Vol. 15 No.2 (February 2005), pp.128-130

SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AND WORKFARE IN THE UNITED STATES AND WESTERN EUROPE: THE PARADOX OF INCLUSION, by Joel F. Handler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 330pp. Hardback. £55.00 / $85.00 ISBN: 0521833701. Paper.  £19.99 / $31.99. ISBN: 0521541530.

Reviewed by Gretchen Ritter, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. Email: ritter@mail.utexas.edu .

The fundamental nature of welfare in the US and Western Europe has changed.  Twenty years ago, welfare was premised on civic status.  It was an entitlement afforded to all citizens, which guaranteed a basic level of income and benefits in the areas of health care, housing, and education.  Now, the premise behind most welfare programs is that they represent a contract between the state and those seeking assistance for basic means.  At the core of this new contract is an obligation to work.  In both Europe and the US, workfare (or activation as it is often called in Europe) has replaced welfare as the main form of social assistance for society’s poor.  This change, according to Joel Handler (the Maxwell Professor of Law and Social Policy at UCLA), should be regretted.

Before discussing the book’s overall argument, two aspects of the analysis are worth highlighting. The first concerns the role of gender in welfare reform, and the second involves practical assessments of welfare reform’s impact on social inequality and poverty.  According to Handler, changing family structures and gender roles have had a significant impact on patterns of work and poverty in both the US and Europe.  There are several aspects of the gender issue that merit attention: first, there has been a large increase in both single parent families and families where the parents are not married, which are typically associated with greater poverty; second, many more women work today than in the past, but in all these countries they are still subject to economic discrimination in compensation; and third, there has been a shift towards more part time employment, which is associated with less economic security, and women are more likely to be part time workers. In response to these social and demographic realities, Handler notes, some countries have done much better than others at addressing the changes in gender roles and family structure with policies and programs that both promote gender equity and reduce economic insecurity. Handler stresses the positive impact of programs in which social provisioning and work structures reinforce each other – nations with universal childcare programs and generous parental leave policies allow caregiving parents to both care for their families and be productive workers.

One of the most compelling aspects of Handler’s book is his attention to the lived realities of welfare workers and welfare recipients.  Handler highlights the way that caseloads, goal setting measures, and labor rewards often create incentives for welfare workers to favor recipients with greater social resources, while disqualifying the more difficult cases of the socially excluded.  Further, [*129] looking at the shift to workfare from the perspective of the clients, Handler notes both their widely held belief in the value of work, and the many social, physical, and emotional barriers that stand in the way of getting and keeping a job.  In the political demand that the poor behave well and earn their keep, what gets lost is a concern with social vulnerability and the plight of the persistently poor.

Returning to the comparative focus of the book, Handler notes that the United States was never fully committed to the view that citizens were entitled to social assistance.  Even at its height, the provisions afforded under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program were rather miserly, and the nation has yet to develop a universal health care system.  The closest that the US has come to a universal commitment to social provisioning is the Social Security system, which provides benefits to the majority of elderly Americans. Having never really developed a commitment to social citizenship, the move away from welfare as a right to workfare as a contract occurred first and most fiercely in this country. AFDC has been replaced by TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), which mandates work in exchange for time limited social benefits, without regard to the availability of viable employment opportunities and with insufficient attention to the social supports (transportation, childcare and health benefits) needed to make work a lasting endeavor.

The political traditions behind welfare in Western Europe were quite different.  There, the social citizenship model has deep roots, and social programs are much more extensive than in the US.  Economic stagnation, rising unemployment, and demographic shifts (involving both large waves of immigration and the influx of women into the workforce) all contributed to a rethinking of the welfare state in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerged is called the “Third Way” – an approach to social citizenship articulated by social theorists Anthony Giddens in Britain and Pierre Rosanvallon in France. According to this view, the persistence of longterm unemployment has undermined social solidarity.  The new approach to social provisioning tries to rebuild solidarity by emphasizing social inclusion and integration, and contends that the best means of social integration is through work. The “Third Way” emphasizes opportunity and behavior – there is a greater emphasis on programs that will enable those who chose work to do so successfully, and less provision of transfer assistance for those seen as voluntarily unemployed.

In many ways, the European models offer a kinder, gentler approach to contract based benefits and workfare.  Consequently, they offer a good opportunity to judge workfare’s potential to realize the goal of social integration.  In a careful review of the programs that have been implemented both on the Continent and in Great Britain, Handler concludes that instead of increasing social integration the “Third Way” often tends to further segregate the socially excluded. For these programs to really work, according to Handler, good jobs must be available, the programs must not be stigmatizing, and a great deal a attention must be paid to overcoming barriers to employment – related to transportation, illness and disability, mental health problems, child care, and the [*130] like. None of the programs currently in place do all of that. As a result, some people – those with greater personal resources and motivation – benefit from the workfare approach, while others – the more vulnerable and less enabled – suffer greater poverty and exclusion.

Handler has spent his career analyzing social politics and policies in the United States.  There is no one in the American academy better positioned to speak to the issues he addresses in this book. His knowledge of the policies and programs designed to assist the chronically poor both here and abroad is seemingly endless. Nonetheless, and this says more about American politics today than it does about Professor Handler, the viewpoint taken in the conclusion to this book feels hopelessly idealistic. Handler promotes a Basic Income Guarantee for all citizens as a way of protecting the socially vulnerable with a subsistence income while still allowing for the incentive effects offered by workfare programs. Writing on the day of George W. Bush’s second inaugural, one cannot help but wonder whether there is any real political possibility for the sweeping reforms that Handler advocates.

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Gretchen Ritter.