Introduction
The recent global financial crisis has revealed the extent to which social, economic and financial risks have been transferred to individuals (Rafferty and Yu, Reference Rafferty and Yu2010). Rather than seeking to mitigate individual risks, Western industrialised societies have developed new styles of governance and new forms of policy which further individualise collective responsibility for managing risks and insecurities (Marston, Reference Marston, Marston, Moss and Quiggan2010). In shifting their focus away from the male breadwinner and towards new ‘groups at risk’ of social exclusion, liberal welfare states have focused less on providing protection against new risks, and, instead, have emphasised manipulating incentive structures (Bonoli, Reference Bonoli2007). Individuals are encouraged to accumulate resources to manage risk across the life course (Bovenberg, Reference Bovenberg2007: 3), and increasingly policy makers understand workforce participation as the key to social inclusion (Nelms and Tsingas, Reference Nelms and Tsingas2010). The increased participation of women in the labour market has been accompanied by changing expectations about family life and, at a policy level, concern about families that do not conform to a ‘traditional’ pattern. Australia has enthusiastically led the way in promoting part-time and casual work as the solution to the tensions associated with meeting employment and family-related responsibilities (Cass and Brennan, Reference Cass and Brennan2003). At the same time, Australia has pioneered activation policies that cast income support as ‘passive welfare’ and require participation in employment related activities (OECD, 2001). Active labour market policies are contrasted with ‘passive’ labour market policies such as income replacement (Auer et al., Reference Auer, Efendioğlu and Leschke2008). Over recent years, the categories of income support recipients subjected to activation requirements have broadened to groups such as mothers without partners or people with disabilities. In this context, the emergence of the ‘adult worker model’ (Lewis, Reference Lewis and Maclean2005), the erosion of the ‘standard employment relationship’ (SER) and the introduction of ‘gender neutral’ activation style policies combine to create new and intensify old risks for women and men.
In Europe, policy responses to these ‘new social risks’ have included attempts to provide flexibility with security, ‘flexicurity’. This approach emphasises the development of individual capabilities, the promotion of labour market attachment through activation, and the provision of access to various forms of insurance (Schmid, Reference Schmid2006; Bekker and WiIthagen, Reference Bekker and Wilthagen2008). Bovenberg (Reference Bovenberg2007) emphasises how individuals can be assisted in accumulating resources to mitigate risk across the life course. He calls for an integration of social and economic policies in response to the ‘rush hour’ of life, the period of intense pressure created by the competing demands of paid employment and childrearing and other caring responsibilities. Yet his analysis does not take into account the ‘linked lives’ (Elder et al., Reference Elder, Johnson, Crosnoe, Mortimer and Shanahan2003: 13f) and the complex social, cultural and relational factors that shape the employment choices of many women and men. Women are more likely than men to be ‘flexible workers’ due to family care responsibilities, and are also less likely to be ‘economically autonomous’ (Lewis and Plomien, Reference Lewis and Plomien2009: 433). Thus, apparently gender-neutral policy responses such as flexicurity have gendered effects because they do not acknowledge or address the persistence of gender inequality.
Policy reliance on highly aggregated standardised outcome data and generalised models of autonomous rational action result in policies that lack an understanding of the rationales that structure everyday life (Duncan and Edwards, Reference Duncan and Edwards1999; Taylor-Gooby, Reference Taylor-Gooby2008; Millar and Ridge, Reference Millar and Ridge2009). We focus, therefore, on the lived experiences of low income women to illustrate how the labour market, social security requirements and expectations about family relationships intersect to intensify risk and insecurity for women. We draw on two recent Australian studies to illustrate individuals’ attempts to manage risks associated with family life, employment and welfare obligations, and the sometimes contradictory effects of social policy.
We start with a review of the changing expectations about employment, gender roles and income support. Then, drawing on our two studies, we examine the collisions of work and family life which emerge from tensions between new and old normative frames and institutions, and highlight the impossible ‘choices’ they create for women. We conclude by commenting on perverse effects of social policy in Australia that heighten insecurity and risk for some groups, highlighting the need for an in-depth approach to better understand policy outcomes.
Gender, risk and the life course
Gender has long been recognised as a key element in the structuring of welfare states and of the experiences of parenting, welfare receipt and labour market engagement. In the ‘Golden Age’ of democratic welfare capitalism (1950s to 1970s) in Europe and elsewhere in the industrialised Western world, an ideal model of the life course became a normative expectation (Kohli, Reference Kohli, Sørensen, Weinert and Sherrod1986), with different but complementary models for men and women. The male breadwinner model describes a family model in which the husband undertakes paid work on a ‘full-time’ basis and the wife undertakes unpaid care work in relation to the household and family.
In the first part of the twentieth century, in Australia the male breadwinner model was both a norm for policy and a norm for many families (Lake, Reference Lake1999). It underpinned what Castles (Reference Castles1985) famously characterised as a “wage earners’ welfare state”, a combination of policies also premised on residual welfare targeted to those deemed deserving of support, tariff protection, centralised wage fixing and full employment as a central policy goal (Castles, Reference Castles1985). The strength of the breadwinner model and the responsibility of wage earners to provide for their families underpinned the development of ‘neo-familialism’, an approach where neo-liberalism and market-based policies combine with support for ‘traditional’ forms of the family (Daly, Reference Daly, Castles, Leibfried, Lewis, Obinger and Pierson2010).
The economic independence of women was a key goal of second wave liberal feminism. Yet, initial demands for economic support for the caring role, based on an understanding of difference, gave way to demands for ‘equality’ in the labour market (Lake, Reference Lake1999: 4–5). Pocock argues that the revised goal of equal access to paid work then found a ‘happy co-conspirator’ in a globalised market ‘greedy’ for women's labour and, in particular, its ‘flexibility’ (Pocock, Reference Pocock2003: 8). However, the absence of structural supports for women's autonomy, such as childcare, has left little option but for women to conform to the ‘modified’ breadwinner norm, with a full-time male earner and part-time mother/worker (Cass and Brennan, Reference Cass and Brennan2003: 40), with flexible employment, as defined by part-time and casual work, rendered an ‘individual’ choice. Over the past decades large numbers of women have entered the labour market at a time when the standard employment relationship (SER) has increasingly been hollowed out, making Australia one of the leading nations in part-time and casual employment of women (Brennan, Reference Brennan2007; OECD, 2008). Over the past three decades, the number of men and women in SERs has significantly decreased. Women overwhelmingly dominate part-time permanent employment (Campbell et al., Reference Campbell, Whitehouse, Baxter, Vosko, MacDonald and Campbell2009; Vosko et al., Reference Vosko, MacDonald and Campbell2009). In 2011, close to three quarters of part-time workers were women (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Part-time jobs are more likely to be casual than permanent. In 2009, almost three quarters (72 per cent) of all casual employees worked part-time hours (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010). These jobs are often insecure as casual jobs do not offer many of the protections and benefits associated with the standard employment relationship. Furthermore, part-time work, whether casual or permanent, usually does not enable women to achieve short- or long-term financial security or economic autonomy because of the low level of hours worked and income earned.
Despite the persistence of the male breadwinner model, there has also been an increasing emphasis on workforce participation for all individuals, the gender neutral ‘adult worker model’ (Giullari and Lewis, Reference Giullari and Lewis2005). The contradictions between normative policy constructions of work and family life and ‘lived realities’ have been variously described in social policy and sociological literature as an issue of ‘work−life’ balance. Lewis (Reference Lewis2002) argues that debates around work and life have been so successfully reframed as a concern for gender neutral ‘work-life balance’ that the classed and gendered processes involved are no longer considered. Popular discourse about work and family emphasises the ways women must choose between, balance or juggle the demands of the market and the domestic sphere (see for example, Hakim, Reference Hakim2001; Armstrong, Reference Armstrong2006). In this way, the issue is ‘depoliticised’ (Grace, Reference Grace2006: 313) and the risks and responsibilities associated with resolving tensions between paid work and family responsibilities are shifted onto individual women.
To illustrate the real-life effects of the dominant social policy paradigms in Australia, we draw on two studies, providing examples of how women attempt to resolve the tensions between paid employment, family responsibilities and compliance with income support obligations. We focus on poor women to highlight the gendered risks for women in the precarious labour market and the further risks created by the intersection of activation policies, a precarious labour market and family care. In doing so, we reveal the myths of autonomy and choice for women with paid and unpaid work responsibilities.
The studies we draw on in this article are both quasi-longitudinal and were funded through the Australian Research Council Linkage scheme and the Brotherhood of St Laurence (BSL), a community-based organisation.Footnote 1
The Job Retention and Advancement of Disadvantaged Jobseekers (Bowman, forthcoming) study is a four-year mixed-method study that examined the employment experiences of people who, in 2008, had moved into paid employment after participating in the Intensive Customised Assistance phase of the Job Network, the Personal Support Programme or Vocational Rehabilitation Services. The respondents had been unemployed or out of the labour market because of illness, disability, parenting or other caring responsibilities. In this article, we draw on the qualitative component of the study, which comprised semi-structured interviews to allow for in-depth exploration of the experience and understandings of respondents. The data drawn on in this article are from wave one (fifteen men, fifteen women) and wave two (twelve men, ten women) of the study.
The second study focused on the experience of single mothers affected by Welfare to Work reforms regarding their transition to paid work (Bodsworth, Reference Bodsworth2012). This doctoral research was conducted between 2007 and 2012. Fifteen single mothers were interviewed using in-depth biographic narrative research methods. The study was semi-longitudinal, with second interviews conducted with eleven of the participants. It is beyond the scope of this article to report in detail on these studies, but rather we draw on them to highlight the implications of collisions between social change and normative policy frameworks for individuals.
Precarious work and the persistence of gender power relations
The Job Retention study highlights the risks experienced by people who had been out of work for a variety of reasons, including ill-health, disability, parenting or unemployment (Bowman, forthcoming). Initial findings suggest that while partnered women may adopt part-time work as a solution to the tensions between work and family responsibilities, this solution exposes them to two different kinds of risk. They are at risk due to the unreliable, casualised nature of part-time work, especially as they grow older and if they have been out of the workforce for long periods of time, and they are also exposed to the potential risks of relationship dissolutions. The example of Sharon illustrates these risks. Sharon was in her early forties and was married with two teenage children. She had worked part-time when rearing her children, and in recent years had assisted her husband in his work as a tradesman. With no formal qualifications, and a patchy work history, Sharon had been unsuccessful in her search for an ongoing job in retail. She had had some casual work but the hours had diminished and then she was no longer offered shifts. Her self-employed husband wanted her at home so he could rely on her assistance, but at the same time needed her to supplement his sporadic income. She explained:
He says to me: ‘I don't want you to get a job’. And I said: ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘Because I'm used to you being here and being available for me when I'm at work and I need particular things . . . to help finish the job off. I can ring you up and say, “Bub, can you go and get this, can you arrange that?”, and you go and get it for me, and I've got it for the next day.’ But then he'll say: ‘Get a job, we need more money’, so it's sort of like you're stuck.
While she wanted to work, she could not achieve economic autonomy; her unpaid assistance to her husband was simultaneously valued and devalued. As Sharon said, ‘Bloody hell, I can't win, can I?’
For many women in the study, the risks associated with undertaking part-time or casual work in order to manage family responsibilities only became apparent when relationships dissolved. Agnes, forty-seven, had worked on short-term contracts as an integration aide since having her children, as this allowed her to be with them during school holidays. Agnes subsequently found herself divorced and caring for two teenage daughters with little support from her former husband. She found herself ‘battling’ on her own, but her previous solution to managing the tensions between work and family responsibilities was no longer adequate. As a result, she decided to work on a casual basis, despite the associated insecurity:
I had to make a choice between the two because [integration job] pays less and I only had 13 hours a week, whereas I'm getting 20 hours a week with [bus company] . . . and they pay a bit more. So I begrudgingly had to go with the one that paid more, because I've got Elizabeth at Uni and everything, so I've got to.
A back injury made it difficult for her to cope with her job as a chaperone on a school bus for children with disabilities. She explained that she ‘can't climb up a hierarchy ladder or anything like that . . . even to obtain an ongoing position would be great’. Her primary motivation was providing for her daughters and ‘making it so that they don't go without’. This commitment shaped her decision-making and her aspirations.
Paradoxically, low pay led some women to take on several part-time jobs, in an attempt to earn an adequate income, while also meeting their family responsibilities. For example, Marlene, a forty-two-year-old single mother, was also caring for her parents with dementia. She felt locked into doing work that she could do rather than work she would like to do. Working in aged care, she earned ‘just the award wage – it's crap. That's why I have two jobs.’ Work dominated her life: ‘I just sleep, then go to work or go to work then go to the other work, then go to sleep. I'm lucky if I get four to five hours sleep a night.’ She felt frustrated because she was unable to retrain due to her heavy paid and unpaid workload, so was locked into low paid care-work. She said, ‘I haven't advanced in fifteen years – I'm still where I was. And the wages are less.’ For these women, part-time and casual work carried risks; it did not provide the conditions for economic autonomy and it entrenched gendered power relations. Indeed, as a strategy for managing the tensions associated with paid work and unpaid family responsibilities and relationships, part-time and casual work exposed these women to further risks, not least poverty in later life. The following section, drawing on the Welfare to Work study reveals how activation policies create additional risks for single mothers.
Activation, gender, choice and risk
The increased flexibilisation of the labour market has been accompanied by the growing popularity of active labour market programs. Increasingly people previously understood as ‘legitimate’ non-participants in the labour market, such as mothers, people with ill-health or a disability, and older people, have been redefined as ‘jobless’ and needing ‘activation’ (Betzelt and Bothfeld, Reference Betzelt and Bothfeld2011). Thus, activation strategies challenge the traditional gendered labour division through the promotion of an adult worker norm and represent a shift in the basis for women's social citizenship (Letablier et al., Reference Letablier, Eydoux, Betzelt, Betzelt and Bothfeld2011: 79). Yet, the lived experience of women indicates that they will fail to meet these citizenship requirements as they continue to face inadequate care support, inflexible work and gendered cultural expectations.
There is a further clash between activation policies that presume a model of employment resembling the standard employment contract and the reality of precarious and insecure work. Gender neutral activation policies compound a so-called ‘activation paradox’ (Betzelt and Bothfeld, Reference Betzelt and Bothfeld2011) by ignoring the lag of policy and practice in relation to work and care and the reality of an increasingly precarious labour market. In Australia, activation policies have also emphasised increasing conditionality and tighter compliance frameworks (Cortis and Meagher, Reference Cortis and Meagher2009).
In 2006, Australia introduced Welfare to Work reforms requiring single mothers receiving income support to engage in thirty hours of paid work each fortnight once their youngest child turned six. Similar reforms have been introduced in the UK and the USA. Bodsworth (Reference Bodsworth2012) found that with the removal of the option of full-time caregiver under the Welfare to Work reforms, women struggled to fulfil either the role of universal worker or part-time caregiver. This was further compounded by the activation requirements associated with Welfare to Work.
The women in the Welfare to Work study described their employment choices in the context of their roles as either primarily providers or caregivers, yet found it difficult to fulfil either of these roles adequately. The context in which these women made employment decisions was characterised by a lack of decent, permanent part-time work that offered the prospects of career progression. In the absence of decent work, these women made choices between time for their children and economic security, informed by their perceptions of their children's needs, their own abilities and what seemed to be the right thing to do as a mother.
Some women emphasised the importance of secure employment and financial security, but faced difficulty managing care of their children, often placing additional responsibility on their children for self-care and care of siblings. For example, Lisa emphasised the need to provide financial security as a ‘provider’ for her children, based on previous experiences of poverty as a young single mother.
I thought that that's what I was supposed to be doing anyway – as a parent and a provider for my children. After living for a couple of months with only $30 to do the shopping for the week, it was like – I can't do this, I can't feed him and provide in little ways, and that's when I started working more and more. And it was to provide for him, to give him the things and opportunities that I think he should have.
The tensions between having less time to spend with one's children but needing more money for the family and household were not easily reconciled, and the women in this position expressed a sense of guilt as well as pride in their work ethic and their ability to provide financially for the family.
Other women described ‘choosing’ flexible employment and therefore sacrificing financial security to have more time with their children. For example, Helen had separated from her children's father when her daughter was two and had since been casually employed in a range of low paid jobs in the community sector, despite having a Bachelors degree in Music. She was working four jobs as a disability support worker, an after-school care worker, a child care worker and dancing teacher ‘because I can't get anything else that fits in with our lifestyle’. She then challenged her own use of the word ‘lifestyle’, in an apparent realisation that she had reduced her desire to care for her children to a ‘lifestyle choice’, but was then unable to articulate her circumstances in language other than that of personal ‘choice’:
When I say lifestyle, I mean, I've chosen to be there for my children. Ideally I'd like to be home in the evenings with them, but at the moment I can't do that. At the moment I'm hoping that in a few months time I'll be able to drop some of those shifts.
Paradoxically, while a number of the women spoke about ‘choosing’ flexibility through casual, part-time employment the reality of genuine flexibility often failed to materialise. Many women found they were unable to control their hours of work in the way they had hoped, unable to refuse their employers’ demands. The introduction of Welfare to Work further constrained the women's capacities to combine care and paid work. For example, Hannah, an emergency primary school teacher, found herself working more hours than necessary due to the need to meet both the demands of the employment agency and her welfare obligations. ‘It's a very fine balancing act between keeping Centrelink happy and the agency happy.’
Despite requiring only part-time work participation, Welfare to Work reporting requirements reflected the old dichotomy between permanent worker and unemployed job seeker. It was thus incompatible with ‘flexible work’ arrangements and the casualised labour market. For those who were not employed at the time the Welfare to Work reforms took effect, the introduction of the policy brought significant pressure to quickly find and accept work regardless of the type of job, the conditions and its compatibility with care of children. The failure to achieve flexibility, and diminution of the ‘security’ offered by the social security system left the women trapped in the gaps between policy and institutional frameworks and exposed to significant risk.
Conclusion
For the women in both studies, choice was highly constrained. Their ‘choices’ were often not considered reasonable or legitimate by employers, the income support system or the broader community. The women in each of our studies, whether partnered or not, constructed flexibility as a desirable quality in paid work, central to their ability to combine paid work with family responsibilities, despite genuine flexibility often failing to eventuate. Coyle (Reference Coyle2005) suggests that it is no coincidence that an association between ‘flexibilisation’ and ‘family-friendliness’ has emerged at a time when the standard employment relationship is hollowing out. This echoes the de-politicisation of the tensions between paid work and family. These tensions become a personal rather than social problem and women ‘choose’ precarious employment, despite short- and long-term risks to their wellbeing and economic autonomy.
Underlying all of the shifts described above is a greater emphasis on the individual, in which individual freedom and responsibility is privileged over ‘collective responsibilities for social integration and capacity building for vulnerable citizens and victims of economic sources’ (Carney, Reference Carney2007: 13) both in the labour market and in the social security system. This exposes women to added risk for which they are required to bear individual responsibility. Not only do the new normative models of the individualised universal worker collide with existing complex realities of work and care, social policies also retain assumptions about gender roles and the division of labour. These contradictions produce substantial tensions and inequalities in everyday life often with long-term effects.
We have argued that the individualisation of risk in social policy masks structural inequalities, and shores up rigid gender roles, while simultaneously devaluing women's unpaid care work. Generalised gender neutral approaches ignore the complex interactions of different policies that frame the lives of people experiencing disadvantage and will fail to produce adequate policy responses. Not only this, but the policy responses produced, may, in fact, further increase the risks to which many vulnerable people are exposed. We suggest that policy solutions to the risks highlighted in this article will come from attending to the ways in which individual opportunity and choice are shaped by broader social conditions. The available large-scale standardised studies help to identify general inequalities and disadvantage, however they provide little help to understand the complex everyday mechanisms which expose women to new and old social risks. By drawing on qualitative empirical studies, we have demonstrated the importance of attending to the intersections and collisions of social change and normative policy frameworks from the perspective of individual ‘lived lives’.
