Seeing people in the computer: The role of information technology in remote employment services

Abstract

Information technologies have been important in the emergence of new forms of control and surveillance of welfare recipients and of those who administer labour market programmes. These technologies have often appeared at the margins of accounts of welfare reform, for example as means of increasing the efficiency or consistency of services, or as constraining frontline discretion. Henman has argued, however, that information technologies need to be analysed not just as administrative tools, but as “non‐human actors,” shaping policy development and implementation in ways beyond the intentions of their human creators (Henman, Governing Electronically: E‐government and the Reconfiguration of Public Administration, Policy and Power, Palgrave MacMillan). This paper explores the way that the use of government information systems has shaped employment services in remote Australia where over 80 per cent of those included are Indigenous people. The article describes how the production and use of administrative data within employment services have supported and extended the framing of Indigenous people in remote communities as non‐compliant and as needing external direction.

“Sharing Is Caring:” Australian Self-Trackers' Concepts and Practices of Personal Data Sharing and Privacy

“…This research could be extended by focusing attention on social groups in Australia who have been pushed or coerced into self-tracking, who are disadvantaged or socially vulnerable, who are generating health data that are potentially stigmatizing or those who have experienced privacy harms or discrimination from their personal data being accessed by third parties. Australia has a recent poor record in the misuse of personal digitized information for exacerbating socioeconomic disadvantage and exerting surveillance over already under-privileged groups ( 34 , 64 ). Among other groups, Indigenous people have called for better data sovereignty, involving self-determination of what information is generated about them and better control over third-party access to their data ( 65 ).…”

Introduction to the special issue on welfare conditionality in Australia

“…As other authors note, understanding recent global shifts toward algorithmic governance is key to grasping conditional welfare delivery in the present (Eubanks ). Fowkes’ nuanced analysis of a specific case is illuminating, if sobering: her interviews with frontline workers often overwhelmed with the data entry tasks the system mandates reveal the ways in which the system favours standardisation over personalised assistance (Fowkes ). Furthermore, poorly understood local realities, which include unreliable and slow Internet connectivity, result in high levels of non‐compliance recorded in the system, which reinforced political narratives of Indigenous dysfunction as well as impacting on Indigenous people’s payments, food security and well‐being (see Jordan & Fowkes ).…”

Work and wellbeing in remote Australia: Moving beyond punitive ‘workfare’

“…Service contracts under workfare arrangements such as the CDP are stringent and closely monitored, thereby reducing service providers' abilities to work flexibly with participants through individualised case management (Fowkes, 2019). In the case of Indigenous organisations delivering the CDP, this has smothered local Indigenous control (Staines, 2020).…”

“…Local decision-making by Indigenous peoples and communities might transform the kind of upward accountability between third-sector providers (or, in the case of subsidised jobs, employers) and government that is typical of workfare, and resituate it back at the community level. This could lead to greater responsiveness around individual health and wellbeing needs, including for people with significant barriers to worksomething that is disincentivised under the CDP and other workfare, which tends towards commodifying and reducing clients to numbers on a computer screen (Carter & Whitworth, 2015;Considine et al, 2015;Fowkes, 2019). In a broader sense, recognition of the need for input and control over employment policy would also be in the spirit of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, to which Pearsonone of the architects of the JG proposalis a signatory.…”