4 The Violence of Workfare Jon Burnett and David Whyte
This chapter documents first-hand accounts of people who have been forced to participate in UK ‘workfare’ schemes. These accounts were gathered by Boycott Workfare, a grassroots organisation that campaigns to end forced unpaid work for people who receive welfare. The chapter uses first-hand accounts to build a detailed exposure of government-organised workfare schemes and their encouragement of violent – and very often illegal – working practices. A range of attacks on benefit entitlements have been central to austerity-led public sector cuts in which individuals have been punished and sanctioned for not ‘actively seeking work’. Workfare is therefore a form of welfare conditionality, in which individuals are made to work without pay, or risk losing entitlement to benefit income for being defined as not maximizing their employment prospects. Workfare schemes are part of a much wider set of measures that place benefit claimants at the frontline of the government’s so-called ‘belt-tightening’ public sector squeeze and intensification of ‘welfare conditionality’ in the current period of ‘austerity’. There is much discussion around benefit sanctions, and the hardship that follows them, but there is less discussion about the increasingly common use of ‘workfare schemes’. Workfare has a history going back several decades in the UK.1 First introduced as part of the ‘community action’ scheme, under John Major’s Conservative government in 1993, workfare schemes became a central part of welfare policy reforms under the New Labour government’s ‘new deal’ policy for the unemployed, launched in 1998. The last two governments have expanded these schemes. The Conservative’s Mandatory Work Activity scheme, for example, compelling people to work without pay for between 4 and 26 weeks, was introduced in 2011 59