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Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime:Exploring the intersection of welfare staterestructuring and labour market policies in the UKJULIE MACLEAVY aa School of Geographical Sciences , University of Bristol , Bristol, UKPublished online: 09 May 2008.

To cite this article: JULIE MACLEAVY (2007) Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection ofwelfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,14:6, 721-743

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Engendering New Labour’s Workfarist Regime:

Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring

and labour market policies in the UK

JULIE MACLEAVYSchool of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Abstract This article deconstructs New Labour’s emerging workfarist regime to revealthe complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfarepolicy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it tracesthe deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changesinitiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ isconnected to the changing characteristics of employment and women’s socio-economicpositions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour marketparticipation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against thisbackground, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter thelabour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed,which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. Thecrux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work inthe formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions oflabour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains akey form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism,this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its sociallyconstructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications ofthis embedding for social and economic equality.

Key Words: Welfare; workfare; women; New Labour; New Deal for theUnemployed

Introduction

Many women are working day in, day out far below their abilities. Thiswaste of talent is an outrage at a time when the UK is facing increasingcompetition in the global market place, and an outrage for those womenpersonally. (Baroness Prosser, Chairwoman of the Women and WorkCommission, 2006)

Correspondence: Julie MacLeavy, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol,University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK. E-mail: julie.macleavy@bristol.ac.uk

Gender, Place and CultureVol. 14, No. 6, pp. 721–743, December 2007

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/07/060721-23 q 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09663690701659283

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The increased political salience of debates regarding women and work istestament to the growing public comprehension of the axes of gender inequalitythat (continue to) permeate the configurations of states, institutions and socialpolicies across western industrialised nations. Despite widespread political andeconomic restructuring—as a means of response to the crisis of the dominantFordist mode of macro-economic growth—gender divisions still emanate from thelabour market, family and post-welfare state. In the United Kingdom, forexample, the norm of the nuclear family and the allotment of a ‘family wage’, bothof which provided a base for mass consumption activities in the post-war period(and were supported by the state through the social wage), may be traced in thenew accommodation that is being forged between capital, labour and the state inthe era of New Labour governance. As the Women and Work Commissionrecently reported, there remains a continuing disparity in the wages paid to menand women, alongside a continued segregation of jobs (see Women and WorkCommission, 2006). This indicates that despite a de-gendering of the formallabour market, the ideological and cultural remnants of the assumption of amale ‘breadwinner’, which has long legitimised the segmentation of the labourforce along gender lines, continues to frame the earnings of women as a meresupplement to the family income.

Abstracting from such evident differences in the employment of men andwomen, feminist scholars have explored how the traditionally gendered divisionsof labour, which were instituted in the UK through the establishment of theKeynesian welfare national state (KWNS) (after Jessop, 2002), are being translatedto and transformed within its emerging post-welfarist regime. Such ‘genderedworkfare regime studies’ (I use this term as an update and reworking of whatBrush (2002) refers to as gendered welfare regime studies) build on the literaturedocumenting the masculinist nature of welfare policy, in the sense that the KWNSaccorded a low value to women’s work—particularly care work—as a means ofensuring a downward pressure on wages in occupations where productivity gainsthrough mechanisation were hard to achieve. They interrogate the programmesthrough which the state lends credence to its reliance on unpaid domestic labourin the contemporary period of after-Fordism,1 particularly with regard to the roleof women in maintaining the reproduction of the labour force, and assess theextent to which these new ‘workfarist’ (Peck, 2001) policies have been able toprogress the boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ employment by stipulatingthat the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input (for example,Boyer, 2003; Gray, 2002; Lewis, 2002). As such, gendered workfare regime studiesexplore how workfarist programmes seek to counteract the steady increase of(male) unemployment, which has resulted (primarily) from the domesticreduction of manufacturing labour, focusing specifically on supply-side labourmarket programmes that imply a level of personal responsibility for instances ofunemployment. They also consider the gendered impacts of reforms to the tax andbenefit system, including the new policy emphasis on ‘the child’ and thetransference of social security programmes to the market in an attempt to reducethe mounting costs of state provisions stemming from the growing decompositionof the nuclear family form (that is, the greater need for state support for education,housing, health, single households and single parents, social isolation and theageing population). By eradicating the former ‘trappings’ of the welfare statethrough the administration of a cautious and largely covert approach toredistribution, workfarism is explicitly designed to ‘make work pay’ for those

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employed in the lower reaches of the labour market (see Blair, 1999).Consideration of the processes through which this transformation (from welfareto workfarism) has been progressed has been less well documented.

Indeed, a brief survey reveals that whilst much has been written about thepursuit of a ‘work–welfare’ policy agenda—the term used by Desmond King(1995) to conjoin labour market governance and welfare state restructuring—theforegrounding of the causes and consequences of workfarist policy has tended tomarginalise questions pertaining to the discursive manner in which such transitionshave been realised.2 Thus, whilst scholars such as Norman Fairclough (2000), RuthLevitas (1998; 2005) and Ruth Lister (1998) have indicated and emphasised theimportance of ‘new’ language in New Labour governance, the institutional contextof the (ongoing) shift from the KWNS to what Bob Jessop (2002) has characterised asa Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime (SWPR) has been a key focus forwork–welfare researchers. This presents a significant opportunity to go beneathissues of workfarist policy implementation in order to consider the genderingprocesses through which power is being exercised within the contemporary politicaleconomy. Moreover, it provides scope to expand the work of gendered andmainstream welfare regime analysts who have considered the formal—legal andpolitical—frameworks of states and social provision as a means of explainingvariations and commonalities in the character and consequences of state power,institutions and social policies across different national contexts (particularly thebody of work that has built on Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) study of the keypolitical-economic dimensions of welfare) by connecting with recent (inter-national) considerations of the more informal elements of welfarist regimes—including Julia Adams and Tasleem Padamsee’s (2001) exploration of the signs,subjects, strategies and sanctions, which stipulate the formal and informalframeworks through which people calculate individual actions and behaviours.

Thus, in seeking to highlight the discursive systems through which peoplesignify and contest meanings, as well as establish and negotiate subject positionswithin emerging workfarist states, this article uses critical discourse analysis (afterFairclough, 1995; 2003) to explore the means through which the processes ofeconomic restructuring have been interpreted and responded to by government.3

Underpinning the current establishment of workfarism, it contends, is a range ofdiscursively constructed and institutionally realised conceptions of politicalsubjects, which are imbued with a particular vision of women and work. Taking theUK as an empirical case, the article unpacks the rationalities, strategies anddiscourses of New Labour governance and in so doing problematises theemergence of a workfarist regime. Beginning with an exploration of the traditionalgendering of domestic labour markets, it draws on recent work in labour marketsegmentation theory and state theory. From this, it considers the ways in whichrecent economic and political restructuring is re-gendering local labour marketsand labour market policy. Here it points towards the positioning of women in andthrough workfarist programmes, such as the New Deal for the Unemployed.Finally, it unravels some wider implications of this policy approach by consideringthe broader positioning of women in New Labour’s emerging workfarist regime.

Gender and the Labour Market in After-Fordism

Undoubtedly, local labour markets in the UK are undergoing a transformation.Since the 1970s, a long period of economic restructuring has resulted in the loss of

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relatively well paid and stable manufacturing employment, with disproportionateeffects for the unskilled male workers previously engaged in its productiveactivity (Beck, 2000). The ensuing shifts to a service-based economy have involveda rise in female participation rates and new ‘flexible’ working practices that areincreasingly based on casual, temporary and part-time modes of employment(Burchell et al., 2002; Gershuny, 2000; Perrons et al., 2006). These transitions havenot only altered the form and content of waged employment for the majority ofBritish employees, but, more importantly, changed the nature of the labour marketitself, with a redistribution of the balance of job opportunities between men andwomen of working age. Thus one of the defining characteristics of these newlabour markets is that in different sectors and in different places they arebecoming ‘feminised’ (McDowell, 2003).

This ‘feminisation of the economy’ refers to the steady rise in the number ofwomen employed, paralleled by the noticeable decline in men’s workforceparticipation rates. Whilst in 1975 more than 92 per cent of men of working agehad a job, by June 2006 this figure had fallen to just 78.8 per cent (seasonallyadjusted) (ONS, 2006). During the same period, participation rates for women rosefrom 59 to 70.1 per cent. At present, therefore, women’s participation rates are just8.7 per cent below those for men. In a comparable development, the particular life-cycle pattern that previously distinguished women’s working lives from men’shas also diminished (Barham, 2003; Gregg & Wadsworth, 1999). Traditionally,women’s labour market involvement had been marked by two peaks of highparticipation: the first among young women aged from their late teens until theirmid-twenties; and the second among women around the age of 40. More recently,these peaks have been offset by a rise of female employment levels between theages of 25 and 40, such that—in crude terms, at least—there is much greatersimilarity in the patterns of male and female employment in terms of age, exceptfor a decline in female participation rates after the age of 50. This indicates thatwomen are increasingly presumed to be a key part of the labour force with themajority employed for the whole of their working lives: ‘far from constituting amarginal segment of European labour markets, [women’s employment] has cometo be a key force in the restructuring of work and employment within Europe’(Rubery et al., 1999, p. 1).

There are, however, other important dimensions of this transformation that havehitherto received more limited attention within policy debates. This includes themarked gender difference in the number of hours worked; the variations in rates ofpay between men and women; and the low percentage of women on executiveboards or in management positions. More than two-fifths of the female workforce isemployed part-time (42%) compared with 9% of all male workers (Women andEquality Unit, 2005). Among full-time workers, women earn 17% less per hour thanmen, and the earnings for women employed on a part-time basis are 41% less thanfor men employed full-time (Women & Work Commission, 2006). This producesaverage hourly earnings of £9.02 for women and £11.44 for men, with women withdependent children under 16 earning less than those without children, while menwith children under 16 earn more than those without children (see Women andEquality Unit, 2005). Statistically, women also remain less likely than men to workas managers or senior officials: this occupational group is comprised of 11 per centof all women in employment compared 18 per cent of all men (ibid.). As AnnetteWalling (2005) notes, the employment rate for low qualified women dropssignificantly when they become mothers and again when there is a second child.

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There is less difference between highly qualified women and men. The suggeststhat whilst not universal, many women (still) perform ‘secondary’ employmentroles assumed in addition to their ‘primary’ duties as housekeepers and mothers(for further discussions of the gendered divisions within the contemporary labourmarket see Crompton, 1999; McDowell, 1997; 2001)

The traditional gendering of employment is a primary focus of labour marketsegmentation theory, which has developed over time from an initial empiricalidentification of the different contexts through which men and women participatein the labour market, to a broader recognition of the labour market as both site ofstruggle and a source of social power for different social groups. As early pioneerssuch as Doeringer & Piore (1971) argued on the basis of research conducted in theUnited States, labour markets are hierarchical and offer different economic andsocial rewards for different types of worker. The ‘primary’ sector (which iscomprised of professional and technical occupations) offers stable employmentwith relatively high wages and opportunities for career progression, while the‘secondary’ sector (which includes more elementary occupations, for instance insales and customer service or plant and machine operation) offers poor wages,poor working conditions and is subject to strong competitive pressures which, inturn, prompts high staff turnover and patterns of cyclical unemployment. Primarysector work has traditionally been the domain of white males, whilst secondarysector employment is more commonly associated with ethnic minorities, women,disabled people and young recruits (Doeringer & Piore, 1971; see also Barron &Norris, 1976; Craig et al., 1985). It was the recognition of these divisions in workarenas that led feminist scholars to iterate the gendered divisions of labour outsidethe workplace—the greater responsibilities of women in domestic spheres and theresultant restrictions on women’s time and mobility—and position such factors ascontributing to the subordinate positions of female employees (for example,Hanson & Pratt, 1995; Massey & Meegan, 1982).

Whilst work on labour market patterns continues (and remains necessary toensure that myths about women and work are not perpetuated), labour marketgeographers have additionally focused on discerning the social relations andpractices which structure dominant understandings of women’s employment(early examples include Environment & Planning A, 1994a; 1994b—a special doubleissue on the diverse worlds of European patriarchy—as well as European Urban &Regional Research, 1998). This body of work includes conceptualisation of thecultural, economic and political forces underpinning the gendered developmentof the political economy and the related specification of the differential impacts ofstate policies on men and women. This builds on Sylvia Walby’s (1986)exploration of ‘patriarchy at work’, related (sociological) discussions regarding anappropriate framework for analysing gender inequality in employment (forinstance, Pollert, 1996), as well as debates conducted within the field of genderedwelfare regime studies (discussed above) and now the varieties of capitalism(VoC) approach. VoC focuses on firms as actors central to processes of economicadjustment and seeks to determine the extent to which their core competenciesmight confer comparative institutional advantages to help mediate nationalresponses to globalisation (for further details see Hall & Soskice, 2001). This can beused in gender analysis because the patterns of business and individualinvestments in skills implied by VoC may help to explain complementaritiesbetween welfare state regimes and varieties of capitalism (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001;Iversen, 2005; Social Politics, 2005).

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Through such consideration of the patriarchal structures that serve to excludeand marginalise women, geographers have identified three (overlapping) spheresof influence: (i) social reproduction and the role of the family; (ii) labour unionstructures and strategies; and (iii) the positioning of marginal groups in the labourmarket. The first extends the acknowledgement in early labour marketsegmentation theory of women’s ‘dual’ role (in the labour market and the home)and suggests that women’s secondary employment positions are not only theresult of labour market disadvantage, but also the particular choices women(are conditioned to) make regarding their domestic and family responsibilities(Duncan, 1994; Perrons & Gonas, 1998). Such work links with critiques of CatherineHakim’s (2000) preference theory, which maintains a role for (women’s)unconstrained preferences regarding work, especially in the flexible labourmarkets of the UK and US, by suggesting an interaction of choice and constraint inpatterns of labour market activity (for a discussion see Crompton & Lyonette, 2005;Ginn et al., 1996; Himmelweit & Sigala, 2004; McRae, 2003). The second refers to therole of labour supply factors in establishing the unequal conditions of work andremuneration for work. It asserts that men and women supply their labour ondifferent terms and the (constructed) unity of male employees puts them in aprivileged bargaining position with regard to negotiating wages and terms ofemployment. It further considers how welfare state restructuring has altered locallabour markets, changed socio-state relations and created a normative landscapefor those in receipt of state benefits (see, for example, Peck, 1996; 2001). The thirdpart identifies the social foundations of the labour market and the normsconditioning the labour market participation of different groups. It calls attention tothe ways in which different activities have come to have gendered meanings and beattributed with different values depending on the location in which they take place(for instance, Dyck, 1990; England, 1996; Kobayashi, 1994; Pratt & Hanson, 1991a;1991b). This also connects with studies concerning the geographies of differenceand the variation of labour market relations across space and social groups(for example, across axes of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and disability).

Drawing on neo-Marxist state theory, one may further conceptualise the labourmarket as an institutional arena in and through which gender (and other) relationsare mediated. Recent segmentation theory is useful in pointing towards the forcesacting in and through local labour markets to re-gender modes of production andreproduction, including political influences, class forces and other interests. Neo-Marxist state theory develops this understanding through an acknowledgementthat such forces are always contingent and contradictory, and prone to change anddevelopment over time (Brenner, 2004; Brenner et al., 2003; Jessop, 1990; 2002).As such, it highlights the role of politics and policy in determining the (local)specificity of such forces over space. Accepting the state as a ‘plurality ofdiscursive forms’ (Yeatman, 1990, p. 170) also helps to focus enquiries not on thestructures and mechanisms that generate concrete events, but on the discourses(broadly defined to include both languages and material practices) within andaround the state, which provide the social world with its reality (Pringle &Watson, 1992). It reiterates the concern of Adams & Padamsee (2001), amongstothers, to further the initial research concerns of gendered welfare regimeanalysts—in particular through a focus on the discursive and institutionalchannels in which (male) power is being exercised within the political economy—and thereby assists this article’s endeavour to explore the gendering processeswithin New Labour’s workfarist regime.

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Women, Work and Contemporary Gender Inequality

Women’s position within the contemporary labour market is complex. Thetransitions to a service-dominated economy have increased the numbers ofwomen in work (which, in part, stems from the perceived need for female wage-earners to maintain expected standards of living). Yet there is also the impact ofthe increased market provision of services that were once supplied or subsidisedby the state. Together these twin processes are contributing to growing differencesamong women. On the one hand, the changes in the nature of work, which haveoccurred alongside the shift towards a service-dominated economy—includingthe move towards flexible working patterns in line with an increase in the openinghours of business (see, for example, IER, 1999; Turok & Edge, 1999)—haveincreased with the number of women assuming full-time employment roles.Of these a significant proportion are located in the public sector, where jobs offergood rates of pay and benefits, as characteristic of ‘primary’ sector employment.In turn, however, the admittance of women to the formal labour market hascreated a need for market provisioning of care and domestic tasks. Jobs in thisfield are (predominantly) low-paid ancillary positions, with limited prospects forcareer development. They are also seen as (more) suitable for women. The reasonsfor this appear to stem from the disjuncture that exists between shifts emergent inperception of work and the stasis in the perception of women (cf. Perrons, 1999).In other words, whilst an increasing number of jobs are now seen as suitable forwomen, these jobs are generally based on a construction of gender which remainsfirmly entrenched in the traditional division of domestic labour (Pilcher, 2000).This means that the gains being made in public sector and other ‘primary’employment locations by some women are, to a certain extent, ‘offset’ by theexpansive market provisioning of care and domestic tasks (see Darton & Hurrell,2005; Epstein et al., 1999; Erdem & Glyn, 2001; Equal Opportunities Commission,2005; Francesconi & Gosling, 2005).

To put this differently: whilst at one level entry to the labour market is notgendered—vacant posts are filled by men and women in increasingly equalproportions (Women and Equality Unit, 2005)—at another level the emergence ofnew forms of work, which require a high degree of personal interaction (and arecommonly based in the service industries), is further gendering the labour market(see Hochschild, 1983; 2003; also 1997). Then, in addition to care and domestictasks, the introduction of new organisational structures, new employmentpractices, information and communication technologies, new production systems,and innovative management techniques, is transforming the form and content ofoccupational roles, such that many of the skills and qualities now sought byemployers are ‘intangible’ and involve the exchange of knowledge andinformation, rather than the extraction and manufacture of material artefacts(McDowell, 1997). This is leading to the valorisation of the personal skills andattributes of staff, particularly with regard to caring, communicating and ‘makingpeople feel good’ (Bradley et al., 2000), which is extended in some instances to alsoinclude a good personal appearance and pleasing body image (Nickson et al.,2001). These are qualities that were previously associated with people but are nowseen as somehow ‘external’ to them (Adkins, 2005). As part of this process, thelong-standing idealisation of women is engendering these characteristics as‘feminine’ and subsequently prompting a further association of women withfront-line jobs in the service sector.

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As employee identity is no longer incidental to the job, but an integral part of it,the embodied performance of the (female) provider is effectively becoming part ofthe ‘product’ that is ‘sold’ to customers in the new economy (Lash & Urry, 1994).Problematically, whilst such emphasis on social skills and attributes is providingincreased opportunities for women to participate in the labour market through theconstruction of jobs in the service sector as ‘more suited’ to women (Bradley et al.,2000), it is having little impact on gender inequalities in the workplace (McDowell,2001; McKie et al., 2001; Wilson, 1999). Just as women predominate in posts in thewider service economy (in care, hospitality, fitness and beauty, sales, tourism, andpublic welfare), front line jobs in which there is direct contact with servicerecipients (in call centres, clothing retailers, financial services and supermarkets)are emerging as ‘occupational ghettos’ (Goffee & Scase, 1995, p. 127) for low classwomen (Kerfoot & Korczynski, 2005). This is because the modern emphasis ontraining and skills means that women without official qualifications now have fewoptions for employment. Indeed, whilst the labour market has changedfundamentally in the past decade, jobs in the service sector remain polarised,with ‘two kinds of jobs: large numbers of low-skill, low-paid jobs [for women] anda smaller number of high-skill, high-income jobs [for men], with very few jobs thatcould be classified as in the middle’ (MacDonald & Sirianni, 1996, p. 11).

The increased employment of women in bottom-end positions requiring low orno skills, receiving limited financial remuneration and holding little, if any, jobsecurity is further predicated on heterogeneous patterns of employment. Thisadoption of casual, part-time and flexible working practices arguably reinforcesthe secondary employment positions of ‘low class women’, as well as those inprimary employment posts working part-time hours. It does this by enabling themaintenance of traditional divisions of domestic labour (Erdem & Glyn, 2001).At present, 42% of married or cohabiting women in the UK return to part-timework after having children (Walling, 2005), often working only mid-day hours ofemployment (for example: 10am to 3pm). In contrast, just 4% of fathers withdependent children are employed part-time (ibid.). This widespread change inoccupational form—from full-time to part-time work—ensures minimalinterruption to women’s (constructed) family and domestic roles once theirchildren are of school age, for they are still available to drop children at school,meet them afterwards and be home in time to cook their husband/partner’sevening meal (Bower, 2001). It also suggests that the unequal position of women inthe labour market is being augmented by the adoption of casual, part-time andflexible working practices, which restrict women’s average earnings, employ-ment-related benefits and levels of social mobility (Darton & Hurrell, 2005;Epstein et al., 1999; Equal Opportunities Commission, 2005; Erdem & Glyn, 2001;Francesconi & Gosling, 2005).

In cases where women have secured higher level managerial and professionaloccupations (socio-economic classification 1 jobs), estimated at 9.2% of the femaleworkforce in the winter of 2005/2006 (Labour Force Survey, 2006), there is themarked employment of childless women who have delayed or avoided havingchildren in order to have and progress in a career. Melanie Duffield (2002) notes a2% difference in the employment rates of women without children (11%) andwomen with children (9%) in this sector. This implies that women are only able toparticipate on equal terms with men in the employment arena through thesuppression of their (constructed) family and domestic roles (a process thatoperates alongside the market-based provisioning of care discussed previously).

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In other words, whilst shifts in political economy progress, the perception of workremains entrenched in the domestic division of labour, because the assumedsuitability of women to the provision of services is uncritically adapted frompreconceived notions of women’s role in the home, which are mapped onto theworkplace. Hence, there emerges a mutually reinforcing dynamic between‘women’ (that is, the gendered construction of women’s role in western society)and ‘work’ (that is paid work in the formal labour market) that serves to embedpre-existing inequalities of gender within new patterns and practices ofemployment. This may be traced, as the next section illustrates, in the formulationof policy and political discourses, which are supporting the framework ofcontemporary labour market policy, as well as the reconfiguration of Keynesianwelfare provision in the form of state benefits as exemplified by the New Deals forthe Unemployed.

The Intersection of Welfare State Restructuring and Labour Market Policies

The workfarist orientation of UK policy initiatives proposed to reduce thedestabilising impacts of economic restructuring and consolidate a new means ofgovernment support may be problematised through the particular and partialmeans through which women have been able to gain entry to the labour market. Inparticular, the conceptualisation of separation from the labour market as a keyfacet of ‘social exclusion’ (MacLeavy, 2006; Smith, 2000) has implications forgender equality. Whilst lending support to supply-side training and employmentprogrammes as a means of increasing overall levels of ‘employability’ and therebyraising the numbers in employment, the particular emphasis of New Labour’sprogrammes can be seen to deny the limitations of work for fostering socialinclusion. Most notably, it removes the operation of axes of non-economicinequality (such as gender) from political attention through the suggestion thatbarriers to the labour market are collective and the potential for inclusion throughwork universal.

At present, the most eminent programmes for redressing situations of long termunemployment are the New Deals for the Unemployed. Foreshadowed in LabourParty documents before the 1997 General Election, the New Deals offer peoplewho have been unemployed for six months or more assistance in finding a job:first by increasing levels of employability through primary skills development;and second by fostering routines of work through temporary job placements (seeDfEE, 1997). In contradistinction to welfare reform programmes in the US, where(black) single mothers are a key focus, the New Deals were initially aimed atreluctant, unemployable and criminally inclined young men (Levitas, 1998; 2005).A brief history reveals that the first two programmes were targeted at theclaimants of Jobseeker’s Allowance4 and represented a refocusing andintensification of previous government policy concerning the unemployed(particularly the Conservative’s ‘Project Work’ initiative). The New Deal forYoung People (NDYP) is a compulsory scheme for all under 25-year-oldclaimants, which begins after six months of unemployment. Introduced in 1998, itconsists of a period of intense personal advice and assistance followed by one offour options linked to employment experience and training—subsidised workplacement, full-time education or training, a job placement in a voluntaryorganisation, or a placement in a paid environmental project—for those stillunemployed. The New Deal for the Long Term Unemployed (ND25 þ )—piloted

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from 1998 and ‘rolled out’ nationally in 2001—is a compulsory scheme for thoseaged 25 and over who have been unemployed for over two years (12 to 18 monthsin some areas). It consists of a period of intense job reorientation followed byreferral to training or work experience placement.

The widening of this initial target population was (more recently) signalled bythe introduction of two further programmes for recipients of other benefits. Thisincludes Income Support and Incapacity Benefit. These are currently non-compulsory. The New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP)—introduced in three stagesfrom 1997—is targeted at lone parents whose youngest child is over the age ofthree. Focused for the first time on women, it consists of personal advice andassistance, as well as a limited training budget with associated child care.5

The New Deal for Disabled People (NDD)—introduced in 2001 following twopilot rounds in 1998 and 1999—is targeted at all working-age disabled or sickclaimants and consists of personal advice and assistance alongside improvingemployers’ and other organisations’ perceptions of disabled employment.

Finally, two voluntary New Deals have been set up to reinforce the coverage ofthe other four New Deals. The New Deal for Partners—started in 1999—istargeted at women and consists of personal advice and assistance with work forthe potential second earner in an unemployed household. (It is compulsory forpartners under 25 without children). The New Deal for the Over 50s—pilotedfrom late 1999 before being rolled out nationally in 2000—is non-gender-specificand consists of personal advice and assistance with employment, a one-yearin-work subsidy of £60 a week and a training grant.

Despite variations in organisation (and the implicit targeting of differentprogrammes), rationalities common to each of the New Deals are revealedthrough a review of policy documents and debates. This identifies two distinctagendas within New Labour’s approach. On the one hand, there is an imperativeto reduce unemployment by reconnecting people to the labour market with theintroduction of mandatory requirements to encourage people to accept (often low-paid and, particularly for women, part-time) employment. On the other hand,there is desire to maximise the quality of employment positions through theimprovement of employee skills. As indicated above, however, these arepotentially contradictory endeavours, for a primary focus on the quantitative levelof employment to a large extent inhibits political recognition of problemspertaining to the quality of labour market participation (see Perrons, 2000, for adiscussion of New Labour’s policies, including the New Deals, in the context of achanging and more flexible workforce; also Toynbee, 2003, for an emotive critiqueof the proliferation of low-paid, part-time work for women within the UK).

This begs the question of how these contradictory endeavours—betweenincreasing the overall level of labour market participation and ensuring the socialinclusion of secondary employees—are resolved in policy and political discourse.Using a critical discourse approach for the analysis of a wide range of primarysources, including policy documents, political speeches, promotional material,web fora, government and quasi-government reports, the positioning of the NewDeals is revealed. Critical discourse analysis identifies how, at one level, thegovernment transcends the fact that an increasing proportion of employmentis casual part-time and poorly paid, not least through the construction of ‘work’as ‘jobs’ in the traditional ‘Fordist’ sense: as relatively stable and regularemployment, which provides an income sufficient to live on. In practicalterms, the New Deals have helped reorganise access to benefits around a single

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work-focused gateway to enable and encourage non-employed claimants of cashtransfer programmes to work (or better prepare them for employment).Discursively, in this regard, the New Deals may be seen to position the labourmarket as a key site of social equalisation by denying the relevance of economicrestructuring within (polarised) labour markets and glossing over the crowding ofwomen in low-paid, part-time jobs, through the comprehension of struggles inthe labour market in gender-blind terms. The political subscription to thisunderstanding is illustrated in the following excerpts from House of Commonsdebates. The first uses the metaphor of a ladder to gloss over the gendering ofemployment and suggest that women’s increasing participation in the labourforce is based on the same founding principles as men’s (as opposed to beingprogressed through the often difficult negotiation of women’s traditionalresponsibilities for childcare and domestic chores). The second describes theNew Deals as being ‘rich in opportunity’ and thereby ignores the discriminatorynature of the wider economic and social structures that determine levels ofaccess to welfare state programmes and (usually) result in differential levels ofachievement across social groups:

[W]e will create a new ladder of opportunity that will allow the many, bytheir own efforts, to benefit from the opportunities once open to only afew. (HC Debate 2 July 1997, c. 308–309)

This new deal . . . is comprehensive, rich in opportunity, linked to thedevelopment of skills and has already attracted the support of some ofBritain’s leading companies. (HC Debate 2 July 1997, c. 308–309)

At another level, however, the New Deals internalise a notion of work asincreasingly risk-laden, uncertain and insecure. Applied alongside tax credits,skills development and lifelong learning initiatives the New Deals postulate thatworkers ought now to be responsible for their own protection against such riskthrough primary skills development (see, for example, DfEE, 1997). This changesthe nature of employment relationships through the transfer of economicinsecurity from employers to employees (compare Beck, 2000). As noted above,employment in the UK now takes a variety of contractual forms as differentcombinations of work time, benefits and entitlements are put together for differentgroups of workers (Allen & Henry, 1997). While there is nothing particularly newabout job insecurity at the bottom end of the labour market, the growth insubcontracting and the rationalisation of ‘marginal’ activities by firms and publicagencies is producing a situation in which many (temporary) workers are nowbeing employed through agencies (European Foundation for the Improvement ofLiving & Working Conditions, 2002). This is, in turn, leading to the intensificationof work-time activities (Green, 2006). As a result, whilst statistically there has beenlittle change in the proportion of temporary workers in the labour market (as themajority of jobs have been permanent), the experience of increased workplacedemands is becoming a factor influencing patterns of short-term employment,interspersed with periods of unemployment (cf. Allen & Henry, 1997; Toynbee,2003). This is particularly problematic for the individuals who occupy thesecharacteristically low-skill service sector positions, as they are typically unable toprotect themselves against such risk, particularly income irregularity, because oftheir low wage status (Standing, 1999; 2002).

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In prioritising participation in the labour market, the New Deals may alsoreproduce the institutionalised contexts and discourses in which gender-specificdivisions in the labour market seem natural. As described above, the rationalitiessurrounding work are directed from a middle class sensibility in which theunderstanding of the structural inequalities in the labour market remains limitedby the assumption that all people out of work and/or in low level employment aresubject (only) to problems of qualification and experience. This forgets thenecessary role of (female) carers and domestic workers in aiding the transition ofsome women to professional and managerial occupations in the formal labourmarket. This reasoning is evident within two recent policy documents, forexample:

There is strong evidence to suggest that improving skill levels can reducethe risk of unemployment, and bring broader social returns in terms ofreduced crime and better health. (DfEE, DSS and HM Treasury, 2001)

Many workers . . . have skills that may have been superseded, or becomerusty from a period out of the labour force. (HM Treasury, 1999, p. 56)

In these excerpts, the negotiation of gendering of care which is necessitated by theupskilling of a proportion of the female labour force is not directly acknowledged.Instead the focus remains on the level of entry to the middle and higher echelonsof the labour market. By failing to recognise the barriers to—and limitations of—labour market participation for less advantaged women, the Labour governmentmay neglect the operation of axes of inequality in determining individuals’ accessto work, not least by emphasising the improvement of personal capabilities. Thischanges consideration of whether people should work to whether or not they areable to do so (a hypothetical question) and subtly removes the option to notparticipate in the labour market from the arena of policy debate. This has markedgender impacts, for the increased emphasis on women’s employment has beenaccompanied by a transition in the distribution of family and domesticresponsibilities, which remains profoundly gendered. In this sense, the ‘discursiveselectivity’ of New Labour (after Hay, 1996) may be suggested to progress theunequal positioning of women by underwriting a culture in which ‘commonsense’ (Gramsci, 1973, pp. 322–323, 419–425) decrees equality of opportunity—asopposed to outcome—as a policy ideal. In other words, women (as a group)remain excluded from full and equal participation in the labour market throughthe manifestation of a principle of equality in the workplace, but not in the home.This standpoint is further illustrated by two polemics from the House ofCommons:

Past employment programmes have helped men but often ignoredemployment opportunities for women. From this year, the New Dealswill be extended to thousands of women previously denied the chance towork. (HC Debate 28 November 2001, c. 974–975)

First, everyone in need of work should have the opportunity to work.Secondly, we must ensure that work pays. Thirdly, everyone who seeksto advance through employment and education must be given the meansto advance. (HC Debate 2 July 1997, c. 308–309)

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Both of these statements imply that the problems of women’s labour marketparticipation may be overcome through the (further) inclusion of women inlabour market programmes. This, problematically, neglects the manner in womenhave been integrated into the labour market, as well as how they—as a group—continue to experience inequality as a result of the application of gender-neutralroles to social and economic processes that are themselves strongly segregated(cf. Bakshi et al., 1995). This is also evident in the practical organisation of the NewDeals for the Unemployed, which were originally modelled on male patterns oflabour market participation. As women are more likely to have breaks inemployment than men, to work part-time and thus earn lower wages, theintroduction of workfarist policy and the subsequent provision of only a minimalsafety net of state-provided welfare may be seen to place women at a furtherdisadvantage. First, it progresses the construction of women as a source of cheap,flexible and relatively low-paid labour, entrenching the position of women insecondary labour market roles. Second, it extends women’s unequal experiencesas consumers of the welfare state, for whilst programmes are technically genderneutral, the greater reliance of women on (some) schemes means that the actualprogrammatic orientation towards men places women at a further disadvantage.6

Such evidence of gendering/ungendering processes complicates the hypothesisof a particular social contract embodied in the neoliberal state: ‘a fraternal socialcontract, characterised by discourses that deny the relevance of gender while,in doing so, reproducing that (ir)relevance’ (Tickell & Peck, 1996, p. 602).Moreover, it suggests that workfarist policy may be the result of a weak critiqueof patriarchy.7 This renders the New Deals for the Unemployed ineffective inameliorating inequalities of gender (as well as race, ethnicity, sexuality anddisability) by positioning them not as strategies for greater equality, but as meansof ‘transform[ing] regulatory norms in the lower reaches of the labour market . . .to articulate a regulatory strategy concerned to make flexible labour markets work’(Theodore & Peck, 2000, p. 124, emphasis original). This may be necessary tosecure public acceptance for new organisational structures and employmentpractices (including the rise of part-time and flexible patterns of employment), therationalisation of state spending (through the amalgamation of funds and therestructuring of delivery mechanism), and the changing patterns of stateinterventions (in particular the new relationship between the state and itscitizens—see Kearns, 1992; 1995). However, in subtly re-orientating the publicperceptions of the labour market, the state and national citizenship, the discoursesembedded within the New Deals evidently help to support a strategy of flexiblelabour utilisation as deemed necessary for the restructuring of the economy after-Fordism, and the associated restructuring of the Keynesian welfarist state, whilstmaintaining capitalism’s gendered fix. The next section explores this contentionthrough a consideration of the broader positioning of women in New Labour’semerging workfarist regime.

Engendering New Labour’s Workfarist Regime

We have thus far established how the retrenchment of the post-war KWNS—which saw universal state benefits combined with full-time employment for menwho earned a family wage (sufficient to support themselves and theirdependants)—has given rise to a workfarist policy agenda, which nominallypromotes employment for all who are physically fit through a series of supply-side

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training and work-placement initiatives. Programmes such as the New Deals forthe Unemployed attempt to increase equality (and engender social inclusion)through the (re)involvement of people in the labour market. However, it iscontended that they have different and unequal effects on men and women as aresult of their particular formulations.

To this, we can add that the New Deals, taken together, spend considerably lessresources on women than they do on men. This is because they are primarilytargeted on people who are officially registered as unemployed. As women areless likely to register as unemployed (as a result of joint assessment for income-related Jobseeker’s Allowance and the fact that more women than men earn lessthan the lower earnings limit and so are ineligible for contributory Jobseeker’sAllowance),8 they are not well represented within this group (Rake, 2001; see alsoOxfam, 2001). NDYP, in particular, has been noted for its primary focus on men(Levitas, 1998; 2005). Recent figures from the Department of Work and Pensions(DWP) support this assessment. Of the 87,300 participants who were registeredfor NDYP in February 2006, 62,990 were male, 24,310 were female. Similarly, froma total number of 48,200 ND25 þ participants in February 2006, 39,960 were maleand just 8,240 were female (DWP, 2006).

With regard to the New Deal programmes that specifically target women, bothNDLP and NDP are small in scale and low in impact (Britton, 2001; Rake, 2001;Willetts & Hillman, 2000). In addition to lacking the incentives and subsidies ofthe other New Deals, they fail—more generally—to tackle the practical obstaclesand moral dilemmas of labour market participation. For unskilled mothers, thelow wages paid for part-time, predominantly service sector posts are often notsufficient to warrant the financial and personal costs of working, particularly withregard to charges levied for private childcare (Dean, 2001; see also Taylor & Jones,2000). This makes questionable a policy in which women are being pressed intoparticipating in the labour market without additional measures to support themin relation to their (constructed) obligations.

Moreover, whilst the National Childcare Strategy—launched in 1998—wasintended to facilitate the transition of parents into employment (particularlythrough the expansion of pre-school provision and means-tested help withchildcare costs directed towards the lowest-paid families), its potential to improvethe position of women remains restricted by the failure to incite men to embracetheir parental and domestic responsibilities more fully (cf. Kelly, 2000). In Sweden,for instance, social policy has come to interpret gender equality as referring tomen’s family roles as well, reserving part of the care leave specifically for men (the‘daddy’ month) (Daly & Rake, 2003; see also Ellingsaeter, 2006). In addition,policies framed around the restructuring of work/family responsibilities, suchas the Working Time Regulations, Parental Leave Directive and the increase/-introduction of maternity/paternity pay—introduced in 1998, 1999 and 2003respectively—take issue with the long hours culture within the UK by promoting‘family friendly’ employment patterns, but fall short of tackling the informalrestrictions imposed on women as a result of their constructed duties within thehome (Lewis, 1997; for a critique of the government’s Work–Life Balanceagenda—into which all these policies fall—see also McDowell, 2004). The Swedishwelfare state, by contrast, ensures that women’s and men’s investment in unpaidwork is equalised by making public what is in other countries placed beyond thereach of the state. The downside of this arrangement, however, is that it closes offthe option to be a full-time carer for both men and women (Daly & Rake, 2003).

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Supplementary to this (UK) critique, it might be contended that the NewLabour government is helping to reinforce low pay (and the low pay-no pay cycle)by introducing the New Deals alongside a series of tax credits for working families(some of which are specifically intended to cover the relatively high costs ofchildcare for working parents). Such measures are intended to further encouragewomen (most notably) to exchange familial dependency for exploitation in theworkplace (cf. Dean, 2001). However, the increased expectation for women towork, at least part-time, without income compensation—that is, without welfarestate transfers to help women achieve a greater share of total wages—not onlycombines with the lack of policies to encourage men to assume a greaterproportion of domestic labour, with the effect that women are left in adisadvantaged position when looking for work as a result of their domestic andfamily responsibilities, but with a policy agenda that allows the costs of part-timeand low-skill work to remain high with regard to pay, career development andemployment benefits, including pensions, by ensuring a steady supply ofavailable labour. It is this that supports the replacement of women’s economicdependence on men in the Keynesian welfare state not with economicindependence, but with dependence upon an unstable and unrewarding sectorof the labour market.

In consequence, whilst the Women & Work Commission (2006) calls for achange of the culture of work—asserting that the gender pay gap is costing the UKup to £23 billion a year in lost productivity and wasted talent, and demanding thatthe government funds a suggested £20 million package to raise skills amongwomen and so improve the quality of their employment—the New Labourgovernment has resisted addressing the segmentation of the labour force as bothan economic and extra-economic issue. It has shied away from the full challenge ofdistributive justice, perhaps because of the practical and cost implications ofequalising current ‘male’ and ‘female’ incomes, especially with regard toincreasing wages paid for caring jobs. That is not to say that small gains are notbeing made. In March 2005 UNISON agreed to the biggest ever equal pay awardwith North Cumbria NHS Trust for 1,500 women working at CumberlandInfirmary and West Cumbria Hospital (for details see IDS, 2005; also Thornley,2006). However, the simultaneous pursuit of workfarist policy—which continuesunabated—is re-trenching the gendered division of pay and work-related benefits,not least through the assumption that men and women who are currently out ofwork will have equal opportunities and derive equal benefits upon entering thelabour market.

Amidst a burgeoning interest in transitions in the political economy, a crucialcomponent of contemporary state restructuring is thus emerging: the reorderingof gender relations within and around the labour market (Perrons et al., 2006;Sunley et al., 2005). The increased involvement of women, both in work andworkfarist policy, is recognised, but the limits to this involvement—as indicatedhere through the practical and discursive positioning of women in work and athome—has hitherto received more limited political attention. This is important,for whilst New Labour rhetoric is largely concerned with choices (with thedecision to work or not to work for women often presented as a matter ofpreference), it is through political discussions about childcare and the balancing ofcommitments between work and home that the increased expectation of women’sformal employment is socially established. This may be illustrated by two recentpronouncements, both of which suggest that the burden of explanation and

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justification now rests on women without work, as opposed to women in work, aswas the case up to the mid-to-late 1980s (Benn, 1999). The first by Patricia Hewitt,Minister for Women, 2001–2005, construes the notion of choice (to work) in termsof a one-way decision to combine motherhood with a career, with policies pivotedaround issues of childcare and working rights:

I think . . . what the government has to do, and increasingly whatemployers have to do, is enable different people to make differentchoices about how they balance work and family, work and the rest oftheir lives, at different stages in their increasingly long lives. For familieswith children that means government mustn’t in any way dictate tofamilies about how they balance earning and caring, paid and unpaidwork. Government instead has to create the supportive environment, theprovision of public services, the right employment regulatoryframework to ensure that parents can make choices about how theybalance earning a living and caring for their children in ways that will suitthem and their families best. And of course that commitment to greaterchoice, real choice for more and more parents, is entirely in line with themost fundamental values of our government. (Hewitt, 2002; emphasisadded)

The second statement by Baroness Jay, Minister for Women 1998–2001, positionsthe labour market as a key source of value and self-worth for women, consideringchoice (of work) to be unlimited by existing labour market constraints on women,which remain untackled within contemporary government policy:

In the new economy, women will take time out of the workplace to haveand raise children. But they will want to return to work because their jobsare fulfilling and businesses will understand that losing them representsa huge loss of skills. (Jay, 2001, p. 6)

These statements, essentially, invert the emphasis of the work/home dichotomywith which we have long been familiar: work, rather than family, becomes theultimate marker of women’s contribution to society. Yet women are still expectedto be the primary managers of family; indeed, women who do not ‘have andraise’ children but still contribute economically through work are necessarilyexcluded from this vision. Thus, while New Labour’s discourse of women-and-work elevates the idea of choices, it is simultaneously predicated upon anidealised female subject—one who will want to choose to have and raise childrenand will want to choose to be fulfilled, ultimately, through economiccontribution.

Conclusion

This article, therefore, asserts that workfarist policy developments do notrepresent a radical departure from the programmes of previous administrations;indeed, the particular (and increased) emphasis on work is problematic because ofits continued neglect of the operation of axes of gender and other socialinequalities in the labour market. This means that programmes such as the NewDeals for the Unemployed can only (continue to) have unequal impacts on targetpopulations because of their emphasis on paid work in the formal labour market.

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In broader terms, such gendering of the state is positioned as a salient aspect ofthe wider restructuring of New Labour government (for details of the changingstructures, strategies and languages of the contemporary political economy seeMacLeavy, 2007). As a crucial component of this process, the New Deals for theUnemployed have not been effective in removing the limits to women’s labourmarket participation (Rake, 2001; Willetts & Hillman, 2000). Arguably, this is not astated intention of the New Deals in the first place. But there is an underlyingparadox at play here if we accept the proposition that the UK’s multilayered andcontested transformation from a Keynesian welfare national state to a moreSchumpeterian workfare post-national regime (after Jessop, 2002) has engendered(in the sense of stimulating) the ‘feminisation’ of the ‘new economy’. As theseemingly inevitable, although potentially resistible outcome of widespreadeconomic restructuring, as well as state reorganisation within the UK, the NewDeal programmes fail to recognise women’s unequal starting points in the labourmarket. They therefore do not redress the typically higher levels of responsibilityassumed by women for parental and domestic duties. There are of coursequestions over the sustainability of these more non-communitarian welfaremodels. But at present the UK work–welfare ideal exhibits a severe elision of theexistence of the challenges faced by women in this period of economic transition.In consequence, it is clear that gender remains a key axis of social inequality inNew Labour’s establishing workfarist regime.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at a session of the 2006 AnnualMeeting of the Association of American Geographers and a Geographies ofPolitical Economy research group meeting in the School of Geographical Sciencesat the University of Bristol. I am grateful to those who attended these events fortheir comments and questions. In addition, I would like to thank Deborah Dixon,Martin Jones, Columba Peoples and Mark Whitehead for their written feedbackand useful insights in discussion. I am grateful for the constructive criticismreceived from three anonymous reviewers of this journal. Finally, and moreformally, I would like to acknowledge the support of ESRC award number PTA-030-2002-0168. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

1. The term after-Fordism is used throughout this article to refer to the actually existing ensemble ofmechanisms and practices which presently enable capital accumulation to occur in a relativelystable way, despite being marked by a continuing relative incoherence because a discrete post-Fordist accumulation regime and mode of regulation has yet to become established (for a furtherdiscussion of this period of transition to post-Fordism see Jessop, 2002).

2. I use the term ‘discourse’ within this article to refer to the wider linguistic frameworks throughwhich key policy concepts come to function as the central nodal points for welfare staterestructuring, including policy formulations, speeches, media reports, popular reactions andsecondary political analysis.

3. Critical discourse analysis is a multi-method approach to research, which pioneers a dual focus ondiscourse, as a means of performing a representative function and as an indication of the social andcultural practices that seek to ensure the replication of dominant power relations (Fairclough, 1995;2001). It is a research approach concerned with the identification of the forms of governance thatunderpin and stimulate the manifestation of dominant political forms and practices in society, aswell as the intricate links between representations, languages, practices and policy outcomes.

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4. Jobseeker’s Allowance is a form of unemployment benefit that is paid by the government to peoplewho are unemployed and seeking work. It is part of the UK social security benefits system and isintended to cover the cost of living expenses in periods when the claimant is out of work. It is paidby the Department of Work and Pensions, through local Jobcentre Plus offices.

5. Under NDLP advisors also staff compulsory work-focused interviews operating in some areas fornew claimants—a move that blurs the non-compulsory nature of NDLP.

6. This article is specifically directed towards an examination of how British work–welfare texts act to‘ungender’ their subjects by glossing over or ignoring gender relations and the gender divisions oflabour, however, similar conclusions have been drawn by Boyer (2003) in a study of NorthAmerican policy.

7. As Pateman (1988) notes, the meaning of ‘civil society’ is constituted through the ‘original’separation and opposition between the modern, public—civil—world and the modern, private orconjugal and familial sphere. This is a patriarchal division, in which everything that lies beyond thedomestic (private) sphere is public or ‘civil’ society. As most discussions of civil society, andformulations such as ‘public’ regulation versus ‘private’ enterprise, presuppose that the politicallyrelevant separation between public and private is drawn within civil society, fraternity—as a crucialbond integrating individual and community—is seen to be based upon the constitution the‘individual’ through the patriarchal separation of private and public. Hence, the ‘fraternal socialcontract’ is used to distinguish between equality made after a male image and the real socialposition of women as women (and further suggest that the categories and practices of civil societycannot simply be universalised to women).

8. There are two forms of Jobseeker’s Allowance. The first is contributions-based Jobseeker’sAllowance, which is awarded to claimants who have paid, or are treated as having paid, aminimum level of National Insurance contributions in the two financial years preceding a claim.The second is income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, which is means-tested for each individualclaimant and/or their dependants. Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance may be awarded to thosewho are ineligible for contributions-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, as well as those in receipt of suchassistance, only if they are in a low-income household.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATION

Engendrando el regimen ‘workfarist’ del Nuevo Laborista:

Explorando la interseccion de la re-estructurando del

estado del Bienestar y las polıticas del mercado de trabajo

en el Reino Unido

Resumen Este artıculo deconstruye el emergente regimen ‘workfarist’ delNuevo Laborista para revelar las relaciones complejas y contradictorias de generoencarnadas en y a traves de su polıtica de trabajo-bienestar. Empezando con ladeclinacion del empleo manufacturero en el Reino Unido, expone ladesregulacion del mercado de trabajo y la gama de los cambios estructurales y

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sociales iniciados por este proceso. Se nota, en particular, como la ‘feminizacion dela economıa’ esta entrelazada con las caracterısticas cambiante del empleo y de lasposiciones socioeconomicas de las mujeres. Este artıculo identifica la manera en lacual la participacion creciente de mujeres en el mercado de trabajo sirve paraafianzar mas la desigualdad del genero. Contra este contexto, se procede plantearcuestiones con respecto a la expectativa creciente para incorporar el mercado detrabajo en los programas tales como el Nuevo Acuerdo para los Parados, queestipula que la recepcion de las ventajas del estado ahora tiene que requerir unaentrada laboral. El quid del analisis es en la polıtica y los discursos polıticos queconceden prioridad al trabajo renumerado en el mercado de trabajo formal,mientras que simultaneamente descuida la division de genero del trabajo detareas domesticas y el trabajo no renumerado de cuidado. Sugiriendo que elgenero siga siendo una forma dominante de organizacion polıtico-economica en elperıodo contemporaneo post-Fordismo, este artıculo discute que se deba dar masatencion a las maneras de que sus caracterısticas sociales construidas sonmanifestadas dentro de la polıtica del trabajo-bienestar y de las ramificaciones deesto que encaja para la igualdad social y economica.

PALABRAS CLAVES: Bienestar; ‘workfare’; Nuevo Labor; El Nuevo Acuerdo paralos Parados

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