Precarious Education-to-Work Transitions: Entering Welfare Professions under a Workfarist Regime

Abstract

This article looks at the process of education-to-work transitions in female-dominated welfare professions within the Slovenian post-crisis context marked by a workfarist agenda. It departs from a scholarship that conceptualises precarity as a transitional vulnerability and disaffiliation exacerbated by workfarist policies to explore the contemporary experience of those trying to achieve professional integration under a volatile workfarist regime. The findings reveal a mismatch between established regulations for early career recruitment and professional licensing and actual chances in the labour market to meet these requirements through available workfarist non-standard, entry-level jobs/schemes designed for particular status and/or socio-demographic groups. It gives new evidence that European workfare regimes exacerbate precarity and a novel understanding of state-manufactured precarisation as an intersectional process of marginalisation and discrimination that not only hinders integration into welfare professions, but also downloads the costs of social reproduction on the next generation, causes precarious ageing and widens intersectional differences.

Unequal Mobility Regimes and Radical Adult Education in Neoliberal Times

“…As discussed, neoliberalism operates in different registers, as an ideology, economic and political governance, and as a form of public pedagogy, which is "at war against public values, critical thinking and all forms of solidarity, based on ideas of cooperation, social responsibility and common good" (Giroux, 2015, as cited in Štempihar, 2020, p. xxi). Such neoliberal education is corporate-driven and prescribes an endless accumulation of human capital that is supposed to make individuals more competitive and employable in a seemingly free and meritocratic labour market, which is in fact characterised by structural unemployment, growing precarity and segmentation and division of labour (Baptiste, 2001;McLaren, 2020;Moir & Crowther, 2014;Samaluk, 2021).…”

»Čigavi študenti smo, če ne vaši«

“…104). Država pri širjenju prekarnosti nikoli ni nevtralna, saj s spodbujanjem neoliberalnih politik »fleksibilizacije« trga delovne sile in pogojevanjem dostopa do socialnih pravic z vključenostjo na trg delovne sile postavlja »tuje« delavce v položaj, ko postanejo preživetveno odvisni od prodaje svoje delovne zmožnosti do te mere, da sprejemajo izredno slabe pogoje dela (Samaluk, 2021).…”

Neenaki režimi mobilnosti in radikalno izobraževanje odraslih v času neoliberalizma

“…Že prej smo videli, da neoliberalizem deluje znotraj različnih registrov -kot ideologija, gospodarsko in politično upravljanje in kot oblika javne pedagogike, ki »bije vojno proti javnim vrednotam, kritičnemu mišljenju in vsem oblikam solidarnosti, ki temeljijo na sodelovanju, družbeni odgovornosti in splošnemu dobremu« (Giroux, 2015(Giroux, , v Štempihar, 2020. Tovrstno neoliberalno izobraževanje poganja korporativno poslovanje in zavezuje k neskončnemu kopičenju človeškega kapitala, na podlagi katerega naj bi bil posameznik bolj konkurenčen in zaposljiv na navidezno svobodnem trgu dela, ki temelji na meritokraciji, v resnici pa ga zaznamujejo strukturna nezaposlenost, naraščajoča prekarnost in segmentacija ter delitev dela (Baptiste, 2001;McLaren, 2020;Moir in Crowther, 2014;Samaluk, 2021).…”