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In Australia, decades of public funding have led to the creation of a multibillion-dollar industry that produces no value, manufactures no products, and employs no labor. These late-capitalist enterprises instead profit by not employing labor. It’s the business of unemployment — and business is booming. Australia is witnessing the rise of the new digital workhouse. Unlike the workhouses of old, the digital workhouse of today is an invisible web of algorithms, e-government websites, and scattered “Work for the Dole” sites, managed by anonymous bureaucrats and owned by private employment service providers. It’s a uniquely neoliberal form of decentralized coercion, and it has two purposes: to discipline and punish unemployed workers, and to privatize what remains of the welfare state. With 1,635 outlets nationally, there are now more employment service providers than the total number of McDonald’s franchises in Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea combined. The industry’s primary resources are virtually limitless: for any single job vacancy, 15.71 workers apply. Over three million people want work or want more work, and nearly one in five unemployed fifteen to twenty-four year olds today have been out of work for fifty-two weeks or more.

From Pauper to Dole Bludger There’s a myth that nineteenth-century Australia was a “working man’s paradise,” but in many ways it mirrored the conditions of the British society it broke off from, with its Poor Laws and workhouses. Workhouses of this era were usually government-run or publicly funded institutions offering limited indoor relief, housing, and employment to the poor — with strict conditions. Only the “deserving poor” were allowed entry. This was justified by two guiding principles: the first was the Benthamite maxim of “less eligibility” which stipulated that the terms and conditions offered in the workhouse should be undeniably worse than the lowest-going wage on the market. The second was the work test, a daily labor activity required of applicants, to demonstrate that their unemployment was genuine. In order to prevent “pauperization” — another Victorian myth that lives in the modern conservative imagination as “long-term welfare dependency” — tasks set by workhouses were designed to be tedious and unattractive. This work was seen as reformatory, transforming the pauper into the ideal, subordinate worker. If the workhouses found no work for their inmates, they were required to smash rocks or pull saltbush from sunrise to sundown, like their convict forebears. From Perth’s “Mount Eliza Depot” to Sydney’s “Benevolent Asylum,” the workhouse policed the economic margins of respectable colonial society, a lynchpin in the colony’s struggle to discipline labor. To prevent seasonal workers from starving, rioting, or eking out other means of survival between stints on government work gangs — that is, to preserve the value of their labor power — the workhouses were to be disciplined. The Adelaide Destitute Asylum, for example, was modeled on the factory system. Rooms ran according to a clear division of labor, and applicants were assigned on the basis of work history. Inmates were supervised at all times and adhered to an hour-by-hour timetable defining their tasks and responsibilities. For workers both inside and outside its barrack-like walls, the workhouse was a symbol of everything awful about unemployment: poverty, futility, and the crushing loss of dignity.

Welfare 2.0 Today’s digital workhouses comprise a system of means-testing, compliance, surveillance, and work-test activities that are mandatory for individuals who want to claim unemployment benefits (“JobSeeker Payments”). They are managed by the unholy triumvirate comprising government, the private employment services industry, and businesses that run sites that absorb some of the reserve army of labor at a profit. While the digital era has not diminished Bentham’s principle of less eligibility, it has transformed the way it is applied. No longer may the unemployed walk into a Centrelink office (the department responsible for social services) and apply for benefits in person. Brick-and-mortar offices are glorified self-service spaces, auxiliary to the online services, accessed by browser or app. To apply for welfare, you must create an online account with Centrelink and upload a sweeping array of personal information, including employer separation certificates, bank statements, proof of all your education attainments, and other arbitrary documents. Couples are required to notify Centrelink of their relationship; if one partner has work, the other can become ineligible and by implication, dependent. It isn’t hard to see how this reinforces sexism. At times, it is even more explicit. Mothers applying for the single parenting payment must have a “referee” sign a legal document verifying that they are, in fact, single. Once you’ve provided all the information, an algorithm-powered review process begins to match your data against means-testing criteria. It’s designed to be inflexible, frustrating, and dysfunctional. Repeated errors mean that it takes weeks, sometimes months, for an application to be granted. Many thousands of applications are rejected in error, leaving the unemployed with no support at all. Once deemed deserving, unemployed workers are referred to one of the 1,600-plus private employment service providers to undertake activity-testing. Unemployed workers are responsible for managing and submitting records of their activities online. This can include entering a daily code confirming attendance at job service providers, recording details of jobs applied for (regardless of whether they are available or appropriate), and reporting fortnightly income. Thus, the administrative burden of work testing is shifted to the unemployed. This in turn allows providers and government to cut staff, generating more unemployment.