Content uploaded by Barbara Cameron
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Barbara Cameron on Nov 03, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Social Reproduction and Canadian Federalism
... Considering the issue of women's access to the labour market through a feminist political economy framework additionally situates this topic as a structural concern. Feminist political economy sees social reproduction as an integral aspect of capitalist economies (Cameron, 2006). ...
... As explained by Cameron (2006): "social reproduction of the working class is a precondition of capitalist production, ensuring a constant supply of labour with the appropriate skills and behaviours" (p. 46). ...
... This work is disproportionately taken up by women. Although social reproduction is highly invisible in the labour market, Cameron (2006) argues the state occupies an important role in intervening to facilitate social reproduction work as it is a benefit to the capitalist economy. These interventions occur through the dispersal of capital via entitlements to women or "replacement of the wage through income programs, or the provision of services to McMaster University -Social Work supplement or socialize household labour" (Cameron, 2006, p. 46), such as employment insurance, parental/pregnancy leave, and child care subsidies, amongst others. ...
This thesis reports on the findings and implications of gendered precarity in the neoliberal labour market for millennial mothers. By considering the unique intersection of precarity, gender, and age, my findings contribute to the literature by adding qualitative evidence to the anecdotal reports of women being restructured, demoted, and let go from their workplaces while on pregnancy/parental leave. Further, this research contributes to the knowledge on the topic of precarious work by reporting on participants' "sense of precarity" as a result of structural inequalities. The interviews conducted with six millennial women in their 30s reveal the complexity of their experiences as precarious workers and parents. Specifically, feeling vulnerable in the workplace, the impact of major life changes on millennial mothers' identities, and participants' responses to perceived motherhood penalty. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the findings in relation to the literature, considers the limitations of the study and offers possibilities for future research, avenues for policy advocacy, and suggestions for social work practice.
... Scholars such as Barbara Cameron have made a case for understanding the constitutional divisions of responsibilities in sections 91 and 92 within a framework of social reproduction. 100 She traces the ways in which assigning responsibilities for economic development powers to the federal government and those related to private matters, or "local works and undertakings," 101 to provinces created a framework in which the messy work of caring for people evolved into being a kind of division of social reproduction. She notes that the "1867 division of power assigned 'Indians and lands reserved for Indians' to the federal government, a power that it has exercised historically to destroy the material basis for the social reproduction of Aboriginal peoples." ...
... Healthcare spending continued to decline throughout the 1980s and 1990s with spending caps and freezes (Whiteside 2009, 90). Cameron (2006) explains that as federal spending was reduced, provincial responsibility increased with the introduction of block payments for healthcare and education to increase provincial autonomy. Cameron argues that the existence of state-funded programs for healthcare, childcare, and income assistance reflects an acceptance of state responsibility for the sphere of social reproduction. ...
This article analyzes abortion politics from a Marxist feminist perspective by adapting social reproduction theory (SRT). Despite the urgent threats to abortion access facing feminists worldwide, abortion is largely absent from contemporary SRT. This absence is first addressed from a theoretical perspective through the development of three arguments: that SRT can connect abortion to the biological reproduction of labor power via gestational labor, that abortion can make gestational labor less alienating, and that abortion can function as a refusal of productivism and reproductive sexuality. The article then applies these arguments to a preexisting case study of reproductive justice and women in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. By situating abortion within migrant workers’ struggles over social reproduction processes, this analysis demonstrates that SRT is useful for the study of abortion and can generate insights different from those of the reproductive justice approach alone.
... Social reproduction thus includes all the processes required to reproduce capitalist societies over time, muting class relations and limiting the concept's utility in explaining oppressions. Much more useful are conceptualizations of social reproduction like Cameron's (2006), located in contemporary capitalist societies, describing "production and social reproduction [as] two aspects of one process of capital accumulation and the relationship between them is contradictory in the dialectical sense of a unity of opposites" (Cameron, 2006: p. 46). For Cameron, social reproduction is both biological reproduction and the daily maintenance of the current and future generation of workers and their entire social group who rely on wages either directly or indirectly. ...
Social reproduction has received considerable recent attention from academics and activists aiming to stimulate and advance transformative political change. Yet, an understanding of social reproduction as “work” has sometimes slipped away, leaving behind important anti-racist feminist insights. Engaging with recent contributions from scholars in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, we argue that social reproduction is most useful as a concept, not as a theory, and is best understood as “work”. We point out quandaries and ambiguities that have produced conceptual confusion in scholarship on social reproduction and argue for a conceptualization offered by feminist political economy. We conclude that social reproduction, when understood as work, can support efforts to build the mass movements and solidarity necessary for effective anti-capitalist politics if its relationship to, and contradictions with, the processes of dispossession and capital accumulation are taken into account.
... We first highlight how a social reproduction framework attends to the 'dynamics that produce and reproduce people in material, social, and cultural ways', including the roles the market and the state play in mediating these processes (Bezanson, 2015: 13). We then draw on a second informing tenet, showing how a social reproduction framework articulates connections between reproduction and production, and between paid work and unpaid care work, with the state acting as a mediator between social classes (Bezanson, 2015;Cameron, 2006;Razavi, 2015). Cameron (2006: 46), for example, argues that: ...
http://jir.sagepub.com/content/58/4/543.full.pdf+html
Canada has two parental leave benefit programs for the care of a newborn or adopted
child: a federal program, and, since 2006, a provincial program in Québec. Informed by a
social reproduction framework, this article compares access to parental leave benefits
between Québec and the rest of Canada by family income and by its two different
programs. Our analysis of quantitative data reveals that maternal access to leave benefits
has improved dramatically over the past decade in the province of Québec, especially
for low-income households. By contrast, on average 38% of mothers in the rest of
Canada are consistently excluded from maternity or parental benefits under the federal
program. We argue that one key explanation for the gap in rates of access to benefits
between the two programs and between families by income is difference in eligibility
criteria. In Canada, parental leaves paid for by all employers and employees are unevenly
supporting the social reproduction of higher earners. Our article draws attention to the
need for greater public and scholarly scrutiny of social class inequality effects of parental
leave policy.
This handbook surveys knowledge from all six of the planet’s continuously inhabited continents to understand how governments and related institutions have attempted to advance human development and improve social outcomes over the past several decades. The current state of knowledge about the social welfare sphere is robust, but explorers of its two conceptual hemispheres—social policy and social administration—have too often missed opportunities to share insights and trace connections across cultural, historical, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Each of the 64 chapters commissioned for the handbook seeks to rectify such omissions by applying an administrative lens to selected issues of social policy. Authors were carefully chosen by editors based in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada and the United States, Europe, and Latin America to capture key developments and challenges in their region’s social welfare spheres during the decades spanning the turn of the millennium. The result is an engaging description of the international state of knowledge at the intersection of social policy and public administration on the eve of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Adaptations forced by the pandemic and related crises may create momentum for social welfare system change, and even transformation, in some parts of the world. Future researchers will describe and measure such changes relative to benchmarks set in the pre-pandemic period, including the rich variety of practices, paradigms, and insights collected in The Oxford International Handbook of Governance and Management for Social Policy.
By applying the social reproduction theory, this study proposes a critical conceptualization of the relations between the worker family and offshoring labour in transiting economies. The theoretical foundation of this article underscores that a thorough study of offshoring requires an examination not only of the workplace, worker and employment relations but also of the familial relations within the workers’ households. Based on interviews with workers and their family members, which I conducted in the host community of a consumer electronics facility in Romanian Transylvania, in this article I show how familial support helps to manage limitations that result from the precarious nature of offshoring labour and the transitional realities of the destination countries and how it ultimately serves as a means of achieving greater inter-generational emancipation. The study of familial relations in offshoring’s destination countries provides a better understanding of global labour relations and the way offshoring labour is reproduced in transiting countries. It also shows how the global capitalist system causes tensions with the processes of social reproduction in low-welfare economies, which usually host offshoring investments.
Work on state rescaling has generally argued that economic restructuring is hollowing out the state at the nation-state level. The ambiguity of this formulation, with the displacement of power potentially being recuperated through governance, is accentuated by a thin political analysis. This paper follows Purcell in emphasizing state-citizen relations and institutionalization in the state rescaling process, which constrains changes in scalar relationships even when the state is neoliberalized. The regulation of public health care in Canada provides an example of the relevance of state-citizen relations in shaping state rescaling, as these limited the ability of actors seeking to reduce federal leadership and standardization as part of health privatization.
This paper assesses the work of Robert Brenner alongside the insights developed within social-reproduction feminism to reassess discussions on the origins of capitalism. The focus on the internal relation between social production and social reproduction allows social-reproduction feminism to theorise the construction of gendered capitalist social relations that previous accounts of the transition to capitalism have thus far been unable to provide. It argues that a revised political Marxism has the potential to set up a non-teleological and historically specific account of the origins of capitalism. This paper seeks to redress the theoretical shortcomings of political Marxism that allow it to fail to account for the differentiated yet internally related process involved in the constitution and reconstitution of gendered capitalist social relations. This critique contributes to a social-reproduction feminism project of exploring processes of social production and social reproduction in their historical development and contemporary particularities.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.