Ontario Works - works for who? An institutional ethnographic investigation of workfare in Ontario

This thesis is about the Ontario Works program and the problems that it creates in the lives of people on social assistance. The data for this research is based on a total of 17 interviews with people involved with the Ontario Works program in different positions. Six of the people interviewed were or are people receiving social assistance who participated in the program, eight people represented organizations eligible to receive workfare participants, and three people worked in administering the program. Using Dorothy Smith's approach of institutional ethnography I critically analyze the program from the standpoint of social assistance recipients who have participated in this program.;The research participants narrate the ways in which the Ontario Works program creates a number of problems in the everyday lives of people receiving social assistance. These problems emerge because of the institutional ideologies surrounding social assistance recipients and the social practices that make up the Ontario Works program. My analysis highlights how the Ontario Works program comes to serve the needs of the ruling relations of capital at the expense of people living in poverty; how this program serves to enforce work norms through a series of administrative obstacles that make it difficult for people to obtain or stay on social assistance; by using social assistance recipients to provide a lesson to people who work for wages that their fate on social assistance would be worse than in any low paying job; and by pressuring social assistance recipients to work for low wages.;Through my analysis I show that the actual objective of Ontario Works has nothing to do with helping people on social assistance or providing people with "real jobs" as it claims in official discourse. Rather, the program has to do with facilitating an attack on people on social assistance more generally, while providing subsidized and cheap labour for some companies and social agencies. This labour is provided in very precarious and transient forms that are not going to produce any major benefits in the lives of people on social assistance.;The research problematic stems from the disjuncture between how the program is described within the official discourse of state relations and how it is experienced by people on social assistance. Through their accounts, the social assistance recipients have come to describe this workfare program as a modern-day form of slavery, while state relations call it a "practical" form of assistance. I explore how this experience of disjuncture is socially organized.