Dear Friends
I snip:
>
>But people still seemed to love the notion of it.
>
Perhaps since so many hate their own work and wish the curse on others?
Might we discuss this?
j
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BTW Victor - i recieved your e-message in an odd format, as a sort-of
picture that I couldn't highlight from ??
Thanks, tho' for sending it !
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>From: "Victor Milne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "futurework" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: workfare
>Date: Sun, Sep 26, 1999, 1:50 pm
>
>
>
>One fact can't be ignored: Workfare's a failure
>
> ``Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.''
> - The Education of Henry Adams
> by Henry Brooks Adams, 1907
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>
>
>
>
> ABOUT A YEAR before the last Ontario election, communications aides in the
>Harris government attended a weekend seminar to identify their core
>constituency and to fine-tune their messaging.
>
>At it, they were told that far and away the single most popular government
>initiative to that point had been workfare. And when you think of it,
>that's astonishing.
>
>How many among us have ever actually witnessed a workfare crew or project
>in action? How many of us have seen or experienced the results of such
>labours? Probably very few.
>
>But people still seemed to love the notion of it.
>
>By then, the Conservative government was absolutely certain of what a
>backroomer told me it had learned during the 1995 campaign that brought it
>to office - that playing the welfare card was like shooting fish in a
>barrel, that the Premier simply couldn't be tough enough on
>social-assistance recipients to suit his supporters.
>
>How intriguing then to hear news yesterday that the government is now in
>receipt of a consultant's report that says Ontario's highly popular, but
>faltering, workfare program requires substantial spending (most especially
>on child care) if it's to produce real, as well as political, success.
>
>>From the outset, the facts made this plain. But the facts were, in the
>words of Henry Adams, conveniently ignored. For as Michael Kinsley wrote in
>The New Yorker a week before Mike Harris was first elected, ``the passion
>behind Draconian welfare reform exceeds any rational assessment of what it
>is likely to achieve.''
>
>There could be only three purposes for workfare. One, to cut costs; two, to
>create work for those needing it; three, to capitalize on its puritanical
>appeal by punishing welfare recipients and appeasing angry taxpayers.
>
>>From the start, we knew workfare was bad economics. The cheapest way to
>provide social assistance is by mailing a cheque. A serious work
>requirement - one that wasn't just, as Kinsley put it, ``a euphemism for
>cutting people off'' - would cost more, not less, than existing systems,
>chiefly in child care and administration.
>
>We know that workfare has largely failed at creating work. We can safely
>conclude this because the government has been able to trot out only
>anecdotal evidence of success, the odd personal testimonial by individual
>clients and no statistics that support more extensive claims.
>
>We know this as well because of the Premier's pleadings lately for
>municipalities to help with his workfare program and his recent desperate
>threats to turn social-assistance recipients into farmhands.
>
>What he's apparently discovered is what most other jurisdictions who've
>tried workfare found earlier: that it is riddled with inefficiencies and
>contradictions, that at best it might lift people out of welfare but not
>poverty, and most particularly that, done right, it costs.
>
>For all that, there's no denying that workfare succeeded on the third
>score, the punitive aspect. Otherwise, how is it that a program so largely
>invisible and inconsequential to the general public, so obviously
>disappointing in results to its most ardent proponents, could remain so
>exceedingly popular?
>
>As old Henry Adams also said, ``knowledge of human nature is the beginning
>and end of political education.'' And beyond doubt the Harris government
>understood something of human nature.
>
>What it played to with workfare is what the New York Times Magazine last
>year called ``the new American consensus'' - ``government of, by and for
>the comfortable.''
>
>In other words, it didn't much matter that the program didn't work - only
>that it produced benefits to the comfortable and/or made them feel better.
>
>In this, though, it might be prudent to again consult Adams, who said that
>``simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.''
>
>The simplicity of workfare, as retailed by the Harris government, was a
>deceit. This latest report will merely add to the body of evidence that
>it's a complicated and costly business.
>
>It will be interesting to see if the government is serious enough about
>making workfare work to spend the money required. But I think we already
>know the answer to that.
>
>For to invest would mean relinquishing one of two irreconcilable claims
>made about workfare - that it at one and the same time saves money and
>actually helps people by providing ``a hand up.''
>
>And, more than anything, this government knows its constituency.
>
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Jim Coyle's column usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
>
