Dignity Strategies in a Neoliberal Workfare Kitchen Training Program

Abstract

Welfare‐to‐work training (workfare) programs are designed to technically and affectively prepare marginalized people for jobs that are often routinized and dirty. They are expected to accept personal responsibility for their situation and demonstrate submission to bosses as means of “working off” their “debt” to society. Ethnographic observation at workfare training sites has tended to emphasize the indignities that trainees suffer, with less attention to how workers maintain dignity in the face of these experiences. Using ethnographic observation and interviews in a Chicago workfare kitchen training program, we show that neoliberal kitchen training work encompasses paradoxical expectations for trainee‐workers; they must demonstrate high levels of discretion and creativity required in professional kitchen work and demonstrate submission to charismatic authority as a means of getting kitchen work done and of affective compliance with the goals of the program. To combat the direct efforts of others to produce indignities, trainees developed two dignity strategies that are highly dependent on the structure of kitchen work: operating in a slipstream, and banking confidence that allows them to take liberties normally allowed for chef‐trainers. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of workplace dignity, a privilege that has been especially elusive for the poor under welfare‐to‐work programs.

Both sides of the Paycheck: Recommending Thrift to the Poor in Job Readiness Programs

“…Altogether, the literature captures the efforts within these programs to effect a moral transformation by instilling within clients the virtues of work, albeit through what is often a set of contradictory discourses demanding, at times, submission, and, at other times, entrepreneurialism (Helman, 2018;Hennigan and Purser, 2018;Purser and Hennigan, 2017;Van Oort, 2015;Wilcoxson and Moore, 2020). However, via careful consideration of the content of these programs, we reveal that they do far more.…”

The Fate of Social Modernity

“…In comparative terms, national active inclusion schemes exhibit important particularities, concerning, for instance, the coercive character of the instruments in use, that is, the terms of welfare conditionality. The 'hardcore' version is epitomised in US welfare-to-work programmes which impose job training or public works for recipients of social assistance benefits, with the related activities understood as a personal duty whereby beneficiaries are held responsible for their personal living conditions (Wiseman 2001;Wilcoxson and Moore 2020). While European approaches have been 'softer' in many places and often oscillate 'between protection and activation' (Ahn and Kazepov 2022), the previously mentioned components of active inclusion schemes (enabling employment services and job promotion measures) have often been viewed as two sides of the same coin when it comes to welfare state efforts directed towards (future) workers and jobseekers (Jessop 2022).…”