Critique of How Workfare is Meant to Combat Poverty

In Canada and specifically Ontario, the current sentiment among federal and provincial governments asserts that the provision of welfare results in recipient dependency. This dependency in turn perpetuates poverty because of the disincentives it offers to find employment. The dominant viewpoint is that people are poor because they do not have a job, therefore if they are encouraged to enter the labour market this will pull them out of poverty. The recent literature on the issue of labour force exclusion indicates that there are two types of workfare programs. This includes the Labour-Force Attachment (LFA) model as well as the Human Capital Development (HCD) model.

The LFA model favours low cost solutions in which any employment is better than welfare provision. This model is designed to move people off welfare, regardless of whether job entry is at minimum wage. The goal is to force an attachment of the poor to the labour market, whether or not this may perpetuate their continued impoverishment. The LFA model is the defining perspective behind Workfare in Ontario. This approach illustrates the shift in focus from government responsibility to provide for the needs of those without other options, to a focus on the responsibility of individuals to find work regardless of structural inequalities.

The HCD model, which I view as a step up from the previous, involves high-cost job training and education with a goal for job entry above the minimum wage mark. However, the economist James K. Galbraith argues that while this model may be more beneficial, it still ignores the root of income inequality as a consequence of structural inequalities, the new global market and monopoly power.

Why do these models acknowledge that poverty results from the lack of decent employment and yet they continue to place blame on individual attributes? Garson Hunter asks, “Should it not be argued that it is the labour market that creates the disincentives to employment and that the labour market needs to change to create meaningful employment, unionized workplaces, decent wages, and decent jobs?”

What seems to have been happening in the case of the Workfare policy, is the forging of a strange relationship between fiscal conservatives and social agencies/reformers. The shift in ideology previously explored may explain this relationship and the current prevalence of a rights based approach as opposed to the previous needs based approach. The idea is to offer fewer services and more rights to the poor. These rights include entrance into the labour market through force or change of individual attributes. However, this seems to have taken on the position of neglect. This approach ignores the progress that was made to shift deterministic views such as the civil rights movement, the fall of the eugenics movement etc. The focus has now been placed directly on changing the individual side of the individual-environment process of socialization.

Whether or not it is an immediate policy possibility to focus on the root cause of poverty (structural inequalities, which will also be covered further in future blogs), this contextual nature should at least be acknowledged. This would lessen the individualization of welfare recipients, shifting the spotlight from an attempt to uncover so called deviant value systems which allow for laziness (in reference to the LFA model) and personal responsibility for educational and skill deficiency ( in reference to the HCD model) and towards the recognition of structural causes of poverty.