Unpaid care, welfare conditionality and expropriation

Abstract

Welfare conditionality where social security payments are conditional on recipients undertaking tasks such as training, submitting job applications and taking part in "work-like" activities, is an enduring punitive feature of contemporary welfare provision in global North economics. | INTRODUCTIONWelfare conditionality is an ongoing feature in the Australian society security system. Unemployment is seen as not a structural issue of advanced capitalist economies, but a problem stemming from individual behavioral

Understanding Covid-19 emergency social security measures as a from of basic income: Lessons from Australia

“…One such example of a basic income-like measure implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic can be found in the Australian federal government's initial response to Covid-19, in 2020. During the first phase of lockdowns, the federal government radically restructured the social security system to move towards basic income-like relief (Klein, 2021a). Australia's social security system had long been thought of as inadequate and punitiveinadequate because the base rates of Australia's working-age social security payments have been below the poverty line for some time, and punitive because of the use of welfare conditionalities, more commonly called mutual obligations (Cahill, 2014;Klein, 2021b). Australia's ongoing meagre benefit provisions has led Alston (2018), the (2014-20) UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, to describe Australia's social security system as providing 'a right to social insecurity' (2018, p. 253).…”

“… 5. An extended analysis of these impacts including gendered impacts and a deep discussion of the methodology are published here (Klein et al 2022) and here (Klein et al 2021). …”

The administration of harm: From unintended consequences to harm by design

“…This discursive manoeuvring has been part of a broader program of neoliberal welfare reform, which has involved the gradual weakening of the welfare state, the disavowing of government responsibility for citizen wellbeing, and the advancement of marketised forms of care provision (Dwyer, 1998; McDonald and Marston, 2005). It has also involved the reification of paid employment, such that other forms of social contribution are systematically expropriated and devalued (Klein, 2020). Governments have advanced a capitalist vision of human worth grounded in economic productivity, and have derived political benefit from being ‘tough’ on the (apparent) free-riders they charge with failing to contribute through employment.…”

“…Lubchenco, 2017) to forced migrants (Anderson, 2013) have been discursively framed as a danger to society. Those outside the mainstream labour forceincluding the unemployed (Peterie et al, 2019a(Peterie et al, , 2019b, single parents (Klein, 2020), and people living with disabilities (Geiger, 2021) are particularly vulnerable to stigmatisation of this kind. Similar forms of harm are evident in policing, where institutional racism against people of colour (who are often viewed as criminals) makes social control appear necessary (Durr, 2015;Vitale, 2017).…”

“…Eligibility criteria have always surrounded the receipt of social security payments, but these conditions traditionally pertained to individuals' circumstances rather than their personal conduct (Clasen and Clegg, 2007;Dwyer, 2004). Since the late 1990s, however, 'conditional welfare' has taken on new meaning in Australia with the introduction of 'mutual obligations' such as meeting stringent job search quotas, engaging in education and training, attending mandatory meetings, and accepting any reasonable offers of employment (Klein, 2020;Marston and Peterie, 2020). Individuals who fail to meet these behavioural obligations risk financial sanctions, including the suspension or termination of benefit payments, which can push claimants deeper into poverty (Parsell et al, 2020).…”