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September 10, 2006
What the Government calls 'mutual obligation requirements' in relation to welfare-to-work is a group of instruments that are designed to penalise those who fail to fulfil the conditions of their welfare benefits or Newstart. Penalties are incurred when welfare recipients breach their mutual obligation requirements. This is part of the broad neo-liberal reform push to deregulate the labour market and to substantially change the welfare state. Over at Club Troppo Don Arthur says that:
Charles Murray and Peter Saunders both want to dismantle the welfare state--- they just have different strategies for doing it. Murray's plan is to convert current welfare state spending into cash grants for every adult American (except those in prison) while Saunder's plan is to replace unemployment allowances, Medicare and other benefits with privatized savings accounts.
The neo-liberal assumption is that the unemployed need prodding back into work because they have no work ethic, and they are not personally motivated to acquire one. Unemployment is what lazy members of the working class engage in in that they chose this welfare lifestyle option. So they need a bit of regulation and discipline. What this account overlooks is that individuals are acting rationally in turning down low wage work because they suffer from high effective marginal tax rates in the transition from part time to full time employment.
Though the neo-liberal concern with the moral character of the unemployed is a return to the way the nineteenth century understood the unemployed, neo-liberal discourse is different because of the social democratic intervention, and construction of, the welfare state. It adopts a dependency culture perspective on the problems of unemployment and poverty and argues for the need to get back to what is called 'insurance principles' in the name of enhancing freedom.
We can look at the neo-liberal concern with the unemployed as a policy issue in terms of a range or assemblage of mechanisms and instruments devised by neo-liberalism that are bought to bear on welfare subjects to shape their conduct. The aim is to bring them into the market place. Any job is better than no job, as it were. Foucault's concept of 'governmentality', which is concerned with techniques and technologies of discipline, can be deployed to interpret the administrative categorization process that was used to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate unemployment benefit claims. Unemployment is understood as a historically specific site of regulation and the concern is to discover which kind of rationality is being used by the liberal state.
This review of William Walters 'Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social' describes this approach:
Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” and employing what may be called a social constructionist perspective, Walters aims to understand how unemployment has been discovered / created as a “conceptual object” (p. 36) and "rendered as a problem for government" (p. 3). This means looking at what sort of problem unemployment is imagined to be, and how this has changed historically. Walters also relates this to the major shifts which have taken place in how governments have responded to this problem. Here he is concerned with both the mundane devices and technologies used to regulate the social life of the unemployed and the broader "technologies" within which these are embedded.
What we have is a form of social governance whose strategy of rendering individual subjects 'responsible' entails shifting the responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc. and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming it into a problem of "self-care". We are deemed to be good if we engage in self care and bad if we rely on the welfare state.
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