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Austerity, Personalized Funding and the Degradation of Care Work:

This chapter examines the employment impacts of two of the most significant pieces of social policy introduced in Scotland and Australia in the past decade, namely the Social Care (Self-Directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013 and the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act in Australia. Launched in the era of austerity, both policies have been viewed as critical human rights-engaged legislation aimed at improving the social inclusion of marginalized and vulnerable populations. Drawing on qualitative interview data in Scotland and Australia, the chapter identifies a downward spiral in wages and conditions, and increased privatization, fragmentation, precarity, and insecurity, alongside serious concerns about quality of care. The analysis shows no winners, as may be characteristic of social policy introduced in the context of austerity and neoliberalism. Instead, the private-market focus and austere funding of these new policies places the human rights of service users in a zero-sum competition with the employment rights of care workers.