PERFORMING WORKFARE AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE SO-CALLED ONE-EURO-JOBS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Timothy Haupt August 2012 © 2012 Timothy Haupt PERFORMING WORKFARE AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE SO-CALLED ONE-EURO-JOBS Timothy Haupt, Ph. D. Cornell University 2012 Anthropological considerations of welfare reform, in their most compelling moments, mobilize ethnographic evidence to undermine the hegemony of a neoliberal project, which orients the logic of public services toward the market if it doesn’t privatize these services outright. While my dissertation draws on and engages these studies, my fieldwork on a new workfare program in Germany required me to pursue a very different line of inquiry. Interviews with persons encompassing a range of perspectives (workfare participants, NGO administrators, social workers, Job Center case workers, and Job Center administrators) quickly proved that it wasn’t the neoliberal rhetoric of the reformers that had become hegemonic but the politico- economic rhetoric of their critics. In order to come to terms with the significance of this, I (1) readdress the theoretical effect of ideology via a discussion of Weber, Freud, and Lacan, whereby I argue that “spirit” can, in psychoanalytic terms, be understood as socially produced desire; (2) show how the legal and institutional framework of Germany’s workfare state supports a rational-strategic relation to work but not a spirited one; (3) show how the political rhetoric of reform demoralizes the middle class just as their critical reaction ultimately dispirits those participating in the workfare programs; and (4) discuss the relevance of German MCs for the cultural framework surrounding welfare and its reform in that some refer to themselves as losers or deadbeats in lyrics that structurally resemble American gangsta rap. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Timothy Haupt graduated from Haverford College in 2002 with a double major in Philosophy and German. In 2004, he earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in German. Between 2008 and 2010, he completed 18 months of field research in Berlin, Germany with funding from Fulbright and DAAD. He is currently a lecturer with the Writing Program at Princeton University. iii For B.H. –Here we are. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would first and foremost like to thank my dissertation committee—Dominic Boyer, Jane Fajans, Chris Garces, and Saida Hodzic—for their thoughtful and patient engagement with this project in its various stages. The dissertation is based on research made possible by grants from Fulbright and DAAD; their support is gratefully acknowledged. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements v List of Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 1. From Guest Workers to One-Euro-Jobbers 8 2. The Rhetoric of Reform and the Rise of Popular Ideology 26 3. Searching for Spirit in the German Workfare State 57 4. Stories of One-Euro-Work 89 5. Professional Deadbeats: Hip Hop and the Question of Productivity 138 Conclusion 175 Bibliography 182 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ABM – Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahme – A previous state-subsidized employment program, which aimed to ease unemployment. CDU – Christian Democratic Party Hartz IV – The Fourth Law for the Reform of the Labor Market, which came into effect on 1 January 2005; it serves as the legal basis of Germany’s workfare state. MAE – Abeitsgelegenheit mit Mehraufwandentschädigung – The so-called One-Euro- Job, which aims to integrate long-term unemployed persons into regular employment. SPD – Social Democratic Party vii Wer nicht arbeitet, soll auch nicht essen. (Whoever doesn’t work, should also not eat.) -Franz Müntefering (SPD), 9 May 20061 Introduction As Carol Greenhouse has argued, “neoliberal reform…has restructured the most prominent public relationships that constitute belonging: politics, markets, work, and self- identity” (Greenhouse 2010, 2). In Germany, a set of four Laws for the Reform of the German Labor Market (Gesetze zur Reform des Arbeitsmarkts), commonly referred to as the Hartz laws, did just that between 1 January 2003 and 1 January 2005. The fourth, Hartz IV as it is called, ushered in a radically new “welfare” state, whose operating principle consists in challenging (fordern) its “customers.” 2 In short, this law requires each earning-capable, assistance-requiring person (erwerbsfähige Hilfebedürftige) to make every attempt to reduce or terminate his or her dependence on the state. The introduction of contingent benefits sought to guarantee that the customer accepts the challenge: if a person is unwilling to “make every attempt,” his or her benefits can be suspended, in some cases in their entirety. The German welfare state has then, as regards its legally circumscribed goals, become an employment agency, which is to say a workfare state. A person does not receive benefits merely to guarantee his or her existence, let alone to allow him or her to participate in the German democratic process. Rather, a person 1 Franz Müntefering was Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs between November 2005 and November 2007. He later became the head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Quoted in “Arbeiten fürs Essen,” Katharina Schuler, Zeit Online, 10 May 2006, http://www.zeit.de/online/2006/20/Schreiner. It perhaps need not be pointed out that Müntefering is quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (as the King James Version puts it: For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat). Perhaps less well known, though, is the fact that August Bebel, a key figure in the early history of the SPD, also famously quoted this verse (1891). 2 I realize the term “customer” may strike some as odd, the better choice being “client.” In Job Center lingo, persons receiving welfare benefits are called Kunden, which is the common German word for customers. One could also use the German word “Klient,” which is the term that lawyers, therapists, and others use for the persons who receive their services. But Job Center employees don’t say “Klient,” they say “Kunde” and that very clearly means customer. The term also appears in the federal laws regulating welfare (for example, see SGBII, 51a). 1 receives benefits so that the person may become independent of the benefits. In other words, “the giving hand” currently has less to do with redistribution than with rendering the “unproductive” more productive.3 Welfare reform has largely been justified in the United States as well as Europe with reference to economic necessity.4 Sociologists have questioned the necessity of this shift in policy (Schram 1995, 2006; Wacquant 2009). Loïc Wacquant pushed the point perhaps furthest by arguing that the transition from welfare to workfare “is not a mechanical response to economic changes so much as an exercise in state crafting aimed at producing—and then adapting to—these very changes” (2009, 103). According to Wacquant, this state crafting entails the reorganization of bureaucracies in charge of managing dependent populations, on the one hand, and producing and disseminating official schema of perception capable of depicting and justifying the governmental practices of state functionaries (103). David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberalism makes the same basic point: “Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (2005, 3). In summary, these theorists grant policy an exceptional amount of efficaciousness such that it becomes, first, the driving force of social change and, 3 The terms here are drawn from a feuilleton debate unleashed when Peter Sloterdijk published an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled “The Revolution of the Giving Hand” on 13 June 2009. Sloterdijk adopted numerous arguments of “authors of a liberal tendency” and made a case for how welfare constitutes the reverse exploitation of the productive. See Peter Sloterdijk, “Die Revolution der gebenden Hand,” FAZ, 13 June 2009; Axel Honneth, “Fataler Tiefsinn aus Karlsruhe,” Die Zeit, 24 Sept. 2009; Peter Sloterdijk, “Das elfte Gebot: die progressive Einkommenssteuer,” FAZ, 27 Sept. 2009; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Der Spieler und der Baumeister,” Die Zeit, 1Oct. 2009; Christoph Menke, “Wahrheit. Nicht Stil,” Die Zeit, 15 Oct. 2009; Karl-Heiz Bohrer, “Lobhudeleien der Gleichheit,” FAZ, 21 Oct. 2009; Peter Sloterdijk, “Aufbruch der Leistungsträger,” Cicero, 22 Oct. 20009; “ʽEingeweide des Zeitgeistes,’” Spiegel 44, 26 Oct. 2009; Richard David Precht, “Zwei Mäner und der Mond,” Der Spiegel 45, 2 Nov. 2009. Two books have emerged from these debates (Wagner and Rehmann 2010; Sloterdijk 2010). 4 See chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of this rhetoric in Germany. 2 second, the determinative cultural framework for grasping that change. Neoliberal policy in this view constitutes, then, its own cause, justification, and grounds for reproduction. If we assume the same for the German case of welfare reform, that the economizing discourse surrounding and justifying the apparent reductions in social spending became determinative for how social reality is perceived, then we would also have to say that the economizing rhetoric worked too well. For one doesn’t speak of the Laws for the Reform of the Labor Market (the official name of welfare reform) but rather Hartz IV and its One-Euro-Jobs. Again, the official name for the One-Euro-Jobs is Working Opportunities with Additional Cost Compensation (Arbeitsgelegenheiten mit Mehraufwandsentschädigung, AGH MAEs, or just MAEs).5 The MAEs are a common mechanism used to “challenge” long-term unemployed persons who are not expected to receive employment offers in the near future. Typically lasting six months, an MAE is a 30 hour per week “working opportunity,” which does not constitute a legal employment relation and hence is not subject to any other employment regulations.