The Tension Social Security - Assistance in Universal Child Allowance for Social Protection

Abstract

This article presents results of the doctoral thesis "The conditionalities of social policies from a relational perspective of analysis: meanings and tensions of the Universal Assignment by Son in the Province of San Juan", PhD in Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, 2015. The Universal Child Allowance for Social Protection (hereinafter AUH) combines components of the social security field and the field of assistance^[1] into the same definition, entering a gray area between both systems. That gray area is given because the AUH moves away from the usual forms of assistance policies of the last decades by the extension of its coverage and because it represents the extension of a right that until the moment only had the children of the formal workers, to the children of informal and unoccupied workers. Also because although it is possible to recognize care components in its design, at the same time it can be placed outside the typical characteristics of the assistance and promotion actions. The definition of AUH from assistance also appears in the actors involved in its implementation: both agents of the State and the beneficiaries define it as an "aid" for families that do not have work or whose income is insufficient to meet their basic needs, though the meanings and arguments around these terms have different traits, according to one or another group. In the article we will analyze the assistance components of the normative and official discourse of the AUH and the meanings or constructions of meaning realized around the AUH as assistance in the actors involved in its implementation.

[1] The assistance organized based on the principle of necessity, linked to the characteristics of the person and their situation; while social security anchored in the recognition of the rights of workers (in general, formal workers).