Beyond work-first and human capital approaches

This chapter builds on the critical appraisal of New Labour's labour market and social policies in Chapter Ten to point to possible futures ‘beyond the workfare state’. It explores the kinds of measures that might be taken, involving more concerted efforts to tackle exclusion and disadvantage in genuinely empowering ways, to overcome the plateau effects occurring after 10 years of New Labour's work-first approaches.

The grounds for criticising this approach are, in part, social scientific, in that a greater awareness that the causes of unemployment and worklessness are due to the complex interplay of (social) structure and (personal) agency is likely to offer better, more strongly evidenced remedies. They are also political-ethical in that the resort to compulsion is a breach of human rights principles that is arguably likely to be ineffective or counterproductive. While claiming benignly to ‘rebalance’ rights with responsibilities, most of the latter are placed on disadvantaged people, with the government reluctant to date to shoulder some itself by intervening on the demand side to tackle structural inequalities and to improve the quality of jobs available.

A key question, however, is whether there are alternatives to current policies, which this final chapter therefore seeks to scope out, finding that some are being articulated within government circles, and some are being argued for externally by academics and think-tanks but they are also, we would emphasise, emerging out of the struggles by social movements from below. Thus it is in principle possible to envisage a future in which collective agency in civil society and the democratic sphere can be influential, and that we do not have to passively accept that the global market inevitably narrows possibilities for political choices. Our efforts to identify choices beyond the workfare state acknowledge that global economic pressures are significant, but can be mitigated by struggles around ideologies and discourse, and by the mobilisation of collective agency. While the strength of class-based movements may have weakened in the UK, the influence of new social movements claiming recognition and redress around the range of inequalities focused on in the case study chapters has grown.