Motivation, morals and justice: discourses of worklessness in the welfare reform green paper

New Labour’s recent green paper on welfare reform No one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility – outlines new plans for tackling worklessness. The proposals centre on extending conditional forms of welfare that mandate participation in work-related activities to cover most of the workless population. This article considers the way in which discourses of workless are deployed in the green paper to make the case for reform. It asserts that the proposals are underpinned by three central claims regarding the individual causes of worklessness (‘motivation’), the responsibilities of citizens to seek work (‘morals’) and the social benefits of working (‘justice’). These claims are used to legitimise plans for accelerating the roll-out of supply-side welfare-to-work programmes that seek to improve the employability of the workless. This article contends, however, that these claims are undermined by competing arguments that worklessness is as much a function of labour demand in terms of a lack of suitable jobs. It identifies the need to ground welfare reform in a sober assessment of labour market conditions if it is to provide more equitable forms of assistance to ensure ‘no-one [is] written off’. The paper concludes by suggesting that the failure of policymakers to acknowledge these arguments can be attributed to the role these discourses play in validating conditional forms of welfare that enforce the takeup of unattractive work.