The self-sufficiency trap: A critical feminist inquiry into welfare-to-work policies and the experiences of Alberta families in poverty

Like other liberal-welfare states, Canadian policy makers, in a climate of balanced budgets and deficit reduction, have been active in developing policies intended to move people from social assistance to employment. Although programs designed to move welfare recipients into the labour force are not new in Canada, the mandatory nature of recent welfare-to-work initiatives is new. The introduction of welfare-to-work policies in Canada signals a neo-liberal shift which is moving Canada from a model of social citizenship, where all citizens are entitled to a base level of benefits, to a model of market citizenship, where citizenship entitlement is contingent upon a person's attachment to the labour market. Given that welfare recipients have a precarious attachment to the labour market at best, the shift to market citizenship may have negative consequences for their income security, and, in turn, their health and well-being. With increasing value placed upon labour-force attachment, welfare recipients are increasingly at risk for receiving fewer citizenship entitlements.; In this dissertation I detail the experiences of 17 welfare recipients over the period of one year in their quest to become productive market citizens. Using critical feminist and human ecological theoretical frameworks, I explore the interface between mandated welfare-to-work policies in Canada and the experiences of welfare recipients with preschool children. I show how welfare-to-work policies offered participants the promise of employment, self-sufficiency and social inclusion, set against the backdrop of food and income insecurity, stigma and social isolation of welfare. I demonstrate that for a significant majority of these participants, welfare-to-work did fulfill the promise---for awhile---mostly through increased income provided by student-finance benefits. However, this promise was short-lived, as most welfare recipients did not get the promised jobs, and at the end of the year were not economically or socially better off than before. Furthermore, I show how welfare-to-work impacted the unpaid work at the edges of a workday, what I refer to as the "work outside the work", suggesting that welfare-to-work policies do not adequately address the work/family issues of low-income families. I discuss what these findings reveal about larger social processes, positing that the trend toward active social policies which attempt to move welfare recipients to self-sufficiency will not be successful because these policies fail to adequately acknowledge and address obstacles faced by welfare recipients. I conclude by revisiting the concept of social citizenship and delineating a vision for a caring society.