Buying and Selling the Poor: Inside Australia's privatised welfare-to-work marke

The Nile on eBay   Buying and Selling the Poor by Siobhan O'Sullivan, Michael McGann, Mark Considine

Buying and Selling the Poor ventures behind the scenes of the multibillion-dollar welfare-to-work system, offering new insights into how Australia responds to unemployment and disadvantage. As the authors tell the story of four local employment offices, they paint a vivid picture of a critically important social service which many people are aware of but which few properly understand. They also reveal the wider impacts that processes of marketisation and welfare reform have had on these frontline services over decades, and how the work of frontline staff and service providers has been transformed.Buying and Selling the Poor looks closely at how these services operate, why some succeed where others fail, and what can be learned from the stories of local staff and clients who have navigated the system. Three decades into this market experiment, how well are we doing in supporting our most vulnerable citizens to get back to work?'Buying and Selling the Poor takes a rigorous but accessible look inside the 'black box' of our privatised jobseeker market, and at the commodification of the people within it. The authors, academics in the fields of politics, public policy and social science, combine their 20 years of survey data with immersive fieldwork...This revealing, often heart-wrenching work will prove enlightening for not only those within the policy field, but also anyone with an interest in or experience dealing with a system that often feels like a race to the bottom.' - Kim Thomson, Books+Publishing

FORMATPaperback CONDITIONBrand New Author Biography

Siobhan O'Sullivan is a public policy scholar based at UNSW in Sydney. She has studied welfare-to-work in Australia, the UK and elsewhere, over many years.Michael McGann is Research Fellow in the Social Sciences Institute at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He specialises in the sociology of unemployment and the governance of activation, with a particular focus on the marketisation of public employment services.Mark Considine is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Melbourne.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsPreface: On History, Poverty, and the Continuous Quest for ReformIntroduction1. The Politics of Managing the Poor2. Thinking Inside the Box3. Wilmore, the Heart of Australian Suburbia4. 'Welcome' to Westgate5. 'Downtown' Crompton6. The Casual CoveConclusion: Success and the Significance of DifferenceGlossary of Key TermsWorks CitedIndex

Review

When Paul Keating put elements of Australia's 'welfare to work' system out to tender in the mid-1990s, he could scarcely have imagined the system we have in place today: one dominated by short-term contracts, employee churn, and for-profit and multinational corporations. *Buying and Selling the Poor* takes a rigorous but accessible look inside the 'black box' of our privatised jobseeker market, and at the commodification of the people within it. The authors, academics in the fields of politics, public policy and social science, combine their 20 years of survey data with immersive fieldwork. They were granted remarkable on-the-ground access to four 'best performing' job provider offices across Victoria and New South Wales over 18 months, hoping to discover best practices for helping the most disadvantaged people in the system. The resulting book takes us into the world of the sector's case managers, who are beset by onerous targets, star ratings and caseloads of 150 or so clients at a time. We meet a cast of anonymised characters with varying approaches, from the hard-line Katsy at a metropolitan site to mission-driven Andrew in regional New South Wales. What's uncovered is a disjointed, inconsistent system obsessed with outcomes that it repeatedly fails to deliver. This revealing, often heart-wrenching work will prove enlightening for not only those within the policy field, but also anyone with an interest in or experience dealing with a system that often feels like a race to the bottom. *Kim Thomson is a freelance writer.*

Long Description

Buying and Selling the Poor ventures behind the scenes of the multibillion-dollar welfare-to-work system, offering new insights into how Australia responds to unemployment and disadvantage. As the authors tell the story of four local employment offices, they paint a vivid picture of a critically important social service which many people are aware of but which few properly understand. They also reveal the wider impacts that processes of marketisation and welfare reform have had on these frontline services over decades, and how the work of frontline staff and service providers has been transformed. Buying and Selling the Poor looks closely at how these services operate, why some succeed where others fail, and what can be learned from the stories of local staff and clients who have navigated the system. Three decades into this market experiment, how well are we doing in supporting our most vulnerable citizens to get back to work? 'Buying and Selling the Poor takes a rigorous but accessible look inside the 'black box' of our privatised jobseeker market, and at the commodification of the people within it. The authors, academics in the fields of politics, public policy and social science, combine their 20 years of survey data with immersive fieldwork...This revealing, often heart-wrenching work will prove enlightening for not only those within the policy field, but also anyone with an interest in or experience dealing with a system that often feels like a race to the bottom.' -- Kim Thomson, Books+Publishing

Review Quote

"This revealing, often heart-wrenching work will prove enlightening for not only those within the policy field, but also anyone with an interest in or experience dealing with a system that often feels like a race to the bottom." -- Kim Thomson -- Books + Publishing

Details ISBN1743327862 Author Mark Considine Publisher Sydney University Press Format Paperback Year 2021 ISBN-13 9781743327869 Publication Date 2021-12-01 Imprint Sydney University Press Country of Publication Australia NZ Release Date 2021-12-01 Series Public and Social Policy Series Place of Publication Sydney ISBN-10 1743327862 UK Release Date 2021-12-01 Audience General Pages 284 Subtitle Inside Australia's privatised welfare-to-work market Illustrations Illustrations AU Release Date 2021-11-30 We've got this

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