Role Models and Traditional Moralities: the Development of In-work Relief for Lone Mothers

Abstract

We have argued that the leading in-work benefit Family Credit and its successor, Working Family Tax Credit were developed from a Conservative elite understanding of US workfare, which we defined as ‘market workfare’. In Chapters 2 and 3 we argued that market workfare is a mechanism aimed at managing some of the economic dilemmas pertinent to neo-liberal capital accumulation: high levels of economic inactivity; fears of inflationary pressures; and the maintenance of a competitive edge in globalised markets. Market workfare therefore, we suggested, was an aid to the accumulation process. The current and following chapter have a somewhat different focus. Although we maintain the argument that market workfare is an important mechanism in the regulation of capitalism, in these chapters we focus upon the ways in which FC and WFTC (this chapter) and ETU and the NDYP (Chapter 5) were, and remain, a form of social engineering intended to reproduce ‘male’ role models in lone mother-headed families and reproduce the work ethic among unemployed young men. In those senses we are suggesting that market workfare can be seen as social mode of economic regulation helping to reproduce institutions — ‘the family’ and employment — that were also seen as being crucial to the accumulation process.