Care and Minimum Income Policies. When Welfare Conditionality meets Unpaid Care Work.

This paper proposes an exploratory analysis of Minimum Income Schemes (MIS) in three European countries: Italy, Spain, and the UK. The aim is to first understand the extent to which unpaid care work is taken into consideration in MIS’s conditionality criteria. And secondly, how that impacts on women’s ability to claim these benefits. MIS are means-tested monetary benefits for working-age individuals aimed at reducing poverty and social exclusion by promoting their active participation in the labour market (Jessoula, 2021). This approach has been questioned because of its inability to consider why people draw on social security (Klein, 2021). Women, for example, are increasingly exposed to poverty and social exclusion due to structural gender inequalities that affect their position regarding both unpaid care and paid work (Malgesini Rey, 2021). I argue for the incorporation of care alongside employment to understand the extent to which these policies incorporate structural constraints that limit the access of women in need to MIS (Natili, 2020). To the best of my knowledge, no specific study has yet been carried out in this sense. This paper intends to fill this gap. The analytical framework is based on the work done by Yerkes et al. (2019) in rethinking social policy from a Capabilities Perspective. This allows me to assess MIS conditionally under both objective and subjective criteria. I understand the minimum income protection as a step in the process of institutionalising the capabilities of working mothers at risk of poverty and social exclusion. In other words, as a means aimed to improve their quality of life by broadening their range of choice. I focus on different opportunities to balance caregiving and employment, also acknowledging how conversion factors shape their real opportunities to translate the policy in real functionings.