Abstract

From Employment Policy to the Fight Against Poverty:
The New Path for Social Investment States?

Pascale Dufour and Jane Jenson

Since the “Axworthy Social Security Review”, in 1993, the way the Canadian welfare state is dealing with unemployment has radically changed. Beyond retrenchment, which brought in a more stringent unemployment insurance program and lowered the participation rate in many provincial assistance programs, it is the whole philosophy of state intervention regarding unemployment that has changed. Aside from federal discourses emphasing the autonomy of workers, self-education, innovation and life-long learning, we are witnessing a transformation of employment policies towards a very limited range of aims. Long-term training has been replaced by short-term measures, targeting more the movement of people across the boundary between unemployment and work than the development of skills. New in-work benefits supporting low paid jobs help to alleviate workers’ poverty but have no impact on improving employment. Finally, more and more policies are designed to facilitate (or require) women to work, regardless of working conditions. Employment policy has come to be viewed mainly in the context of reducing poverty rates.

Bios

Pascale Dufours, Ph.D., holds an SSHRC post-doctoral scholarship and is a Sessional Lecturer in the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Her current research focuses on the collective actions of the socially and economically marginalized as well as the associated transformations of the Welfare State, in Canada and France. In June 2000 she defended her thesis in the political science department, Université de Montréal, entitled "Citoyenneté et hors-travail : la construction politique d’un nouvel espace social au Québec et en France". She has published several articles, including « L’État post-providence : de nouvelles politiques sociales pour des parents-producteurs» Revue canadienne de science politique, 35, 2, juin 2002, 301-322 and « La vie quotidienne des sans-emploi: des formes communes de résistance, au-delà des frontières », Nouvelles pratiques sociales , vol.15, 1, automne 2002 : 180-194. She is a co-researcher in the SSHRC strategic grant team, Fostering Social Cohesion: A Comparison of New Policy Strategies, headed by Jane Jenson.

Jane Jenson, Ph.D., FRSC, is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Université de Montréal/ McGill University Institute of European Studies. She has been the Director of the Family Network of Canadian Policy Research Networks since June 1999. She is also Editor of Lien social et politiques - RIAC, a franco-Quebec social policy journal. She has been a Visiting Professor at a number of European universities and at Harvard University, where she held the Mackenzie King Chair in Canadian Studies. In 2001 she was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Governance and Citizenship to held at the Université de Montréal. Her research interests and publications cover a wide spectrum of political analysis including social movements, the relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada, citizenship, diversity, gender studies, family policy, child care and elder care. Her work in recent years has focussed on social policy and she currently holds two grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), one for an individual project on Citizenship Regimes and New Social Unions: Learning from Caring and a Strategic Grant for Fostering Social Cohesion: A Comparison of New Policy Strategies. Her most recent book (with Mariette Sineau) is Qui doit garder le jeune enfant? Les représentations du travail des mères dans l'Europe en crise (Paris: LGDJ, 1998). A substantially revised version appeared as Who Cares? Women's Work, Child Care and Welfare State Redesign (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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