Women's Views on News |
| Questioning benefit sanctions – again Posted: 01 Apr 2015 10:07 AM PDT
A full independent review should be established in the new Parliament, to investigate whether benefit sanctions are being applied appropriately, fairly and proportionately, across the Jobcentre Plus (JCP) network, the Work and Pensions Committee said in a report published recently. The Committee reiterates this recommendation, which was originally made in January 2014 but rejected by the Government, in the light of new evidence which raises concerns about the approach being adopted in a number of individual Jobcentres, and more broadly, including concerns about whether targets for sanctions exist. The report calls for the independent review to also examine the legislative framework for benefit sanctions policy, to ensure that the basis for sanctioning is well-defined, and that safeguards to protect the vulnerable are clearly set out. Dame Anne Begg MP, chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, said: "Benefit sanctions are controversial because they withhold subsistence-level benefits from people who may have little or no other income. "We agree that benefit conditionality is necessary but it is essential that policy is based on clear evidence of what works in terms of encouraging people to take up the support which is available to help them get back into work. "The policy must then be applied fairly and proportionately. "The system must also be capable of identifying and protecting vulnerable people, including those with mental health problems and learning disabilities. "And it should avoid causing severe financial hardship. "The system as currently applied does not always achieve this." A system of discretionary hardship payments exists to mitigate the risk of sanctions causing severe financial hardship. However, the report concludes that changes are required to the system, to ensure that it is more effective in achieving this. In particular, the report emphasises widespread concern that standard JSA (Jobseeker’s Allowance) hardship payments are not available until the 15th day of a sanction period. "Recent research suggests that benefit sanctions are contributing to food poverty," Dame Anne Begg said. "No claimant should have their benefit payment reduced to zero where they are at risk of severe financial hardship, to the extent of not being able to feed themselves or their families, or pay their rent. "DWP's (Department for Work and Pensions) discretionary hardship payment system is intended to prevent this happening, but it does not always do so. "This is often because JSA hardship payments are not available until the 15th day of a sanction period. "It is not reasonable to expect people to live without any source of income for 2 weeks. DWP should make all hardship payments available from day one of a sanction period," she continued. "Problems also arise because the claimant is not aware of the application process for a hardship payment or because they are put off applying because of the difficulty in understanding and navigating the system. "This needs to change. DWP should not wait for the claimant to apply for a hardship payment. "It should initiate the process itself, and then coordinate the decision on hardship payments with decision-making on the sanction itself, particularly where the claimant has dependent children or is vulnerable." The report notes that DWP currently investigates all deaths of benefit claimants “where suicide is associated with DWP activity”, and in other cases where the death of a vulnerable benefit claimant is brought to its attention, through a system of internal “peer reviews”. Since February 2012, DWP has carried out 49 peer reviews following the death of a benefit claimant. DWP has stated that 33 of the 49 cases have resulted in recommendations for change at either local or national level. However, it was unable to confirm in how many cases the claimant was subject to a benefit sanction, or provide any details about how its policies or procedures had been altered in response to the death of a claimant. "We have asked DWP to confirm the number of internal peer reviews in which the claimant was subject to a benefit sanction at the time of death, and the result of these reviews in terms of changes to DWP policy," Dame Anne Begg said. "It is important that all agencies involved in the provision of public services are scrutinised, to ensure that lessons are learned after members of the public are let down by the system, particularly where the failures of a public body may have contributed to a death. "We believe that a new independent body should be established to fulfil this role." The Committee finds that more “active” regimes, in which unemployed claimants are required to do more to find work, have been shown to be relatively effective; however, evidence on the specific part by played by financial sanctions within successful active regimes is limited and far from clear-cut. The report calls for a series of evaluations to increase the evidence base, particularly around the efficacy and impacts of the new sanctions regime introduced by the Welfare Reform Act 2012. Dame Anne Begg said: "The Government introduced longer minimum sanction periods without first testing their likely impacts on claimants. "The minimum sanction period is now four weeks, rather than one week. It is important that the impacts of the new sanctions regime are properly evaluated. "There is currently no evidence on whether the application, or deterrent threat, of a four-week sanction makes it more, or less, likely that a claimant will engage with employment support or gain work. "This is an area of policy which must be based on robust evidence. "The Department needs to demonstrate that the application of the new sanctions regime is not intended to be purely punitive." The Oakley Review of Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) sanctions in relation to Back to Work Schemes, published in July 2014, made a number of recommendations aimed at improving some aspects of the sanctions system. This has already led to welcome changes, including improvements to DWP's information to claimants about the sanctioning process, and the clarity of its claimant letters. However, a number of the Oakley recommendations are yet to be fully implemented, in part due to the requirement for legislative change and/or contractual negotiations with Work Programme providers. The Committee believes that DWP should take more urgent steps to fully implement the outstanding recommendations. Dame Anne Begg said the DWP must take a more common-sense approach to mandatory Work Programme activity and sanction referrals. "For example, it makes no sense, and is a considerable waste of administrative resources, for Work Programme providers to have to refer a claimant back to DWP for a sanction decision, even where they know that the claimant had a perfectly good reason for not meeting a particular requirement," she continued. "In the negotiations to re-let the Work Programme contracts in 2017, DWP should prioritise the development of a more flexible approach to the setting of mandatory conditions. "There is also widespread support for pre-sanction written warnings and non-financial sanctions. The Department should get on with piloting this approach. "If it requires legislation, the Department should bring it forward as soon as possible in the new Parliament." The report makes a number of further recommendations, including that DWP should: Not proceed with in-work sanctions beyond the existing pilot areas until robust evidence is available from the pilots to demonstrate that in-work conditionality can be effectively applied. [paragraph 56]; Establish a small-scale pilot to test the efficacy of a more targeted approach to sanctions based on segmentation of claimants by their attitudes and motivations; Develop new and more effective systems to monitor the destinations of claimants leaving benefit in general and, in particular, those leaving benefit following a sanction; Expedite the evaluation of the Claimant Commitment, including a review of the appropriate use of Jobseeker Directions; Develop guidance which is specifically intended to assist JCP staff to identify vulnerable claimants and tailor conditionality according to the claimant's individual circumstances; Improve JCP staff training on the statutory single parent flexibilities designed to protect single parent JSA claimants from inappropriate benefit conditionality; and produce a simple, plain English guide to the flexibilities for all single parent claimants; and Review Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) sanctioning within the Work Programme, and continue to develop alternative approaches to employment support for this group, including voluntary models, such as Individual Placement with Support, for some groups. The MPs' call that an "independent review of benefit sanctions is urgently needed" seems almost polite for what is going on here, Frances Ryan wrote in the Guardian in response to this report. People are literally starving and their crime is that they dare to be poor and unemployed, she continued. Stopping the money people need in order to eat is not the purpose of government. The benefit sanctions regime should be scrapped, and the culture that created them needs shredding to pieces.  |
| Marxist critique and socialist feminism Posted: 01 Apr 2015 09:39 AM PDT
By Cynthia Cockburn. Since the 1970s, a sizeable fraction of the feminist movement has striven to bring together in one coherent body of thought the Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation and our home-grown feminist critique of male power ‘Socialist feminism’. Propelling this analysis into activism, has seen ups and downs in the ensuing forty years, a wavy graph line that parallels the fluctuating fortunes of trade unionism, left parties and anti-capitalist movements. An international three-day conference on Marxist-Feminism took place in Berlin last weekend, designed to boost the upward slant of that hesitant graph line. Enabled by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which hosted the event in its spacious premises in formerly Communist east Berlin, the event drew together contributors from across Europe but also from far afield – India, Australia, Turkey, Latin America, the USA, Canada and elsewhere. The invited speakers, many of whom knew each other as hardy survivors from an earlier phase of the women’s movement, were astonished to find themselves now in a crowd of five hundred participants, mainly young and mainly resident in Germany, seemingly attracted by a potential renewal of left feminism. What’s more, as the conference progressed, many of this audience joined energetically in the debate and seemed hungry for a productive outcome, for ideas that could energize and guide a movement of deep social change. The conference saw the launch of two new books. One was Der im Gehen erkundete Weg: Marxismus-Feminismus (Making the Road as We Walk It: Marxism-Feminism) by Frigga Haug, who has also devoted many years to editing a multi-volume dictionary of Marxist-Feminist concepts, the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Feminismus, similarly published by the Institute for Critical Theory, Berlin. The second publication launched at the conference was a collection of essays on Marxist ‘key words’ as reworked and used today by feminists. Titled simply Marxism and Feminism and published by Zed Books, London, it was edited by Shahrzad Mojab of the University of Toronto, Frigga Haug’s principal partner in conceptualizing the conference. Many of the presentations at the conference, like the chapters in these books, dwelt on production, on work and labour power. Frigga Haug, in opening the conference, foreshadowed this economic focus. ‘For theoretical consistency’, she said, Marxism-feminism ‘must think of gender relations as relations of production’. This follows necessarily, she believes, from the perception that a dominant class (be it the owners of the means of production, or men in relation to women) has ‘the ability to dispose of others’ labour power’. In this spirit some of the conference papers dealt with the experience of female workers – for instance in Spain in present conditions of austerity, and in Latin America and India under the contemporary onslaught of neo-liberal global capitalism. Two speakers stressed the self-interest with which bureaucracies and businesses today welcome into prominent jobs a certain category of aspiring women, products of liberal feminism. Hester Eisenstein, whose recent book Feminism Seduced explores the way global elites use women’s liberation to their own advantage, was one of them. The difference between foundational Marxism and feminist Marxism however is that the latter, as Frigga went on to say, understands the relations of production as including not only the production of the means of life (in farms, fisheries, factories) but also the production of life itself (in human pregnancy, birthing, caring, and in nature). In this vein, many of the conference presentations dealt with health services and the ‘care sector’. The natural world was discussed, in relation to women and to the labour movement, and its manipulation and devastation by corporate interests. Sadly, Lena Gunnarsson had to cancel her attendance at the conference. I imagine that she would have treated us to some of the electrifying uses of Marxist concepts she and Anna Jonasdottir have proposed, extending what is understood as ‘the production of life itself’ beyond conception, pregnancy and parturition, to include emotional life, feelings. They urge us to understand ‘love’ – bonding, desire, ecstasy – as a material practice occupying the position in feminist theory that ‘work’ occupies in Marxist theory. Just as the capitalist grows rich on the surplus value generated by the worker’s alienated labour, men grow strong by appropriating more of women’s loving and caring than they give back to women. Not everyone in the hall was happy with the scope of the thinking presented from the platform. There were complaints from some that, notwithstanding a contribution by Tucker Farley on lesbian movements, the tone of the conference was overwhelmingly heteronormative, with LGBTQ issues sidelined. And one or two participants, I’m told, walked out of the hall, angered that racialization, racism and racial domination were neglected by the speakers. This was a little unfair, however, for the issue of identity politics versus intersectionality featured in several presentations and was hotly debated. Had they stayed around for the closing lecture they would have heard a compelling tale of subaltern groups from Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, drawing on her intense engagement with deeply subordinated village communities in caste-ridden, class-divided and post-colonial India. It’s often remarked that, when feminists try to bring Marxist and feminist theory into a single frame, patriarchy tends to shrink into a mere adjective glossing the principal system: ‘patriarchal capitalism’. Perhaps because we feminists have contributed a wealth of analysis of women’s work, mainstream Marxist economics has deepened its understanding of the mode of production by paying more attention to the way capitalists benefit from the sexual division of labour in society and employment. But the left has been less ready to hear us when we say that men as men, too, have always had an interest in the sexual division of labour, strenuously resisting employers’ attempts to substitute cheap females for skilled craftsmen, while profiting from women’s unpaid work in the home. Perhaps it’s because men are disinclined to acknowledge that they share an interest with the ruling class in this. Engaging with men in Marxist and socialist milieux we have sometimes been less than assertive in stating (and they have been disinclined to grasp) that there’s more than one kind of ruling, one kind of ruling group and one kind of ruled. There is more than one axis of power. Patriarchal power, exerted in myriad ways that cannot be reduced to the economic, is still somehow elusive in the Marxist context, alluded to but seldom brought to view and challenged. The under-stressing of male supremacy was evident, I felt, even during these intense three days in Berlin. The word ‘capitalism’ was mentioned perhaps twenty times for every mention of ‘patriarchy’, and the word ‘women’, at a guess, fifty times for any voicing of the word ‘men’. This could have been due in part to the fact that militarism, war and violence barely surfaced in our discussions. Gender power as we know and suffer it – call it patriarchy, fratriarchy, phallocracy, male supremacy or what you will – is more easily perceived, and its workings understood, if we bring to view what Charles Tilly called ‘the means and forces of coercion’, the wealth that states or aspirant rulers exact by tribute or taxation to pay for external war and internal repression, and the men and weapons those resources buy. Marxist theory now has the conceptual tools, thanks to Tilly, to address the relationship between the means and forces of production and those of coercion. Our task as Marxist feminists is to clarify the part that gender plays in ‘the continuum of violence’, the relationship of socially-constituted masculinity to the structural violence of capitalism and the physical violence of militarism, to say nothing of the overwhelming preponderance of men in the incidence of violent crime. Male-on-male violence tells us much about the masculine (racialized and class) hierarchies of patriarchy; male-on-female violence, especially sexualized violence, tells us yet more about the systemic subordination of women. I touched on this in my own paper, and Erica Burman made mention of the gross incidence of sexual abuse and violence that has been coming to light in British society, in which even the left is not innocent. Quite a few men were present in the audience at the Berlin conference, and it would have been productive, I feel, had they shared thoughts with us from their own positionality, about the persistence of patriarchy into the modern era, its renewal in religious structures and dogma, its empowerment in ever more costly weapons systems, and the way class power, racializing power and gender power are enlaced in the institutions of our everyday lives – in factories, banks, science labs, schools, churches, families. Marxist men engaging constructively with Marxist feminism in facing up to and refusing male dominance ‘in the institutions’ (including trade unions and left parties) would help put gender transformation – the profound re-shaping of masculinities and femininities from an early age by conscious policy and deliberate practice – onto the anti-capitalist revolutionary agenda. It would greatly strengthen the likelihood of a forward moving, mixed-gender, socialist feminist activism. For this is what last week’s Marxist feminist revival in Berlin is ultimately about. Watch out for the sequel, promised by Swedish feminists, for 2016. A version of this article appeared in openDemocracy on 27 March 2015. Cynthia Cockburn, feminist researcher and writer, is associated as honorary professor with the Department of Sociology, City University London, and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, Warwick University.  |
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