Rethinking Recovery III: The gendered impact of Universal Credit

Ruth Cain - Senior Lecturer in the Kent Law School at the University of Kent

The gendered impact of UC is clear: because women comprise the highest proportion of both low-paid and part time workers, women and less well-off couples with children (who may earn under the conditionality threshold if one partner is not working full-time and the other is low-paid) will be among the first in line to feel the smack of the new welfare governance.  They will face a ‘perfect storm’ of high childcare costs and ‘in-work conditionality’, with lower flexibility for single parents’ structural barriers to work.  The new work and ‘evidencing’ requirements will integrate women coercively into the low-paid labour market and heighten their dependence on precarious work, while doing nothing to address the gendered pay gap or women’s disproportionate concentration in precarious labour (which underlies their lack of income).

Further, UC creates new challenges for parents.  It has particularly dire consequences for single mothers, who must now seek work as soon as their youngest child reaches five, although this can be organised around school hours.  Under the Universal Credit Regulations 2013, single parents with children over one-year-old must attend ‘work-focused interviews’ on pain of sanction and will be expected to obtain full-time work with a maximum commuting time of 90 minutes when their child is 13.  Under previous regulations, ‘lone parent flexibilities’ allowed a limited latitude to single parents to turn down jobs which clashed with their childcare responsibilities, but this has now been relegated to ‘guidance’ applicable at the discretion of the JobCentrePlus ‘work coach’ – who has the power, it will be recalled, to sanction claimants if s/he considers that their commitments have not been met.

The structural barriers to single-parent work (and particularly flexible work) as required by the UC are brutally clear.  While an affluent family may be able to hire a nanny or house an au pair to provide childcare while both parents are in full-time work, this is not an option available to the low-paid.  In the absence of affordable childcare, it may make financial sense for a parent to work part-time to accommodate childcare responsibilities.  But, under UC, women with children over 13 could face sanctioning for failure to take up a job opportunity with long or ‘flexible’ hours and a 90-minute commute each way, with diminishing concern for its effects on childcare obligations, particularly where children are over 13.

The Government has largely ignored these gendered consequences, and has avoided mention of single motherhood, in favour of more positive-sounding issues such as family stability. Policymakers are actually sending highly contradictory political messages through this new system.   Ringing indictments of worklessness and ‘intergenerational poverty’ have attained a new vigour in the post-austerity era, as blame for the crisis has been very effectively diverted away from global market failure and the flaws of the financial industry to the poorest members of society.  This is reflected in UC, as the opprobrium historically targeted at ‘bad mothers’ (usually working-class and single) as embodiments of national decline is now being expanded potentially to include even those ‘hardworking families’ beloved of cross-party rhetoric if they can be shown to be earning ‘too little’.

At the same time as women and families are being morally indicted for their inability to create ‘stable’ families in the face of austerity, they are being asked to pull themselves out of poverty through low-paid work and zero-hour contracts.  The reality is that a system making working claimants responsible for ‘earning enough’ fails to acknowledge both that average UK wages have stagnated (particularly since the onset of austerity in 2008), leading to a significant drop in real income, and that the flexible mobile workforce envisaged by UC and the global market is not conducive to extended-family-care arrangements, even if family care were available for free.

This creep of punitive neoliberal logics into the day-to-day lives of working-poor families should be a matter of grave concern to everyone.  In a country where mothers, in particular, are not only blamed for having too many children, but also for failing to spend sufficient time and energy rearing and disciplining them, the inherent cruelty of the UK welfare reform is exposed for all to see.