A ‘new politics’ of austerity, workfare and gender? The UK coalition government's welfare reform proposals

Abstract

This paper considers the UK coalition government's austerity drive, which attempts to garner public support for the reduction or withdrawal of welfare entitlements through appeals to frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence. In particular, the paper considers the recasting of the former Labour government's work incentives and welfare disincentives amidst mounting pressures on public expenditure. The reorientation of state assistance towards work, coupled with the proposed simplification of working-age benefits and tax credits, is argued to present a particular challenge to the financial security and autonomy of women, signalling the end of the process of modernizing the welfare system that was forged around the single earner family model in the period of post-war austerity.

Introduction

This paper considers the UK coalition government's austerity drive, which—invoking the ‘spirit’ of the wartime period (Hinton and Redclift, 2009)—attempts to garner public support for the reduction or withdrawal of welfare entitlements through appeals to frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence. In the context of severe economic recession (OECD, 2010), the paper considers the recasting of the former Labour government's policies of ‘activation’ and employment incentives designed to make ‘work pay’ for low-income families, alongside new proposals to simplify the administration of benefits and tax credit payments through the introduction of a single welfare payment per household. At a time of low economic growth, high unemployment and rising poverty, the introduction of more stringent conditionality in welfare entitlements poses a particular challenge for the sections of the population that are most frequently subject to the ‘new social risks’ emergent from the socio-economic transformations that have brought post-industrial societies into existence (Hogarth et al, 2009; TUC, 2009; see also Esping-Andersen, 1999, 2002). This includes younger people with low or obsolete skill sets, families with small children and/or elderly dependents trying to reconcile work and caring responsibilities and working women occupying the labour market very differently from the standard male workers of the trente glorieuses— ‘the glorious thirty’, which refers to the 30 years following the end of the Second World War when there was an economic boom in Europe—with periods of part-time work and portfolio careers (Bonoli, 2005). For these sectors of the population, the tertiarization of employment and the massive entry of women into the labour force have brought new difficulties and dilemmas in formal labour market participation precipitating the emergence of policies catering for new social risks.

Recent government's efforts to contain the related growth in social expenditure have impacted these welfare measures, particularly with regard to the reconciliation of work and family life. In middle-income households, support for both working and non-working parents has been withdrawn as provisioning for care and paid employment is transferred from the state to the family unit (DWP, 2010). As a result, working or not working becomes a choice that is made on the basis of household requirements and resources, which in the context of a contracting labour market privileges a more traditional single earner model in middle-income families. This is because in dual earner families with a median income, the primary carer's status as a ‘secondary earner’ in the household calculation of Working Tax Credit means they are subject to a high marginal tax on their contribution to the household finances. Only in lone parent families or instances of single earner unemployment in two parent families are women assuming a primary carer and/or secondary earner role incentivized to work by the tax credit system, which confers payments to households in receipt of low rates of remuneration for formal labour market participation. In contrast, adults in low-income households are expected to assume dual roles in reproductive care and paid work in order to meet the stricter conditions for financial support (Oxfam, 2010). By framing responsibility for childrearing and familial care as a private household concern, government cost saving produces different outcomes for low- and middle-income families (although one might argue that the wider impacts of austerity economics level the field by pushing middle-income women into paid employment) (Rubery, 2010). It also risks progress towards labour market equality and the reduction of the gender pay gap as individuals within jobless households are likely to accept time- and skills-related underemployment in order to meet the stricter conditions for financial support (Fawcett Society, 2009; TUC, 2009).

The paper provides an analysis of the main components of the coalition government's welfare reform proposals—austerity and workfare—and analyzes the potential impacts on gender and equality. It starts by outlining the broader economic context of the coalition government's twin focus on encouraging paid employment and achieving cost reduction in the social security system through the design of an integrated benefits and tax credits system. It then outlines the parallels between contemporary and post-war discourses of austerity and self-sufficiency that have been used to garner public support for the proposals to reform the current system of welfare as outlined in the coalition government's consultation document, 21st Century Welfare (DWP, 2010). Although appeals to frugality and fiscal prudence in both these periods have originated from crises relating to the availability of financial resources, there are important distinctions to be made between the era of post-war austerity and the present moment which cast doubt over the ability of a contemporary politics of austerity to address the problems of the current recession without a resultant increase in gender and class inequality. Over the past 35 years, the shift towards a post-industrial economy has combined with changes in family structures to challenge the assumption of a male breadwinner upon which the post-war welfare state was first founded. With increasing numbers of women now participating in the formal labour market, there has been a necessary expansion of social insurance and protection (for example around maternity and childrearing) and public service provision (particularly collective care services) (Bonoli, 2005; Esping-Andersen, 2002). This recognizes that income protection for wage earners is not as successful as it used to be in protecting all citizens against poverty and that further support is necessary to guarantee social cohesion and respond to the aspirations of citizens in the contemporary period. Against this background, I provide a gender assessment of the potential impact of the coalition government's welfare reform proposals, particularly on women living in poverty and in receipt of benefits/tax credits. Identifying women as the primary beneficiaries of welfare state modernization, I argue that in order to alleviate the impact of the global recession and its spatially and socially divisive outcomes, it is important not to undermine the financial security and autonomy of women and to support their dual roles in reproductive care and paid work.

Austerity and UK Economic Policy

‘Austerity’ has now become shorthand for an increasing focus on frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence in contemporary economic and political life. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 which saw national governments act to guarantee the private banking sector—under threat of collapse from excessive lending, particularly on house purchases—austerity has been used as a motif for the array of cuts and retrenchments in public spending deemed necessary to recoup the debts incurred by states in order to finance banking bailouts and fiscal stimulus packages (Summers, 2009; Taylor-Gooby, 2009). For the British public, the cultural resonance of this allusion to the period of enforced austerity between 1940 and the end of rationing 15 years later is particularly marked (see Kynaston, 2007). The severe hardship that was experienced during the post-war austerity regime is remembered—and even celebrated—for the ‘blitz spirit’ that was cultivated at this time (Calder, 1969, 1992). Given the current need for stringency in budgets, it is perhaps unsurprising to find nostalgic sentiments about being ‘in this together’ used to mobilize the public around the need for strenuous action to protect government solvency and to gain political support for the public expenditure cuts and tax raises necessary to address the growing national debt (the UK government borrowed £163.4 billion in the financial year 2009–2010) (Gilmore, 2010). From being first linked to the Conservative Party's projection of an era of ‘responsible politics’ during their time in opposition, austerity is now being used to usher in the ‘Big Society’ policies of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition (Wheeler, 2010).

Yet the ability of the coalition government's austerity paradigm to address the contemporary problems of an unstable economic system is open to question. The recession brought on by the financial crisis was driven by a collapse in confidence and consumer demand (Convery, 2009). Following a period of general optimism about the economy in the UK in which the escalation of house prices served to discourage saving and increase consumption, the 2008–09 downturn saw the Bank of England cut interest rates to a historic low and move to support credit markets. Whereas previous recessions prompted measures to balance budgets in the face of a sinking economy, the former Labour government responded to the recession by instead allowing deficits to rise. This novel approach was quickly claimed a success with the Office of National Statistics declaring the end of recession in the last three months of 2009 (Seager, 2010). Since then, however, the rapid return to hard money and balanced-budget orthodoxy under the newly established coalition government is argued to risk not only the end economy recovery but also a relapse. With the legacy of the initial slump manifest in high levels of unemployment in which women and young people suffer disproportionately (Stewart, 2011), the Comprehensive Spending Review of October 2010 which outlined plans to raise taxes and cut spending as a means of expanding the economy and improving business confidence is in danger of pushing the UK into a deflationary trap. As Krugman (2010) posits, short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy does not reassure investors (indeed the recent experience of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal suggests otherwise). Thus, what is needed, according to this perspective, is not belt-tightening, but further spending.

The need for active demand management at times of recession has long been advocated (following Keynes, 1936) as a means of enhancing social cohesion and providing economic stability for citizens. Indeed, government intervention and stimulation of the economy was a central part of the model of economic growth in the post-war period (Clarke, 2010). As the Great Depression of the 1930s showed, capitalism is an imperfectly instituted system—prone to failure if left wholly unregulated. Hence the creation of the welfare state and the post-war planned economy was intended to fight unemployment and improve household income levels as a means of instituting a series of virtuous circuits of output, productivity, consumption and economic growth. This post-war consensus was based on the principles of full (male) employment, the maintenance and extension of a raft of social security measures, extensive industrial and labour market intervention, social and spatial redistribution and demand-side macro-economic management, all of which evolved under conditions of complex mutual dependence with the dynamics of the Fordist economic expansion (Tickell and Peck, 2003). As an approach, it was successful in laying the foundations of an era of relative prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s in which most of the British public were claimed to have ‘never had it so good’ (cf. Macmillan, 1957).

The pursuit of a Keynesian response to the present economic situation (where the risk of depression has become manifest from the lowering of interest rates to almost zero, removing the traction of conventional monetary policy to stimulate the private sector) runs counter to the neoliberal theory that has dominated economic policy over the past 30 years. Framed as a series of short-term emergency measures, the government consensus is that there will be a return to the neoliberal, free-market, privatized world as soon as possible (Peck et al., 2009). Certainly, there appears no prospect of reassembling the state architecture in order to mobilize and allocate social resources to achieving public goods such as reducing gender and class inequality resulting from unemployment, time- and skills-related underemployment and a lack of economic autonomy for carers, or making the transition to a green economy (Catney and Doyle, 2011; Epstein, 2010; Fawcett Society, 2009). This is arguably because the global financial crisis has been understood—politically at least—as a crisis of the debt and credit system as opposed to a crisis that pertains to the neoliberal state architecture underpinning contemporary patterns of living and working and which has the effect of eroding community and solidarity bonds (Harvey, 2009).

Neoliberalism as a form of social, political and economic regulation was (unevenly) developed under the Thatcher and Major governments of the 1980s and 90s and later triangulated with social democratic principles in the ‘Third Way’ approach of New Labour (in power from 1997 to 2010) (see Giddens, 1998). Under the Conservative watch, the orientation of state power towards the extension and reproduction of market(-like) rule was used to support a general shift in ideology towards greater individual responsibility and a reduction in universal welfare provision (Tickell and Peck, 2003). This continued under New Labour as the social welfarist principles of taxation, public spending and government borrowing and redistribution were displaced by individualist policy discourse. Labour's political strategy promoted economic growth through the creation of stable macro-economic conditions—in particular, the establishment of non-inflationary (slow) growth, a low taxation/low public-spending posture, resistance to deficit spending and government borrowing. It also employed supply-side social interventions to enhance individual opportunity and social justice. Although in rhetoric a break with the former Conservative governments was emphasized, the Labour government crucially continued its predecessor's approach to inflation control as a means of ensuring higher growth and prosperity. Indeed, interest rate policy and inflation targeting became the central means for regulating the economy under New Labour (Hobson and Mabbett, 2009).

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08, the limitations of monetary policy instruments were revealed. The propensity of monetarism to create trade in products or assets with inflated values (resulting in an economic bubble) resulted in the first run on a British bank since the 1866 and a near collapse of the banking system a year later (Hobson and Mabbett, 2009). Triggered by a liquidity shortfall in the USA, the financial crisis saw a sharp reduction in the general availability of loans and the tightening of eligibility criteria for borrowers. This contributed to the failure of many businesses and a significant decline in economic activity. It also halted the model of rising consumption that had been fuelled by increased levels of personal indebtedness (often achieved through borrowing against rapidly growing housing equity) since the mid-1990s. Because the ‘credit crunch’ fundamentally altered the relationship between credit availability and interest rates, the Bank of England was required to implement an emergency programme of quantitative easing to avoid the risk of a deflationary spiral (in which lower wages and higher unemployment lead to a self-reinforcing decline in consumption). It bought gilts from financial institutions, along with a smaller amount of relatively high-quality debt issued by private companies, which it used to offset the reduction in private finance. This intervention brought down the cost of borrowing, making it easier and cheaper for companies to raise capital. It also induced investors to switch to other investments, such as shares, boosting their price and creating the illusion of increasing wealth in the economy. In spite of a massive investment of public money and the assumption of a bigger role in organizing financial institutions and markets than at any time in since the middle of the 20th century, this enabled the UK government to plot a rapid return to the status quo ante of a hands-off public policy approach to the financial sector (Epstein, 2010).

In the wake of these developments, the coalition government's austerity programme is being implemented. Augmenting long-standing intellectual arguments about the need to manage national affairs (including social spending) with the object of enhancing competitiveness in a global market economy, it risks new and more intense forms of segregation as it seeks to reduce the state mediation of labour market outcomes. This is because the process of economic restructuring sees the downwards homogenization of the quantity and remuneration of male employment, inducing a rise in the number of families claiming working tax credit on the basis of a female sole or joint earner (Rubery, 2010). Indeed, whilst the lack of access to benefits plus household means testing accounted for women's (voluntary) withdrawal from the labour market and the growth of workless households in the previous recession of the 1980s (see Rubery, 1988), the working tax credit system now places a premium on female employment in instances of male job loss. Reducing the threshold and amount of working tax credit at a time of downgrading public sector work where the majority of women are employed not only exacerbates the effects of labour market (particularly public sector) reconstruction but also creates a potential ‘double whammy’ for families already hit by recessionary layoffs in traditional male sectors of the economy, which has wider implications for reinforcing the long-standing North–South divide in the UK (Hogarth et al, 2009; Stewart, 2011; see Boushey, 2009 for a US comparison).1

Although the Big Society is coterminous with extensive cuts, it does not represent a straightforward return to earlier Thatcherite policy. Instead, the coalition's emphasis on social action develops the Third Way approach of New Labour but uses a provocative critique of inequality and poverty in Britain (both of which remained unchanged under the former government) to garner support (Lister and Bennett, 2010). The fact is that situations typical of a post-industrial labour market and changing family structures are generally not well covered by the activation policies in which a myth of voluntary unemployment prevails. Yet emphasis is placed on the need for the British public to fill the void created by a now retreating state, rather than on the state to develop new policies in response to the emergence of new social risks. Prime Minister David Cameron in his speeches calls for a revival of civil society as a counterweight to the outcomes of laissez-faire economics, which became manifest first in the credit crunch and then in the global recession (Cameron, 2007, 2008, 2009). In this, big government is deemed to be a cause of problems such as poverty because it undermines the personal and social responsibilities of citizens, leading to individualism. There is little recognition of the possibility for austerity measures to undermine recent support for successful integration of paid work and everyday social reproduction in which women continue to assume the majority burden or the apparent incongruence between the removal of assistance for new risk groups and the fact that these groups are now expected to deliver improvements in living conditions under the coalition government's plans. Thus, the financial crisis represents a moment in which the neoliberal preference for social policy engendering self-reliance and market solutions, which was progressed through intervention in the field of active labour market policy and childcare under New Labour, is being rearticulated through the envisaged expansion of the civil society sector, which is in many respects flawed (see also Castree, 2009; Peck et al., 2009).

Welfare Austerity: An End to Modernization?

The UK coalition government's conception of austerity is particularly significant in terms of its implications for the recent beneficiaries of welfare state modernization. This includes younger people, women and those with low skills who do not belong to the traditional clientele of the post-war welfare state but have benefitted from recent activation measures and financial incentives designed to make work pay (Pascall and Lewis, 2004). Though ‘atypical’ patterns of labour market participation make them vulnerable to a loss of welfare, these groups face qualitatively different challenges as a result of welfare reform, which inhibits their political mobilization. Middle-class parents struggling to reconcile work and family life will suffer a loss of income from lower limits for tax credits, whilst unemployed single parents face heightened expectations to participate rather than withdraw from the paid labour market whilst performing care. Yet middle-class women in paid work are unlikely to join forces with lower class women on welfare owing to a perception of unfairness in state provisions; namely that welfare recipients are getting time with their children, which middle-class women performing paid labour market roles are not (Jansson, 1997). Exacerbating the gender and class effects of policy implementation, those most at risk—the young, women and those with low skills—tend to have reduced political influence in terms of political participation, presence in political bodies and government organizations or in labour movements, which renders them less active in political campaigns than other social groups, or by historical comparison the working class would-be-beneficiaries of the welfare state in its formative years (Bonoli, 2005).

In political discourse, the contemporary politics of austerity alludes to the success of post-war governance in encouraging self-sufficiency at the same time as securing improvements in material conditions for at risk groups (see Hinton and Redclift, 2009, for a discussion). The coalition's case for a revival of social action upholds the need to foster autonomy rather than welfare dependency in order to redress ‘spiralling’ state costs—including waste from unproductive administration, inefficient targeting of programmes and poor service delivery (DWP, 2010). It does so by ascribing a duty of care to civil society and the voluntary sector. As the proposed reductions in state spending will have a disproportionate impact on those experiencing new social risks and the organizations in which they typically work in both paid and voluntary capacities, the possibility of growing social action in this manner is far from certain. At the very least, it will be a struggle to build networks of support when civil society and voluntary sector organizations are at their lowest ebb. The increased complexity of people's lives means that fewer citizens can meet the time demands of volunteering for community organizations (de Graaf, 2003). Moreover, government funding cuts mean redundancies for paid staff in many organizations. Efforts to build solidarity bonds must therefore countenance the privatization of people's lives and do this at a time of economic hardship, when research indicates that people volunteer less (Scott, 2010). As a consequence, the coalition government has been charged with reifying “community above and beyond state agency, all the while forgetting the irony of a government making demands of a stressed and fractured social bios to reform and change itself” (ibid: 135).

In contrast to the coalition's proposals, the wartime imposition and success of rationing and self-sufficiency goals was facilitated by the state injunction to prevent the exploitation of the weakest members of an unequal society: the working class. Having experienced the deprivations of war, the British public expected the resources of the state to be used to redress gross inequality by ensuring the fair distribution of scarce goods. Whereas pre-war efforts to relieve poverty were based on ‘charitable mentalities’, a new notion of citizenship entitlement was developed that for the first time saw redistribution on the grounds of need (Hartman, 2005). The era of rationing that began with the enforced austerity of Churchill's coalition government and continued through the pronouncements of the Beveridge report up to the end of the post-war shortages was thus antecedent to the development of the welfare state around the male breadwinner. Although problematic in terms of increasing women's economic dependence on their partner and reinforcing the gender roles forged around the single earner family model, this helped to reduce class and geographical inequality in the period 1945–1975.

Facilitated by new class allegiances, the desire for government interventions to improve equity in consumption following the World War II paved the way for the individual consumer-based policy discourses that, in turn, disrupted the traditional relationships between citizen aspirations and the value schemes of broad social groups. The legacy of rationing was a model of rising consumption in which goods such as clothing and furniture were for the first time framed as market opportunities (Hinton and Redclift, 2009). As increasing disposable income allowed for enhanced personal consumption rather than saving, the injunction to spend incrementally secured a platform of support for neoliberal policy instruments. The rise of personal ‘lifestyle’ agendas of economic and social interests meant that, for many, the sources of identity and the concerns of politics originated at home, far removed from the national and collective concerns. As labour market changes and family developments brought an end to the period of full male employment and sustained economic growth, the principles on which the welfare state was founded came under scrutiny. With increasing numbers of middle-class females entering the paid labour market the expectation for all women to work outside the home became, at the very least, more tenable. Coinciding with and corroborating the feminization of large parts of the labour force, a new set of arrangements for the transfer of state resources was proposed in which all claimants identified as capable of work were expected to work or prepare for employment (Driver and Martell, 2002). Under New Labour, this saw the removal of the right to care from working-class mothers on the basis that such work is not as socially productive as waged labour, even if this takes the form of caring or domestic employment that is completed outside the home (McDowell 2001, 2005).

The current age of welfare austerity continues and extends the trajectory of welfare reform instigated by New Labour. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced a series of workfare-style reforms to remodel the post-war system of universal benefits following the election to power of his Party. Notably, Blair sought to make state support conditional on a labour market input (DWP, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008). New rules for benefit claimants were aimed at tackling ‘worklessness’ and comprised two key components: ‘welfare-to-work’ and a series of measures aimed at making work pay. Welfare-to-work began during Labour's first term with the introduction of the suite of ‘New Deals’ for the Unemployed. The New Deals require welfare recipients to undertake education, training or work experience in return for the payment of Jobseeker's Allowance (see DWP, 2004, for a full description). The New Deals were gender sensitive to the extent that they were designed to address rising levels of unemployment amongst young males, linked to the crisis of masculinity and male-normed employment in the era of post-industrialization (McDowell, 2003). As a result, women's issues were given short shrift because the feminized labour market with its flexible work patterns, low pay and low status employment was perceived to be readily accessible (and acceptable) to women (MacLeavy, 2007). In Labour's second term, the condition to work in exchange for benefits was further extended from jobseekers to the economically inactive through the Pathways to Work programme, which targeted new claimants of Incapacity Benefit. Pathways to Work was less prescriptive than the New Deals in that it required participants to attend work focused interviews but did not mandate participants to apply for or accept specific jobs. The Employment and Support Allowance, which replaced Pathways to Work in 2008, also includes this condition. Alongside welfare-to-work, the introduction of a National Minimum Wage and the Working Family Tax Credit (now Working Tax Credit) were brought in to bolster the supply-side reforms. In seeking to guarantee the income returns of employment were at least equivalent to the state welfare payments made to claimants actively seeking work, they buttressed the low-wage labour market.

In labour market and welfare policy pronouncements made ahead of the 2010 General Election, the opposition Conservative Party subscribed to the anti-welfarism of New Labour. Indeed, Party Leader David Cameron decreed that worklessness is in part a supply side problem with individual cultural roots (Crisp et al., 2009). Reiterating the notion that entitlement to benefits is not automatic but confers responsibilities to look for work, the Conservatives proposed tougher sanctions for welfare claimants that refused to accept a reasonable job, with a third refusal leading to a 3-year ban on entitlement to out-of-work benefits (Conservative Party, 2010). This was more punitive than the existent measures to address unemployment, as well as the Labour Party's election pledge to withdraw benefits for 4 weeks or mandate participation in workfare activities in response to repeated job refusals (Labour Party, 2010). But in spite of minor differences in emphasis, the general election campaigns served to demonstrate that the project of welfare reform had gained considerable cross-party momentum.

The coalition government's welfare reform proposals are largely informed by the pre-election pronouncements of the Conservatives and represent political continuity rather than change. Nevertheless, important distinctions in the role of welfare austerity in supporting families may be observed. While the Labour Party did not ascribe the state with a central role in promoting marriage, the coalition government's diagnostic analysis of poverty manifests a concern for the relationship between family breakdown and economic dependence. Extending the Labour position that unemployment is a cultural phenomenon best tackled through activation and employment incentives, Prime Minister David Cameron has built a case for welfare reform as a means of reversing a rise in family breakdown and lone parenthood, as well as ‘poor’ parenting (Lister and Bennett, 2010). Helping more people into work, he argues, will lead to a reduction in material poverty, which will ease the financial pressures on families that can lead to relationship break-ups (Cameron, 2010). Added to this, the increased numbers of working-class women in employment will reduce the numbers of children receiving home care that is not as socially or educationally beneficial as ‘professional’ nursery care. The implication here is that activation policies such as the New Deals are both economically and socially beneficial. As the strain of managing poverty is lifted through the receipt of employment income, family tensions are eased and parental capacity may be improved. In addition, should the uptake of employment require professional childcare, then the children of poor (that is inadequate) parents may benefit from the additional superior care and support provided by minders or nursery staff whilst their parents undertake paid work outside the home.

The allotment of state resources to encouraging work through these programmes serves to discipline citizens in politically and economically expedient ways. By attributing the poverty that yields family breakdown, lone parenthood and poor parenting to individual behaviour, David Cameron downplays the impact socio-economic structural factors have on personal and familial well-being, as well as the propensity for austerity measures to increase pressure on groups most vulnerable to new social risks. This sidesteps the low rewards for many low-skilled and part-time workers, as well as the ongoing difficulties for women in balancing work and care, which leads working-class women to retreat from the labour market and claim state assistance and also contributes to high levels of work–life conflict for working single parents and dual earner households. Though arguments about welfare dependency infer that eventually all forms of state assistance will be rescinded, the successful implementation of workfare requires an active role for the state in underwriting the economy and creating the conditions appropriate for its redevelopment. Austerity, in this sense, provides a means of legitimating the coalition government's arrangements to expand programmes to orientate state assistance towards work, which increases levels of state control over welfare recipients’ lives, at the same time as dampening public expectations regarding citizenship entitlements.

Austerity: A Feminist Critique

Women as a group are particularly reliant on benefits and tax credits as key social protection. This is a legacy of government reforms emergent in the period of post-war austerity, in which provisions for social security were developed in line with an assumption of male breadwinner full employment. In the trente glorieuses, much child and eldercare was provided within the family and the issue of whether the established gender roles promoted a fair distribution of opportunities was low on the political agenda. Indeed, for several years, the widow's pension remained the only important programme that was either explicitly or de facto directed towards women in the UK (Bonoli, 2005). While the post-1975 transformation of the welfare state in response to the demands of emerging groups—particularly women's rights—was successful in establishing a dual worker model, it failed to fully resolve the horizontal and vertical segregation of the labour market or invoke a rebalancing of labour performed within the home. The expansion of maternity provisions and collective care services facilitated greater entry to the labour market for women, but did not resolve all barriers to their employment or the unequal rewards from paid work. As a result, women remain over-represented in low-paying occupations and continue to fulfil the majority of part-time employment posts (Scott et al., 2010).

The disadvantaged labour market position of women gives rise to a norm of primary (male) full-time employment, supported by a secondary (female) wage, which is evident in the priority afforded to male employment in UK welfare-to-work programmes and tax credit provisions. It also forms the basis of coalition government's plans to introduce a single welfare payment with only one allowed earnings disregard per household (termed ‘universal credit’). The lack of a separate earnings disregard for a ‘secondary earner’ arguably removes the incentive for women in particular to remain in, or find, paid work, which is the stated goal of welfare reform (Oxfam, 2010). The disregard for the contribution of female earnings to household income has its origin in the marginality of female employment in the labour market and the lower rates of remuneration for what has come to be considered ‘women's work’. In the latter part of the 20th century, a gradual ‘feminization’ of the large parts of the economy occurred as the introduction of new technology led to the abolition or export of many of the jobs on which the core working class had relied for security and good living standards. As this produced new trends in earnings inequality and labour market instability, it weakened the (male) working class who were the mainstay of the welfare state at its inception. The insecure nature and quality of work that had pertained primarily to female employment up to this point spread to other sections of the economy that were the mainstay of white males, resulting in employment fluctuations that caused a dramatic rise in the cost of income protection borne by the Keynesian welfare state.

New state programmes directed at cost-efficiency and responsiveness were introduced manifesting a concern to encourage active labour market participation both through welfare-to-work restrictions on unemployment and early retirement entitlements, and through support from advisers, training and make-work-pay wage subsidy (Lødomel and Trickey, 2001). These were targeted in the first instance at out-of-work men, particularly young men struggling to find work in an economy suffering job cuts in areas of traditionally high male employment such as manufacturing (McDowell, 2005). The associated impacts of economic restructuring such as the expansion of low status of work for women in the collective care services were not seen to warrant the same level of political intervention even though they acted to limit availability (of mothers in particular) for paid work. Consequently, when such programmes reorientating state assistance towards work were rolled out to other groups including lone parents, their provisions failed to recognize women's unequal starting points in the labour market, their concentration in certain low-paid industries, or their typically higher levels of responsibility for care and domestic tasks (MacLeavy, 2007). These all serve as barriers to female employment and further inhibit the rewards of paid employment for women.

In an age of welfare austerity, the need to recognize and consider the articulations between gender, the tax and benefit system, and the provisions of employment, childcare and eldercare policy is especially important. Whilst the Big Society discourse makes frequent reference to the virtues of a (feminized) conception of care, affording priority to paid work can only be effective in creating a more gender equal society and reducing poverty if additional measures are put in place to overcome the barriers to women's entry to, and progression in, the labour market. Indeed, the likely consequence of the drive for self-sufficiency through employment is a return to the informal labour market for many women. With increased numbers of women now affected by redundancy brought about by cuts in public spending, securing paid work outside the home will be not only difficult but less financially rewarding (a position which may be further underlined by the imposition of limits to child benefit and the reduction of childcare subsidies). Rather than accept low-grade jobs, in periods of hardship, women have in the past been more likely to register not as unemployed but as economic inactive (Evans, 1998). This is in part because women's continued performance of an unequal amount of labour in the home prompts a mental offsetting of their (potential) earnings against the cost of ‘buying in’ child and elder care, as well as work pertaining to routine household chores (Oxfam, 2010). In such instances, they suffer from an immediate loss of economic autonomy, the diminished ability on labour market re-entry to negotiate rates for work that are commensurate with their abilities and experience (as childrearing and housewifery are not economically valued), and as a direct result of both these factors a low pension at retirement (Grant et al., 2005). Though the tax credit system incentivizes female employment in instances of male redundancy in a manner that the benefit system of the 1980s did not (Rubery, 2010), the current recession has in contrast to previous economic downturns hit female jobs the hardest (Fawcett Society, 2009; Office of National Statistics recorded a 15-year high in women claiming Jobseeker's Allowance in April 2011 (474,400 claimants), see also Rowley, 2011).

In seeking to tackle the products of the financial crisis by encouraging greater engagement with the labour market at the same time as reducing state funding for the principle sources of quality female employment and support for female employees, the coalition government's attempts to reduce the UK's deficit constitute a backwards step for gender equality. While the government might expect the reduction and removal of subsidies for low-paid work and/or costly childcare, along with the imposition of tougher welfare-to-work measures that expand the scope of individual responsibility for income protection to enable or encourage women to deliver the Big Society by replacing their paid labour with unpaid labour through more voluntary action, it is arguably more likely to result in a socially divisive rise in unemployment and pockets of extreme disadvantage (Lister and Bennett, 2010). The 2001 Census recorded the highest proportions of caregivers in areas with higher than average levels of deprivation and long-term illness. Carers in such areas were themselves more likely to be in poor health. There were also clear variations in care giving propensity by ethnic group (Young et al., 2005). Austerity measures—though affecting both middle- and lower class women—will be most keenly felt by those living in areas of deprivation where geographical location, time and mobility constraints pertaining to familial responsibilities, low funds and poor health combine to limit ability to look for work. In affording priority to paid work in the consultation document, 21st Century Welfare (DWP, 2010), the coalition government does not take this into account. Rather it identifies disincentives to work and the complexity of the benefits and tax credits system as key contributors to the disconnection observed between welfare recipients and work. As an approach, its austerity regime “is essentially punitive and betrays classic signs of ‘blaming the victim’ without addressing underlying structural causes and barriers” to sustainable and rewarding positions of employment (Lister and Bennett, 2010, 102).

Conclusion

By awarding priority to paid work over unpaid reproductive and caring roles, the goal of contemporary welfare austerity is ostensibly to underwrite the flexible labour market and manage the UK population such that the fabric of society remains intact in the context of challenges emergent from the current recession. Certainly, the overall objectives of reform—encouraging those who can to work, delivering a simplified system, reducing costs and removing perverse disincentives to paid employment—do not purport to share economic risks across a wider population, redistribute resources over the individual/family lifecycle and between generations and balance taxation between those with and without dependents in the manner of the post-war welfare state. Rather they are designed to reduce the social insurance and protection that was instituted by the welfare state by forcing a substantial reduction in the numbers of those receiving financial assistance. Whilst a tailored benefits system has the potential to enable moves into paid work and out of poverty (see Barnes et al., 2008), the coalition government's proposals are, by contrast, in danger of reducing the popular acceptance and trust of government because they do not consider the impact of these reforms on women as the sex most vulnerable to new social risks owing to their dual and potentially conflicting, roles in reproductive care and paid work. In this sense the ‘New Politics’ of austerity not only fails to take account of the inherent link between the issues of economic redistribution and gender inequality, it also risks further embedding and exacerbating that linkage. Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Minister for Equalities, has gone so far as to argue that the coalition government's proposals “represent the biggest reversals in opportunities for women since the end of the first world war” (Guardian, 2010a; see also Guardian, 2010b).

Polemical as Cooper's point may be, the force of her argument points directly to the radical implications of austerity for women's lives. Though labour markets are becoming less gendered with men and women in direct competition for jobs (although this is happening relatively slowly and is not consistent across occupations or sectors) state supports remain necessary to facilitate women's labour market entry, as well as job retention and career progression. In addition, as the division of labour within the household is not always shared equally between men and women in couples, policy instruments that encourage a fairer gender division of time spent in paid jobs in the labour market against domestic work and care duties ought to be explored as a supplement to state investment in increasing (quality) employment, training and skills. Not only would this likely improve contemporary living conditions for women but it would reduce instances of time and skills-related underemployment, which yield economic benefits both at the household and national scale.

I would like to acknowledge Al James and a further anonymous reviewer for their critical reactions and suggestions to an earlier draft. Additional thanks are due to Columba Peoples for his helpful discussions of many of the issues raised in this paper.

References