Mating Welfare and Workfare

Abstract

With the onset of mass unemployment the obligation to work has been intensified by policies of assistance to the poor in France, as in most western European countries such as Britain. Rather than replacing traditional welfare, `workfare' is thus reinstated at its heart: the destitute are given a minimum income in exchange for their goodwill, which they must henceforward manifest by a willingness to work, real or simulated. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a region of central France to dissect how these new processes of `moralization' of the poor unfold at ground level. Reconstructing the strategies used by recipients of the RMI (France's guaranteed minimum income allocation) and by those who control them brings to light the ordinary scenes of social life wherein the obligation to work is reasserted and uncovers the chain of connections between different sites and scenes from the bottom to the top of the new world of public assistance, linking the most dispossessed to the local notables of the political and administrative apparatus.