SPOL28170 Work & the Welfare State

Academic Year 2023/2024

In advanced capitalist democracies, the welfare of individuals, families, households and the population writ large fundamentally rests upon one’s labour – primarily through formal participation in the labour market, but in some cases also informal labour. This becomes problematic when we consider the impact of ‘new social risks’, the automation of labour, and longer-term changes from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy. Various ‘solutions’ have been proposed to address these problems, from small tweaks to (labour market, migration, education etc.) policy, wider ranging structural changes to how the welfare state operates (e.g. Universal Basic Income and/or Universal Basic Services), and the introduction or deepening of governance strategies and policy paradigms, such as resilience, social investment, flexicurity and so on.

In this module we will ask why is welfare (and the welfare state) so tied up with the idea and practice of work? Students will critically engage with the relationship between welfare and labour, and the challenges posed by fundamental changes in the organization of societies, economies and patterns of work. We will consider changes in the role of the welfare state vis a vis work, especially considering issues such as the decline (or reconfiguration) of social citizenship and decommodification in favour of an increasing recommodification of labour and the financialization of welfare. Students will also consider some of the major attempts to address the frailties of the traditional welfare settlement, and the extent to which the responses represent something fundamentally new and thus a departure from the traditional welfare state, or simply a tinkering around the edges, thus not challenging or acknowledging the conditions that have brought about these changes to work and welfare.