IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ozl/journl/v25y2022i1p1-24.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Back to the future: coercive conditionality in the jobactive era

Author

Listed:
  • Simone Casey

    (RMIT University)

Abstract

It had long been established that coercion has been adopted in liberal welfare regimes in advanced capitalist countries to shift people from welfare payments to employment to reduce government expenditure. Dean (2007) associated this with a contractarian set of social obligations that displaced the entitlements of social citizenship. While the scholarly literature on the Australian marketised employment services had evolved into two major tracks using both governance and street-level perspectives, there remained few studies of the experiences of Australian unemployment payment claimants themselves. This article reports the results of a survey conducted by the author on behalf of the Australian Unemployed Workers Union in 2019 of their members about their experience of coercion during the jobactive era. Jobactive is the main employment services program for Australian job seekers receiving income support. The program commenced in July 2015 and will run until mid-2022. While the data set may reflect the bias of the recruitment group, the size of the sample (n=935) is significant because of the extent of the coercion that was reported. While this coercion has been justified in the shift from passive to active welfare states, the article focuses attention to the ethical basis of the use of coercion in transformative social policy initiatives, particularly in relation to an emergent ‘punitive’ shift in welfare conditionality studies. It concludes with observations of potential openings for future research as Australia’s marketised system undergoes another fundamental reform in 2022.

Suggested Citation

  • Simone Casey, 2022. "Back to the future: coercive conditionality in the jobactive era," Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), Curtin Business School, vol. 25(1), pages 1-24.
  • Handle: RePEc:ozl:journl:v:25:y:2022:i:1:p:1-24
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ftprepec.drivehq.com/ozl/journl/downloads/AJLE251casey.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mark Considine & Phuc Nguyen & Siobhan O’Sullivan, 2018. "New public management and the rule of economic incentives: Australian welfare-to-work from job market signalling perspective," Public Management Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(8), pages 1186-1204, August.
    2. Dean, Hartley, 2007. "The ethics of welfare-to-work," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 3453, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Auriacombe Christelle & Meyer Natanya, 2020. "Realising South Africa's National Development Plan goals: The need for change to a collaborative democracy to facilitate community participation," Central European Journal of Public Policy, Sciendo, vol. 14(2), pages 1-13, December.
    2. Ramón Spaaij & Jonathan Magee & Ruth Jeanes, 2013. "Urban Youth, Worklessness and Sport: A Comparison of Sports-based Employability Programmes in Rotterdam and Stoke-on-Trent," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(8), pages 1608-1624, June.
    3. Johannes Kananen, 2012. "Nordic paths from welfare to workfare: Danish, Swedish and Finnish labour market reforms in comparison," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 27(5-6), pages 558-576, August.
    4. Alexandra Devine & Marissa Shields & Stefanie Dimov & Helen Dickinson & Cathy Vaughan & Rebecca Bentley & Anthony D. LaMontagne & Anne Kavanagh, 2021. "Australia’s Disability Employment Services Program: Participant Perspectives on Factors Influencing Access to Work," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(21), pages 1-20, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Employment; Unemployment; Unemployment; Models; Duration; Incidence and Job search; Capitalist systems; Political Economy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ozl:journl:v:25:y:2022:i:1:p:1-24. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sandie Rawnsley (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/becurau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.