mulinari (2018) explores the dialectic relationship between the representations of migrant women and their economic-political role as workers in the current phase of capitalism and further elaborates this topic. While she is inspired by a feminist postcolonial tradition, she wants to create bridges that link this central feminist intervention with the field of feminist political economy.…”