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Punish, protect or redirect? Synthesising workfare with ‘spatially Keynesian’ labour market policies in times of job loss
Barnes, Tom
Barnes, Tom
Author
Abstract
The relationship between job loss and workfare has been well documented. Workers who lose jobs, including long-term careers in previously secure employment, enter systems of workfare that churn them through precarious jobs in return for meagre income support. But the relationship between workfare and alternative systems of labour market assistance rolled out before job loss is less understood. To shed new light on this issue, this article critically analyses an attempt to synthesise two labour market policies implemented in response to the closure of Australia's automotive manufacturing industry in 2017. The first policy was an altruistic, spatially Keynesian response to deindustrialisation; the second policy was based on Australia's notoriously punitive system of workfare. The article asks: how was it possible to synthesise systems framed in mutually incompatible terms? This question can be addressed, it argues, by deploying an Agency-Structure-Institutions-Discourse (ASID) approach to understand how and why these labour market policies were hybridised. The article's results are instructive in a ‘post-pandemic’ environment in which opportunities to rollout alternatives to workfare will be forced to contend with resurgent workfare states.
Keywords
agency, ASID, deindustrialisation, job loss, redundancy, workfare
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
Book
Volume
55
Issue
4
Page Range
871-889
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
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Relation URI
Source URL
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Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled