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129 Int'l Lab. Rev. 677 (1990)
The Road to Workfare: Alternative to Welfare or Threat to Occupation

handle is hein.journals/intlr129 and id is 691 raw text is: International Labour Review, Vol. 129, 1990, No. 6 The road to workfare: Alternative to welfare or threat to occupation ? Guy STANDING * 1. Flexible labour markets, marginalisation and the rationale of workfare T he growth in the number of people classified or regarded as poor in affluent industrialised societies was a festering reality of the 1980s. Some attribute it primarily to low levels of aggregate demand, others to the irreversible drift out of the economic mainstream of those unable to adapt to increasingly flexible and fragmented labour markets; some see the social security system as having become dysfunctional in the context of the more flexible labour markets, while others claim that large numbers of workers are unemployable at existing wage levels, or at levels that would provide them with a reasonable lifestyle. Whatever the causes, developments in industrialised countries during the past decade have created a proliferation of groups at the lower, more precarious end of the labour market. Perhaps the most rapidly growing category consists of what can be called flexiworkers, those who are in and out of work, some of them combining several different work statuses or activities, some half way between wage- and self-employment and enjoying neither a steady income nor adequate entitlement to occupational (firm- specific) welfare or social security. Such flexiworkers are vulnerable to marginalisation, in that they can easily slip into chronic poverty, partly because they have no regular employment or other forms of labour security.' However, below them in terms of status, income and lifestyles are those who have been described, rightly or wrongly, as an underclass. 2 Essentially, this consists of those who have supposedly slipped from marginal labour force involvement to outright detachment, estranged from the world of labour force work and from the major networks of social support. They tend *International Labour Office. On the concept of labour security, see Standing (1990). 2 For definitions see, for instance, Wilson (1987), pp. 6-8. Critics seem to mix up the motives of those who use the term with the reality the term attempts to convey, i.e. poverty combined with detachment from regular economic activity. For critiques see Lister (1990) and Macnicol (1987), inter alia. Copyright 0 International Labour Organisation 1990 1377

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