Disciplining the Poor: Welfare Conditionality, Labour Market Activation and Welfare ‘Fraud’

Kiely, Elizabeth; Swirak, Katharina

doi:10.51952/9781529202991.ch003

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Implicating the moral and psychological -rather than the economic or systemicorigins of financial hardship, self-sufficiency not only casts people needing assistance as having weak values and ethics (Maki, 2011;Kiely and Swirak, 2021) but also questions their motivation to work (Theodore and Peck, 2001), all while failing to assign responsibility to structures and institutions marked by power. Welfare systems have thus been infused with a multiplicity of complex rules and conditionalities to compel people to engage in paid labour (Baker Collins, 2016a), with the 'overseers of the poor' (Gilliom, 2001) within these systems granted significant discretion to regulate, discipline, and sanction those refusing to comply (Baker Collins, 2016b).…”

Section: Welfare Dependency and Self-sufficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Covering all the [welfare] basics’: a critical policy study of the Expert Panel on Basic Income report in British Columbia, Canada

Smith-Carrier,

Forget,

Power

et al. 2024

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice

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In 2018, British Columbia (BC), Canada’s third most populous province, announced the creation of an Expert Panel to explore the feasibility of introducing a basic income in BC. The Expert Panel on Basic Income prepared the policy report, Covering All the Basics: Reforms for a More Just Society, that responded to this task. Our research applies a critical policy studies approach to explore the ideologies, discursive strategies, and discourses embedded in and emanating from the report. In so doing, we find that the report reproduces problematic discourses about self-sufficiency, welfare dependency, and (poor) choice(s). Rather than discarding a basic income for the working-age population based on flawed assumptions and problematic beliefs, we invite policymakers to consider a more transformative vision that recognises the systemic roots of financial hardship, and embraces a basic income as a key building block of income security for BC and all of Canada.

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