Everyday Resistance to Workfare: Welfare Beneficiary Advocacy in Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract

Beneficiary advocacy organisations, which provide advice to individual claimants about how best to navigate the welfare system, exist in the context of complex and opaque benefit-claiming processes that have resulted from workfare policies. Drawing on a case study of Auckland Action Against Poverty, an organisation specialising in poverty activism and services for welfare beneficiaries, this article examines the provision of beneficiary advocacy services as a form of everyday resistance to workfare policies. Everyday resistance is less overtly political, less confrontational, and more ordinary than spectacular acts of resistance such as protests, but one that should not be seen as accommodating workfare policies and the market-based reform projects to which they are connected. By supporting individuals to defiantly persevere with their benefit claims, beneficiary advocates help to actively resist the operational logic of dissuasion that defines contemporary workfare.