Welfare-to-Work Programs Hold a Contradicting Effect on Parents and Their Families' Wellbeing

Social assistance reforms have tried to combat unemployment and poverty by tying welfare benefits to labour. However, welfare-to-work programs offer little gain for parents who have to balance between work and caregiving demands.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Staying Afloat on Social Assistance: Parents’ Strategies of Balancing Employability Expectations and Caregiving Demands

Using a feminist political economy lens, this paper explores the balancing of work and family by parents on social assistance in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. In all three provinces, restructuring of policy has made parents' entitlement to assistance increasingly contingent on their employability efforts (e.g. mandatory job searches, participation in welfare-to-work programs). This entitlement relationship is implicated by simultaneous and contradictory processes embedded in neo-liberal restructuring - gendering and familization - that problematically affect parents' ability to balance their actual or potential employability expectations with family caregiving demands. Drawing on qualitative data from 46 interviews, this paper reveals the strategies that parents then utilize to manage these competing demands so that they can maintain their family's survival- or ";stay afloat"; - while living on social assistance. In terms of thematic areas, these intricately inter-related coping strategies include: learn the system; play the system; social support; pawning. The significance of these findings for feminist challenges of neo-liberalism and for meeting social justice goals (i.e. economic security; equality) is discussed

The Poverty of Unattached Senior Women and the Canadian Retirement Income System: A Matter of Blame or Contradiction?

Structural and financial inadequacy of Canada\u27s retirement income system, especially with respect to income support benefits (i.e. Old Age Security), are often identified as one major reason unattached senior women experience poverty. While it may be compelling to blame low benefit levels and changing eligibility requirements, particularly because \u27crisis\u27 policy discourses have influenced questionable restructuring over time (i.e. the clawback), this paper argues that this is too simplistic of an account of the relationship between these women\u27s poverty and the retirement income system. Other broad social-structural factors are at play in women\u27s lives that have the potential to disentitle their access to income security in old age. Specifically, the mismatch between women\u27s economic situations over the life course and their claims to pension or retirement savings income is presented as an important reason for why many women are still poor despite policy provisions for their retirement

The Transition from "Mother-Carer" to "Mother-Worker"

Ontario’s welfare-to-work policy was not shaped by neoliberal reform alone. It was influenced by ideas on “good” mothering, and imposed these values into policy.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Race and Gender Impacts Women in Poverty

Lone mother families experience poverty as a result of specific factors such as race and gender. These factors disadvantage them in society and calls for further studies to find solutions.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Fleshing Out the Racial Undertones of Poverty for Canadian Women and their Families: Re-envisioning a Critical Integrative Approach

This paper argues for re-envisioning a critical integrative approach to poverty in lone mother families. In order to substantiate our argument, we unpack the concept feminization of poverty by fleshing out its racial undertones. We also show how a gendered and racialized understanding of poverty in lone mother families is neutralized and/or erased in political and policy discourses and media. Résumé Cet article discute la revisualisation d’une approche critique intégrative envers la pauvreté chez les familles de mères seules. Afin de prouver le bien-fondé notre point, nous développons le concept de féminisation de la pauvreté en soulevant ses nuances tons raciaux. Nous montrons aussi comment une compréhension de la pauvreté des familles de mères seules racialisée et basée sur la différences entre les sexes est neutralisée ou effacée dans les discours de politiques et de lois et dans les médias

Welfare-to-Work Makes Lone Mothers More Vulnerable to Social and Economic Insecurity

Welfare-to-work policies have exposed lone mothers to greater social and economic insecurity. Thus, they are turned into greater “risks” rather than managers of risk.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Feminist Reflections on the Relation of Emotions to Ethics: A Case Study of Two Awkward Interviewing Moments

In Canada, social scientists are accountable to ethical guidelines, including the minimization of harm. Simultaneously, they are accountable to an academic community. But what of those moments in the researcher-participant relationship when these principles clash? They have at times done so resoundingly in our careers as qualitative interviewers, especially when we sought to ensure that information we implicitly understood and perceived as crucial would be duly stated by participants for the research record. Such attempts gave rise to deeply awkward interactions rife with emotions that even risked the premature termination of the interviews. In this article, we use methods from a feminist paradigm, and specifically standpoint and discursive positioning theory, to reflexively analyze the ethics in practice surrounding two of our own cases of awkward moments. Our analysis illustrates how the emotions of awkward moments can be symptomatic of everyday ethical conundrums. We particularly consider whether and how our engagement in reflexivity from these two vantage points can mitigate any real or imagined harm. We indicate how the understanding we develop from our analysis can lead to proactive recommendations for researchers to engage with their emotions and conduct themselves more ethically, both in the field and in analyses

Health Disparities as We Age: A Life Course Comparison of Canadian Early Boomers with Pre-Boomers

Despite a large and growing research literature documenting health disparities by socio-economic status (SES) and income inequalities, research on how these relationships play out moving from mid to later life is meager. Even less is known about how the early Baby Boom cohort compares with the Pre-Boomer cohort as they age in a period of accelerating inequalities, where the wealthy are becoming wealthier and the incomes of those in the middle and at the bottom are stagnating. In this paper, we follow individuals in two cohorts, those born 1947-1951 and those born 1932-36 over the period covering eight cycles of the National Population Health Survey in Canada from 1994/95 to 2008/09 with longitudinal data. The Early Boomer cohort is age 43- 47 in the first period, and 59-64 in 2008/09; the Pre-Boomer cohort is 58-62 in period 1 and 74-79 by 2008/09. We focus on the differences between the two cohorts in terms of self-reported health in a period characterized by dramatic welfare state restructuring, socio-demographic and family shifts, and global economic change. We ask whether health disparities are widening by SES, whether growing income inequalities matter to health in moving from mid to later life, and what implications there might be for Canada’s aging population in future. Our findings reveal that socio-economic factors matter as determinants of health for both cohorts but more so for the Early Boomers than for the Pre-Boomers. Growing income inequalities may have serious and direct negative implications for cohorts transitioning in future from mid to later life

Myth or Reality? Exploring Intergenerational Social Assistance Participation in Ontario, Canada

Is there an intergenerational causal link in social assistance (SA) participation? There is a dearth of research addressing this question, yet the discourse of ‘welfare dependency’ is hegemonic. The limited research that does attempt to tease out a causal link in intergenerational SA participation remains equivocal. Qualitative research is largely absent in welfare scholarship; research that might provide a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics underlying SA receipt. We employ an inductive qualitative analysis, using procedures from grounded theory, to understand SA participants’ experiences and perspectives on intergenerational SA usage. We find that the two causal mechanisms underlying intergenerational SA usage, the learning effect and conformity effect, require further investigation. The theoretical foundations fundamental in explaining a causal intergenerational link are shaken by our grounded theory approach