manage and deliver the programs, generally not welfare recipients). In addition, the few jobs that workfare participants do get tend to be either temporary, so the person returns to welfare, or low-paying with minimal benefits, so that people are not moved out of poverty, but merely from the category of "non-working poor" to "working poor". Another issue largely ignored in Canada as well is health and safety conditions affecting workfare participants. For example, in New Brunswick an unusually high accident rate has been reported among welfare recipients who took part in provincial work programs. Given the overall failure of workfare programs to reduce welfare expenditures, reduce poverty, and move people into adequate and permanent jobs, workfare should not even be discussed as a viable social reform option today. Politicians and the business establishment only call for workfare because it helps to protect their privileged positions in our society. Workfare serves to preserve the status quo by: i.) creating the illusion that politicians are actually doing something meaningful about the deficit and welfare. ii.) increasing the reserve pool of available labour, which can be called upon at any time to carry out society's dangerous and menial jobs. iii.) increasing the competition for scarce jobs, which tends to keep wages down and profits up. iv.)reinforcing the attitude that people on welfare are largely responsible for our economic and social ills, that they are lazy, deviants who will not work unless forced to do so. Workfare creates the assumption that unemployment is caused by personal choice or lack of work ethic. However, due to the fact that we have well over one million people in Canada actively looking for work, this is a ridiculous assumption. Fifteen thousand people lined up one day in Oshawa in January to apply for one of a few hundred possible jobs at General Motors. The problem is not one of a lost worth ethic o...
