New precarious and invisibilised forms of work within Slovenian social services

This paper explores how both workers and users of social services in Slovenia have been re-valued in relation to the market and the shrinking welfare state. It bases its findings upon in-depth interviews with workers within... [ view full abstract ]

This paper explores how both workers and users of social services in Slovenia have been re-valued in relation to the market and the shrinking welfare state. It bases its findings upon in-depth interviews with workers within various third sector organizations that provide social inclusion programs and services and key informants within public institutions. The findings demonstrate how (meta)governance enacted through methodological, legislative and financial mechanisms places new responsibilities on workers within social services and their users and creates new forms of precarious and unrecognized employment and means for the extraction of profits. Social service workers’ jobs have due to austerity measures been reduced and are increasingly dependent on the EU funding, based upon price based competition and are subjected to new monitoring mechanisms. This creates various forms of precarious employment and re-values social work through managerial paradigm that places new responsibilities on workers to demonstrate their socio-economic worthiness to keep and compete for top-down funding opportunities. Due to economic crisis social service workers are also experiencing increasing demand and the changing user base that consists of the new working poor, amongst which are self-employed, migrant workers and long-term unemployed, who have been after years of social care assigned new responsibilities to re-activate. The current EU-Slovenian alignment towards the re-activation is conditioning users’ social rights upon contractual relationship that entails from users both underpaid work as well as consumption of services that can provide evidence of their new contractual obligations towards the state. The paper thus contributes by exposing how new forms of (meta)governance re-value both workers and users of social services by producing new precarious and invisibilised forms of work and means for extraction of profits.