Introduction

Chapter One provided a substantive outline of the neglected relationship between New Labour's modernisation agenda for public services and the responses of different kinds of welfare workers. The purpose of this chapter is to stand back a little from the empirical detailing of this relationship to focus on the crucial sphere of what might be called the ‘welfare labour process’. Like other kinds of waged labour, welfare services are produced as well as distributed through the social organisation of different kinds and amounts of labour. However, unlike other kinds of waged labour, welfare services are produced to serve predetermined social and public policy objectives involving the relief of some unwanted personal or social state. As highlighted in Chapter One, the main focus in this book is on welfare work in the public sector, that is, publicly provided and (not always well) paid labour. We also recognise that there is a suppressed tension between specific capitals bringing welfare work, previously performed without pay and mainly by women, into the marketplace as commodities, such as private nursing homes, and the wider national economy, or ‘capital-in-general’, that continues to rely on the unpaid work of female labour in the home. Rather than collapsing the distinction between waged and unwaged work, our focus in this book is on the specific nature of the relationship between welfare and employment.

As neoliberalism has emerged as an ideological doctrine and the neoliberal state as a governing structure, commodities, accessed in the marketplace by means of the cash (or credit) nexus, have increasingly serviced the fulfilment of social need. In the process, the relationship between capital accumulation and the welfare state has been reconfigured. This has been widely discussed, as Chapter One demonstrated in the case of the ‘modernisation’ of welfare governance in the UK by New Labour in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Clearly, the neoliberal welfare state is an unsteady, chaotic and contradictory creature, reflecting the tension between the ideological clarity of neoliberalism as an abstract model and the pragmatic realities involved in implementing market-facing institutional change (Pierson, 2006). As ever such developments are uneven in and between different areas of the public sector and welfare state, at times affecting different groups of workers in different ways. These are incomplete processes and, as indicated in Chapter One and throughout this book, they are also deeply contested processes.