Neoliberalism by Damien Cahill & Martijn Konings

Author:Damien Cahill & Martijn Konings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Whether by intention or otherwise, workfare became symbiotic with some of the broader economic transformations of the neoliberal era. It provided institutional support to the structures and arrangements upon which corporate profitability in many industries came to depend. Neoliberal approaches to welfare have gradually converged on a logic that focuses on the attributes of the unemployed individual, rather than on the elements of an economic system that often fails to provide sufficient opportunities for waged work (Peck and Theodore 2000). It is thus consistent with the broader shift in macroeconomic policy towards inflation targeting and a tolerance of higher rates of unemployment compared to the postwar boom years. This in turn has helped to keep labour costs in check, since unemployment exerts downward pressure on wages.

As we have seen, by making unemployment payments far less generous and qualifying for them much more onerous, neoliberal approaches to welfare encouraged the expansion of precarious, low-paid forms of work. The growth of such forms of work provided another avenue through which businesses were able to reduce costs and increase flexibility in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis. As critics of Reagan's cuts to welfare funding noted at the time, ‘income-maintenance programs are coming under assault because they limit profits by enlarging the bargaining power of workers with employers’, and ‘if the desperation of the unemployed is moderated by the availability of various benefits, they will be less eager to take any job on any terms’ (Piven and Cloward 1985: 13, 26).

Furthermore, as a way of managing the social dislocation and dissent engendered by the neoliberal restructuring of welfare and of the state more generally, states have increased their coercive surveillance and disciplining of the poor. As Wacquant has argued, in the US and elsewhere this has entailed the rise of a ‘prisonfare’ approach under which increasing rates of incarceration have been used to regulate those dispossessed through neoliberalization: ‘economic deregulation required and begat social welfare retrenchment, and the gradual makeover of welfare into workfare, in turn, called for and fed the expansion of the penal approach’ (2009: 58).

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