Second UBINZ Conference, Wellington, 26-28 March 1998

Michael Goldsmith
University of Waikato

When the British labour policy guru Sir William Beveridge compiled his famous report on social services (1942), he helped to establish a framework for what has come to be known as the 'welfare state'. Writing towards the end of the crisis brought on by the Great Depression and World War Two, he implied that there were a number of freedoms that such a state should guarantee, especially freedom from poverty. But, he maintained, "Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness" (Beveridge 1942: 6). What is admirable about this statement is that Beveridge clearly saw the need to defeat these enemies, not piecemeal and separately, but as a formidable coalition of axis powers. Progressive as the policies set in place at that time may have been, however, we must recognise that we now wrestle with a changed line-up of villains and that we need creative moves to deal with both old and new giants. ¹

Universal Basic Income represents the only viable way of the future in this regard. The Beveridge proposals have come in for criticism from proponents of UBI both on the grounds of blindness to socio-cultural diversity and on the grounds that the average worker's life course no longer revolves around a single fulltime career choice spread over several uninterrupted decades (Parker 1989: Chapter 2). By questioning these assumptions, UBI therefore underpins a thorough rethinking of the welfare state that extends principles of welfare in ways that resonate with the situation of most people in advanced capitalist societies today.

On the other side of the spectrum, neoliberal critics of welfare appeal for a return to an idealised 'nightwatchman state', that allows private enterprise to flourish with as little regulation as possible and instils a sense of personal responsibility in its individual citizens. On this model, welfare is reduced to a minimal safety net, surrounded by all sorts of carping provisos and qualifications. Though public opinion polls routinely report that the majority of adult New Zealanders reject such a trend, the New Right has one significant weapon in its ideological armoury: the argument for freedom from excessive interference by the state in individuals' lives and affairs. As a freedom, it has come to rank alongside (or even ahead of) the ones implied by Beveridge, and neo-liberalism has, in many people's minds, more or less successfully linked the welfare state to the abuse or denial of that freedom. In practice, however, it has done so by promising to confine freedom from interference to those who receive well-paid and secure incomes, command a large amount of cultural capital, and/or enjoy good health. By implication, the majority of those who do not possess such advantages must be stigmatised in certain ways; the role of the 'nightwatchman state' increasingly is to watch over its own second-class citizens.

UBI offers a way of appealing to all the goals of freedom---not just those envisaged by the founders of the welfare state but also those touted by its enemies. A good deal has been written on the advantages of UBI in making welfare universal, by freeing up resources currently devoted to surveillance, classification and targeting, by fostering flexibility and creativity in work, employment and everyday life, and so on. The purpose of this paper is more specific: to point out how targeting regimes are inherently opposed to the common good. ² In late twentieth-century New Zealand, such targeting amounts to a kind of 'welfare behaviourism'---a way of controlling the (re)actions of citizens or of bludgeoning them into submission. The post-1990 regime relies on the sheer pace of restructuring, the downsizing and dripfeeding of public services, and the technological advantages of mediated communication between 'service providers' and 'clients', to instil apathy, undermine resistance to the neo-liberal agenda, and breed suspicion of government and interventionist policy-making.

To illustrate my argument, I will now sketch a selection of the experiences that a former DPB recipient whom I recently interviewed endured through the time she was in the clutches of the system. Some of these incidents reflect street-level bureaucratic inefficiency (or indifference) while a few stem from the sheer perversity of high-level policy makers and their political masters or mistresses---but they all highlight the arbitrariness of a highly targeted regime.

The case I am making is greatly enhanced by the fact that, for most of the period concerned, my interviewee either flatted with or co-owned a house with a friend of hers in almost exactly the same situation. The disparities in their treatment, despite their apparent similarity of circumstances, dramatically illustrate the anomalies to which our current welfare system is prone. I would also like to stress that the young woman who agreed to share these anecdotes with me is bright, resilient, motivated and of sober habits (but I shouldn't have to say that). Unlike some people on Domestic Purposes, Sickness or Unemployment Benefits, she has a network of friends and family who have provided constant moral support and financial help when possible (and when she would accept it). As a consequence, she has been able to ride out difficulties that might have crushed someone less determined and less fortunate. I should also point out that her side of the social contract has been met admirably through her rearing of a model future citizen for whom she has made large sacrifices and for whom she would sacrifice everything, if required.

Like many others in her situation, this young woman can reel off a string of stories that would be laughable if they weren't so petty, frustrating and humiliating. Let me turn to some of them:

A number of years ago, my interviewee and her flatmate received a visit from an out-of-town family who stayed for a couple of nights. The visitors had little money themselves. They paid for one evening meal but still the household budget was strained by the extra demand for bread, milk and other staples. Not surprisingly, the hosts ran out of money the day before their DPBs were due to be paid into their accounts. Our heroines were under the impression that they could get an emergency advance from DSW and have it taken off their payments in subsequent weeks. They went to the DSW office and broached the subject. There they were lectured about their fecklessness for not having asked for a larger contribution from their guests (even though making such demands breaches a number of principles of etiquette in almost every social setting I know of). The plot thickens. One of the two was arbitrarily chosen to be the recipient of the grudgingly conceded advance. As a condition of payment, she had to sign a form promising that she would never ask for an advance again. The money amounted to the princely sum of $35.00---$25.00 being designated for food and $10.00 for petrol (which they needed in order to ferry children to school). The food and the petrol both had to be paid for by means of vouchers. The petrol voucher had to nominate their local service station, presumably so that they would not detour via the pub. On the way directly to that garage, however, the car ran out of petrol.

Later, during a brief spring of welfare thaw, the two flatmates were able to take advantage of a concessionary housing loan from the Housing Corporation (now Housing New Zealand). With some difficulty, they jointly bought a run-down house in a country area. This was a perfectly legal arrangement and one that clearly made sense for all parties concerned, including the state. Note that each of these two young women owned a half share in the property and paid an equal mortgage from what was, for most of the time, an equal income. They were aware that owning a house meant that they could no longer receive accommodation benefits and they informed the DSW of their new status--but they continued to receive the extra payments. It was summer and the Department office was shut because of the Christmas and New Year holidays. When the office re-opened, they attempted to resolve the confusion. Eventually, one was sent a letter saying she had been overpaid in error but the other heard nothing. When she rang the office to check, "they swore black and blue" that her payments were correct. Quite logically, then, the first one asked for her case to be reviewed. It was a long process that occupied two stages: first, a simple review of the decision which allowed it to stand, and then a review board meeting. This was not a court case as such but it was a legalistic and stressful encounter where she was allowed to take along a person in support. Sure enough, the one who had been receiving more was told that she had indeed been overpaid; a week letter her flatmate received a letter to the same effect.

Every time the interest rate changed on their mortgage (and be under no illusion that their status entitled them to lower rates than everyone else---quite often the reverse), their DPBs were adjusted unilaterally at source. Usually this led to a period of sustained confusion. Even though they both paid half the mortgage, on several occasions the whole of the adjusted payment was taken off one DPB but not the other, causing endless headaches trying to bring the deductions into balance. But whereas DSW acted swiftly at the behest of the Housing Corporation, the woman whose DPB had been docked virtually had to sign forms in triplicate to get any action. At one stage, she could not get the money she was owed from either DSW or Housing New Zealand. Instead, they informed her that she had to collect it back from her co-owner! More recently, when she moved back into town to devote herself to fulltime education, she was told that she still met the criteria for a small accommodation benefit. The bureaucrats then changed their minds after six months. The end-result? A debt of $1000 to DSW.

Every time, my informant managed to get part-time work to supplement her DPB, she knew she was in for a hard time, even though the regulations supposedly entitled her to earn up to $80.00 per week without affecting her benefit eligibility, and even though she was scrupulous about declaring her extra income. For example, at one stage she studied fulltime and worked twenty hours a week as a school cleaner. In so doing, she gained a net $20.00 above the DPB. Even that amount was only because she was docked tax at the wrong rate; had she been taxed correctly, her net wages would have been lower. When the Inland Revenue Department finally picked up the error and assessed her for the unpaid tax, she found herself with another $1000 tax bill. This was to be paid---you guessed it---by deductions from her DPB. On a later occasion, she did some casual work for $8.00/hour. Though the money was not only small but irregular, her accommodation benefit of $20.00/week was immediately withheld so that her payments could be adjusted at three-monthly intervals. It was then abated at 20 cents for every dollar received in accommodation benefit, which on top of the secondary tax she was paying meant that her effective top marginal tax rate was 50%. Is it any wonder that, every time she saw the advertising campaign claiming that the benefit structure had been relaxed in order to encourage beneficiaries into the workforce, she felt "pissed off"?

Some time after the move to the country, the two friends were told that they could no longer use the nearest DSW office (in a large town where my informant was studying at a tertiary institution) but had to deal with the office in another town some distance away. They managed to get around that problem largely by ignoring it. Not all the consequences of departmental restructuring could be dealt with so easily, however. Recently, DSW decided to "improve" its performance by allocating each client to a specific "customer services officer" (hereafter CSO) who, in theory, would become familiar with his or her file. That each such officer has a caseload of over 300 individuals undermined the point of the exercise, but in these days of relentless efficiency and productivity gains they clearly have no say in the matter. (Not surprisingly, however, large numbers of welfare bureaucrats, being denied a "voice" in their workplace, exercise the option of "exit".) To access one's own CSO means ringing straight through to a personal phone number. Conversely, if your CSO requests an interview or leaves a message asking you to get in touch, you have to contact him or her within a certain period of time or your benefit is put in jeopardy. To find out what needed to be done in connection with one particular and urgent matter last year, my informant spent three days trying to contact her personal CSO, leaving messages on voice mail which brought no response and getting no answer from the main switchboard as well. When she finally managed to get through, her CSO confessed that she had decided not to answer her phone but to let all calls be picked up by her voice mail and to answer those that she could, when she could. Faced with this kind of efficiency gain, claiming one's entitlements clearly calls for a good deal of patience and persistence.

I do not claim that every beneficiary's experience mirrors exactly what I have just described. I am sure, however, that the stories could be multiplied indefinitely because my informant told me that she had undergone, and knew friends who had undergone, other instances of this sort. In the end, this kind of anecdotal evidence is important to the extent that it demonstrates the arbitrary practical workings of a targeted system of social welfare. The examples I have cited are not aberrations of the system but expressions of its innermost logic. My informant does not blame personally most of the welfare officials she came into contact with, but only because she has a philosophical attitude and a sense of humour. She knows, too, that rules are open to interpretation and she has cultural and social capital to draw on in making the system work in her favour. What about the thousands of people who do not?

The use of CSOs is clearly part of a new strategy in line with the welfare reforms that have been carried out or are being proposed in New Zealand and elsewhere. It parallels---and is probably influenced by---some of the workfare and individual responsibility programmes in the United States. It is apparent that much of the impetus for reform---and that which makes it appear a reasonable alternative---comes from the obvious inefficiencies of the current mess. David Stoesz summarises the trends in the United States:

In New Zealand, the case management approach I referred to above has been backed up by a tightening of welfare eligibility criteria. A year ago, Social Welfare Minister Roger Sowry told parliament that axing people's welfare benefits quickly if they failed work tests would "encourage people to take advantage of employment and other opportunities available to them, and help them share in the economic recovery ...". Sowry was speaking to the introduction of the Social Security Amendment Bill which proposed in effect that Social Welfare be allowed to cut people's benefits with five day's notice, instead of nine days (The Jobs Letter No. 59, 5 May 1997). A couple of quotations from a recent issue of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand indicate the degree to which such thinking has entered policy discourse:

What the latter quotation reveals, however, is that 'case management' is simply an attempt to put a human face on a thoroughly impersonal psychological and moral economy of rewards and punishments. David Stoesz has given this new complex of relationships between individual claimants and a more intrusive state apparatus the apt name of 'welfare behaviourism' (Stoesz 1997). The essay in which he outlines the facets of this approach analyses the ideals and achievements of the new styles of welfare in the United States under the neoliberal ascendancy. He also clearly indicates the central paradox of the assault on welfare---that it will not and cannot achieve what it claims to be able to do. Despite its claims to be based on a scientific understanding of human conduct, it turns out to have been motivated largely by a confused mixture of fiscal and moral arguments:

Yet, as Stoesz and other researchers point out, to modify the behaviour of the targeted populations is notoriously difficult. Zimmerman and Gager (1997), for example, come up with some interesting conclusions in a statistical study of teenage birth rates in relation to AFDC payments in the USA. If welfare behaviourism worked, then applying sanctions should have altered reproductive behaviour. Their findings, on the other hand, "do not support assumptions regarding the incentive effects of welfare that underlie rational choice theories in states where teen birth rates are higher. If anything, teen birth rates are higher in states where AFDC payments are lower" (1997: 109). One can only conclude that the ulterior motive (or the latent function) behind such reforms is not genuine improvement of the lives and work prospects of beneficiaries but the reduction of costs at a time of shrinking state and federal budgets (which are in turn usually induced by government policies such as tax cuts).

There is an old joke about New Zealand being a land of sixty million sheep, three million of whom can vote. At least that calumny implied we were all in the same state, roughly speaking. Unfortunately, a growing minority of goats has become discernible against the background of the sheepish majority. These are the scapegoats, that necessary category whom the fervent priests of the New Right argue are to blame for all our economic and social woes. Astonishingly, despite all the apparent gains in citizenship rights over the last century, advanced capitalist societies are still able to mobilise moral panics over the immoral, infectious and 'savage' poor (Kingfisher 1997). The undeserving beneficiary IS the scapegoated subject of our time, a presence that haunts the welfare state.

My recourse to animal metaphors is deliberate. Behaviourism emerged as a science from studies and experiments carried out on a wide range of animal species. The most common mammalian species in behaviourist experiments, however, have been rats. Some years ago, I saw a film (Mon Oncle d'Amérique) by the great French director, Alain Resnais, which used some of these experiments as a symbol of the extremes of human conduct. The rats in the film were subjected to different regimes of electric shocks, some of which led them to attack one another and some which led them to sink into a kind of despairing apathy. The term coined for this latter kind of behaviour is 'learned helplessness' (Seligman and Maier 1967; Peterson, Maier and Seligman 1993). This term seems like a perfect rubric for the situation many beneficiaries find themselves in---poverty traps, dependency traps, unemployment traps, and so on---especially under situations of rapidly changing or inconsistent rules where everything you try to do to escape seems to have no effect.

Ironically, the welfare reforms supposedly designed to bring about an end to dependency are likely to have the opposite effect on masses of people who currently receive benefits. 'Dependency' will not be reduced, it's just that the privileged sections of society won't have to pay for it any longer. Its costs will be---are being---displaced on to families, voluntary organisations, local communities and the recipients of welfare themselves. I believe, however, that the neoliberal ascendancy of the moment can only ever be a Pyrrhic victory, and that the costs of their 'reforms' will come back to haunt them. Out of the mess they make, the UBI alternative can only increase its appeal as the logical, sane and humane solution to the problems of the new millennium.

1. Iris Marion Young (1990) has outlined an influential typology of forms of oppression that more accurately reflects late-twentieth century concerns and circumstances. [back]

2. For a slightly different take on this issue, see Goldsmith (1997) for a critique of targeting as a form of 'rationing'. [back]

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