Commentary. 'Work first': workfare and the regulation of contingent labour markets

The paper presents a critical review of UK and US welfare-to-work strategies, stressing their implications for changing forms of labour regulation. The favoured policy orientation--"work first"--forcefully redistributes the risks and burdens of job-market instability from the state to unemployed individuals, the solution to whose "welfare dependency" is presented in terms of a one-way transition into (low) waged work. At a systemic level, the analysis suggests that a regressive regulatory accommodation may be emerging between mandatory welfare-to-work programming on the one hand and the lowest reaches of deregulated, "flexible" labour markets on the other, as the destabilisation of welfare via work-activation measures creates a forced labour supply for contingent jobs.