From Welfare to Work

Tony Blair has committed his government to tackling the growing underclass of long-term unemployed. Of all the programmes under discussion, none is generating more interest than 'welfare-to-work'. In this collection of essays Professor Lawrence Mead of New York University, one of America's foremost experts on 'workfare', summarises his extensive research. He starts from the position that the main cause of poverty is non-work: poor people are either unemployed or only spasmodically employed. Furthermore, Mead shows that the widely-accepted explanations for this non-work - lack of childcare, poor jobskills, the decline of heavy industry - are only partially convincing. The main reason for non-work is that poor people have sunk into a culture of poverty: they have stopped even expecting to work. Editor Alan Deacon has assembled a group of experts to respond to Mead's proposals from a British perspective, including Frank Field MP, the Minister for Welfare Reform.