Ramping up punitive mechanisms in employment services: Single mothers are the canary in the coalmine

This week Parliament will release their report on the Coronavirus supplements that have been added to selected income support payments, most notably JobSeeker. It is therefore timely to consider the impacts the government’s plan to taper off the supplement until payments are back to pre-COVID levels will have on the thousand who are currently relying on income support. In today’s analysis, Simone Casey (@SimoneCasey) of Per Capita (@PerCapita) shares her research into the impacts of the pre-pandemic ‘activation’ mechanisms on single mothers, which presages the wider impacts to be felt as the supplements disappear and mutual obligation requirements are reintroduced. This analysis is drawn from a recently-published article in AJSI which can be accessed here.

As we revert back to the social security settings we had prior to COVID-19, there is a need to maintain vigilance in our scrutiny on the effects this will have on vulnerable people.

Single mothers have been the target of punitive income support policies for many years now, and serve as a warning for changes coming to the thousands of people currently relying on JobSeeker payments. Photo by Abhishek Tanwar from Pexels

Last week I published an article in Australian Journal of Social Issues called  ‘Job seeker’ experiences of punitive activation. The data was collected in the JSA era of employment services, which I argued was when ‘work first’ was expressed through both the incentives of the employment services contract, as well as in the ‘work first’ and demanding activation requirements.

It has taken a while to get academic publication of these PhD findings, but as I concluded in that article, they remain relevant to the punitive experiences that have been reported in jobactive. Rick Morton pulled out some prize quotes in his article in the Saturday Paper, used in the context of privatisation. But it was the critical scholarship of Mitchell Dean, Catherine McDonald and Greg Marston, whose governmentality perspective explicitly linked privatisation to a punitive shift in public administration, that informed my study.

To illustrate the risks of a return to the pre-COVID social security model, I’ve pulled out some examples from my findings on the impact on single mothers. As COVID restrictions ease, leading to the return of enforced mutual obligations and the accompanying system of sanctions contained in the Targeted Compliance Framework, and while a punitive reduction in JobKeeper looms, these stories provide warnings about what to expect next.

Activation policy impacts in their own words

It is well known that many single mothers are so because they have sought to leave situations of domestic violence.  My research (and that of others) showed that the authoritarian nature of employment services surveillance and threats to financial security reminded the single mothers of the domestic violence they had left. One single mother compared threats of sanction to coercive control.

The treatment by officials reminds me of the abuse I suffered in my marriage. It is impersonal. It is dehumanising and it is about a government's bottom line and unknown agendas and nothing about people’s circumstances or ability to pay.

The single mothers I spoke to experienced housing insecurity due to the poverty caused by being shifted to Newstart – which has been well below the poverty line for many years (N.B., and when the Coronavirus supplements are removed, JobSeeker will also be below the poverty line). For one single mother the combination of job losses and high rent led to homelessness.

I am 50 and in 2012 I left a very bad marriage with our two girls, 15 and nine. I had recently before that lost my job of four years due to the pressure of the relationship. I was on benefits; I lost our rental property as I could no longer afford the rent; trying to find something in the private rental market that was sustainable for me was difficult.

For another mother, a series of unfortunate events led to her and her three children becoming homeless and they lived in her car for a period.

Then things went from bad to worse. I had a serious car accident four years ago; it was really bad. You know, I was in hospital for a long time, with my boys at home. Luckily, I had my parents who have been able to help me out through the worst parts. But by the time I got out of hospital, I hadn’t been working for so long and all the bills had mounted up and I wasn’t able to work … I lost the house, and we ended up homeless, living in a car. They were very dark days.

Financial insecurity compelled one of the single mothers to go back to a family home where she and her children returned to domestic violence.

I cried for weeks and was in a deep depression at the thought of trying to give my girls a better life away from their controlling aggressive father. I’ve ended up having to move BACK IN WITH HIM [her caps].

It is also important to remember that sanctions are experienced as threats to basic material security for people already experiencing poverty. Threats of sanction, whether they materialised as actual sanctions, were experienced as attacks on the basics of survival.

Every time I was threatened with participation failure, either by Centrelink or the job centre, it brought up a very real fear that the decision of one person could change everything in my family. We could be living in a tent surviving on very little and that is not a stable and safe situation for a child to grow up in.

The children suffer too. One mother explained how these experiences left emotional scars on children and how this had affected the relationships with her children.

They all remember how bad it was. You know, it is terrible putting your kids through that stuff, and I feel like it wasn’t my fault how things went, but no one seems to care about the impact these things have on the kids. I feel like there’s going to be a whole generation of kids who’ve been through these things, with their parents not around, you know, they’re in poverty and feel bad because of that, and then they get into trouble.

Some scholars refer to this kind of treatment as structural violence. This structural violence is more than structural discrimination, it is harm that is deliberately inflicted on real people by the neoliberal market-orientated social policy.

For single mothers, and others on unemployment payments, these are the issues social researchers and journalists need to remain vigilant about as COVID restrictions ease, and life returns to post-COVID normal.

Access the full article here: Casey, S. (2020). “Job seeker” experiences of punitive activation in Job Services Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by @SusanMaury