Activating the Unemployed or Liberating the Employed? Universal Basic Income in the French Welfare Reform Debate

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-180
Author(s):  
Marc-Antoine Sabaté
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
Reform Debate

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-78
Author(s):  
Alain Joffe
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Welfare System ◽  
Welfare Recipients ◽  
Collateral Damage ◽  
Dependent Children ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
Reform Debate

As the welfare-reform debate begins to boil, the place to begin is with an elemental fact: no child in America asked to be here. Each was summoned into existence by the acts of adults. And no child is going to be spiritually improved by being collateral damage in a bombardment of severities targeted at adults who may or may not deserve more severe treatment from the welfare system. Phil Gramm says welfare recipients are people "in the wagon" who ought to get out and "help the rest of us pull." Well. Of the 14 million people receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 9 million are children. Even if we get all these free-riders into wee harnesses, the wagon will not move much faster.

Advancing Universalism in Neoliberal Times? Basic Income, Workfare and the Politics of Conditionality

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 589-603
Author(s):  
Ben Spies-Butcher
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Unemployment Benefits ◽  
Neoliberal Reform ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Welfare Institutions ◽  
Family Benefits

Workfare is an exemplar of neoliberal welfare reform generating precarity. In response, critics have sought to advance a politics of universalism, through either a return to social democracy or the embrace of a universal basic income. Yet, these responses invoke different understandings of universalism. This paper explores the politics of universalism in the context of neoliberal reform to benefit systems. Using Australia as a case study, it applies a variegated understanding of neoliberalism to identify two distinct reform trajectories for family payments and unemployment benefits. While appearing to follow a common template of liberalization, in practice each trajectory fostered distinct social outcomes and political dynamics. I argue the more inclusive restructuring of family benefits reflected the influence of social movement pressure intersecting with an increasingly pro-competition and technocratic state, producing new, hybrid, patterns of universal social provision similar to forms of basic income. However, in reflecting on these political dynamics I highlight how the mobilization of universalism is contingent on existing welfare institutions, suggesting dangers in applying these lessons more broadly.

scholarly journals A sociology of Covid-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Matthewman ◽  
Kate Huppatz
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Social Experiment ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
The World ◽  
Socially Isolated

The Covid-19 pandemic presents the profoundest public health and economic crisis of our times. The seemingly impossible has happened: borders have closed, nations have locked down, and individuals have socially isolated for the collective good. We find ourselves involved in an unprecedented social experiment. This living laboratory is ripe for sociological analysis. In this introductory article, we provide a broad sociology of Covid-19, paying attention to the production of pandemics and the creation of vulnerabilities. We acknowledge the dystopian elements of the pandemic: it will provide opportunities for ‘disaster capitalists’ to profit, it will enhance certain forms of surveillance, and it will impact some constituencies far more negatively than others (here we pay particular attention to the pandemic’s gendered consequences). Yet there are also resources for hope. We are witnessing altruistic acts the world over, as mutual aid groups form to render assistance where needed. Notions of welfare reform, progressive taxation, nationalisation and universal basic income now seem more politically palatable. Some even predict the imminent demise of neoliberalism. While this may be too hopeful, reactions to the pandemic thus far do at least demonstrate that other ways of living are within our grasp. As Arundhati Roy has said: the virus is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

scholarly journals ‘21st Century Welfare’ in Historical Perspective: Disciplinary Welfare in the Depression of the 1930s and Its Implications for Today

2020 ◽  
pp. 136078042093774
Author(s):  
Matthew Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Behavioural Regulation ◽  
The Unemployed

Since 2010, UK governments have intensified conditionality as part of a programme of ‘welfare reform’. Social scientists have undertaken much critical analysis but less attention has been paid to possible historical parallels. This article sheds new light on welfare reform through comparison with the depression of the 1930s. It undertakes a documentary analysis of policy in the 1930s informed by a governmentality perspective. In both periods, governments committed to liberal orthodoxies and feared the unemployed would become vulnerable to ‘demoralization’ and ‘dependency’; their behaviour and character were determinant of their rights to support. However, there are notable differences in what interventions have been considered appropriate. The article assesses the significance of continuities and contrasts, and argues in particular that the severity and ubiquity of behavioural regulation employed today is even greater than that seen in the ‘dark decade’ of the great depression.

Labour, laziness and distribution: work imaginaries among the South African unemployed

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. J. Dawson ◽  
E. Fouksman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Informal Settlement ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Labour Markets ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Unconditional Cash Transfers ◽  
The Unemployed

AbstractA wealth of new writing has emerged around the future of labour, focusing on thinking beyond employment in imagining the futures of ‘surplus populations’ no longer needed by labour markets. These new imaginaries include radically expanded forms of redistribution, such as unconditional cash transfers or universal basic income. But what are the views of the ‘surplus populations’ themselves? This article uses ethnographic research in an informal settlement in South Africa to understand why the unemployed or precariously employed poor are themselves often reluctant to delink labour and income. In particular, we focus on the discursive use of ‘laziness’ by urban unemployed young men. The varied (and often contradictory) ways in which these men employ the laziness discourse sheds light on the logics linking waged work and money in our informants’ social imaginaries. It illuminates the underlying contradictions and complexities of such logics, including those of gender, relational obligations, expectations of citizenship, and the inevitable tensions between aspirational hopes and economic realities. To begin thinking ‘beyond the proper job’, to use Ferguson and Li's phrase, we must unravel and understand such nuanced logics that continue to bind together hard work, deservingness and cash – even for those left out of labour markets.

Infinite testing: tests and critique in and below the public

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-200
Author(s):  
Magnus Paulsen Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Social Economy ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Behavioural Effect ◽  
Unemployed Person ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Unemployed ◽  
The Voice

In chapter 9 the key dynamics driving the active turn are teased out. The composite and tension-filled repertoire installs a multicausal and behavioural problematisation of unemployment where there is constant room for improvement and adjustments. At the level of public debate, this manifests in a permanent testing of policy instruments’ behavioural effect. At the level of the every-day governing of the unemployed, the tensions between the different cities of the active turn are mitigated in categorisations and various and continuous tests that evaluate the behaviour of the unemployed. The tests, such as profiling, screening, interviews and contracts, thus continuously ask what kind of subject the unemployed person is (i.e., what city do you live in?), how worthy are you and what instruments will make you more worthy, that is bring you closer to working. The chapter then points to the implications for the way in which the voice of the unemployed is qualified. The book ends with a discussion of to what extend the ideas of universal basic income and social economy/enterprises, that have received growing attention in international policy debates, contain credible alternatives to the moral economy of activation.

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