Welfare Reform

Write an article on current coalition governments approach to welfare reform Paper must be at least 1500 words. Please, no plagiarized work! The document has invented a category of worklessness to describe the condition of people on benefit. I would like to criticize this notion of worklessness from the Marxist standpoint of the reserve army of the proletariat and unpaid labor. Also, the coalition document argues that there are not enough work incentives in the present system of welfare provisions. However, the kind of work incentives are on offer by the coalition government is immaterial for the people who are already doing unpaid work both within and without the households. Coalition government creates a myth of welfare dependency as if people have an inherent motive to be on welfare than on jobs. Here, my aim is to look at the trajectory of the UK’s welfare system, in brief, to show that the present Coalition government policy has drawn much from the neoliberal ideology of the New Right and New Labour and to offer a Marxist critique of the postulates of the policy.Coalition government document “Universal Credit: welfare that works” is supposed to bring in “fundamental welfare reform” (2010, p.2). According to the neoliberal logic, the welfare cuts improve work incentives by ensuring that individuals keep more of their incomes from work by introducing a smooth and transparent reduction of their benefits. The rationale is to improve work incentives by getting rid of the wrong features of the prevailing system. The reduction of benefits leads to a reduction in interaction with agencies thus smoothing the transition to work. The customers will, therefore, be in a better position to understand their entitlements, making it easy to administer and reducing fraud. The need for fundamental reform is constructed based on two ideological assumptions. namely, the existing welfare policy a) hampers economic growth&nbsp.and b) promotes welfare dependency. In brief, the need for welfare reform arises from the ‘fact’ that communities remain in poverty or getting poorer in spite of the huge spending on welfare provisions. The rationale of the ‘new’ system is to ensure that there are returns from works done and so to encourage people to see that work is the main outlet from poverty.&nbsp. This will improve the people’s livelihoods thus raising the country’s per capita income.&nbsp.