Soft Workfare? Re-orienting Toronto's Social Infrastructure Towards Employment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research tracks the emergence of ‘soft’ workfare in Toronto. This refers to a set of attitudes and practices apparent in the delivery of welfare-to-work programs through the Ontario Works framework, which use compulsion to push people towards employment while simultaneously encouraging limited and specific practices of individual choice. Research findings are derived from eight interviews and relevant policy reports, focusing on the experiences of three non-profit agencies and the City of Toronto, who provide employment assistance and financial assistance through Ontario Works, respectively. These findings indicate that grassroots organizations pioneered employment services for social assistance recipients, and, alongside the municipal government, had been calling for active employment programs. They made use of the distance between policy rules and their own programs to alleviate the most punitive features of OW, but judge compulsion as a means to meet a necessary end. This demonstrates how disciplinary tendencies reside within liberal governmentalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".