Dis-integrated policy: welfare-to-work participants' experiences of integrating paid work and unpaid family work

Using a critical feminist theoretical lens, we followed 17 families for one year – as they attempted to make the transition from welfare to work – eliciting narrative accounts of their day-to-day lives. We used an institutional–ethnographic methodology to analyse the data. Our study shows that the juncture at which unpaid caring work and paid employment meet may be more difficult to negotiate for low-income lone-parent families than for coupled, middle-class employed families. Findings reveal that the unpaid work that happened on the edges of a paid work day, what we refer to as ‘the work outside the work’, took considerable time and energy for participants, making it difficult for them to procure and/or sustain employment. This was due to a number of factors including their limited access to economic and non-economic resources, and the complex nature of their lives, including struggles with day-to-day functioning and childcare arrangements. These challenges, combined with the realities of the low-income labour market made it difficult, if not impossible, for most participants to effectively integrate work and family. These findings suggest that the dis-integrated nature of welfare-to-work policies, which overlooks the actualities of low-income parents’ lives, limits families’ ability to become self-sufficient.