Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with street youths in a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada, this paper centers on the ways some street youths are engaging in partial accommodation and selective resistance to Ontario’s workfare program; Ontario Works (OW). Owing to its neoliberal reconceptualization in the mid 1990’s OW “participants”—in order to receive social assistance—must engage in a documentable effort to pursue employment, practical education or skills-development leading to entry into the labor market. However, many of my informants are unable or unwilling to seek low-wage, precarious work; the only form of work available to them. Through creative interpretation and manipulation of OW rules, I argue that street youth challenge the redefinition of the morality of poverty through OW’s neoliberal policies and discursive strategies, and refashion a moral economy based on survival and making do. Their alternative moral economy reveals the limits of the state’s reach and effort to domesticate marginalized youths.
