Importing Workfare: Policy Transfer of Social and Labour Market Policies from the USA to Britain under New Labour

Abstract

Britain's New Labour government has put welfare reform at the top of its political agenda. It has followed a radical "workfare" agenda in relation to labour and social market policies and no longer aims to secure full employment mainly through direct job creation or Keynesian demand management. Instead, it promotes equal opportunity for all based on a contract between benefits claimants and the employment service. The New Deal is at the heart of British activation programmes for the unemployed. American policy paradigms have influenced the design of the New Deal. Policy transfer in activation policies from the USA to Britain is due to institutional similarities in British and American welfare states on the one hand, and to the comparable structure of their labour markets on the other hand. The influence of the European social model on British labour market policies thus remains limited.

The social exclusion discourse: ideas and policy change

“…In the French social and political discourse, insertion refers to a participatory model of 'activation' based on a contractual model rather than the punitive logic that later triumphed in the US with the enactment of the controversial 1996 welfare reform (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act). This provides more ground to the idea that France's policy makers have rejected the moralistic and neoliberal logic of workfare that became dominant in the US and, later, in Britain (Morel, 2000;Daguerre, 2004). Within the French Republican model, the state has the obligation to provide assistance to citizens (Bec, 1998).…”

“…12 Among the many British measures enacted to fight social exclusion and to bring 'activation' about are the 1999 Welfare Reform and Pensions Act, the 2002 Job Centre Plus initiative, and the various New Deals for the youth and the unemployed (Dwyer, 2004). Overall, the push for 'activation' has proved stronger in Britain than in France, where the RMI's contrat d'insertion is distinct from the workfare model the first Blair government borrowed from the Clinton administration (King, 1999;Clasen and Clegg, 2003: 366;Daguerre, 2004). From this perspective, the official New Labour discourse about social exclusion justifies conditional entitlements in the name of an increasingly moralistic vision of social inclusion (Levitas, 2005).…”

“…As suggested above, the explicit quest for social inclusion and 'national solidarity' in France legitimised the enactment of social programmes that reduced the fiscal reliance on social insurance contributions, which is one of the core policy imperatives of contemporary economic liberalism in continental Europe. 3 In Britain, an increasingly moralistic social exclusion discourse constructed the need for workfare, a policy idea 'imported' from the US during the Clinton years (Daguerre, 2004).…”

Where is the study of work in critical IPE?

“…Rather than specific skills and abilities alone, workers can demonstrate 'labour attitudes' (Worth, 2003: 608 Threads running through the literature on employability include (1) a human capital approach and (2) an approach that stresses labour market attachment or work-first (Daguerre, 2004).…”

Antipoverty Programmes in Venezuela

“…They also reject idleness and passivity. Such moralist discourses are familiar to the author, who has commented upon similar discourses in completely different contexts, namely welfare reform in the UK and in the United States (Daguerre, 2004(Daguerre, , 2008.…”