Voodoo Sociology, Unemployment and ‘The Low-Pay, No-Pay Cycle’
The unemployed are shirkers ‘sleeping their life away’ on benefits. Their idleness is a ‘life-style choice’ underwritten by us ‘hardworking families’. Unemployment reflects ‘low aspirations’ and lack of skills and low qualifications; the unemployed need to catch-up with the new high skills economy. Unemployment is caused by a ‘culture of worklessness’; by ‘welfare dependency’ inculcated through dysfunctional, ‘troubled families’ — some of whom have never known work for three generations or even more. We need tougher regimes of discipline and punishment; heavy doses of ‘Welfare to Work/ Workfare’ and ramped up ‘conditionality’ tests backed by a punishing sanctions regime. The unemployed need to be more like us. Shirkers should be more like us strivers.
This, more or less, is how many of our politicians — and the general public — see the problem of unemployment. Research shows that practitioners who work with the unemployed will often sign up to these ideas.
But all of this is what I call voodoo sociology. The term ‘voodoo economics’ came to be applied to the powerful but flawed doctrine of the 1980s Reagan governments that free market economics would create wealth for those at the top which would then ‘trickle down’ to those below. The numb-headed insistence that unemployment is somehow the fault of the unemployed (that they lack something — aspiration, skills, work ethic, a suitably polished CV, whatever) — and that this can be fixed by poking them harder with the pointed sticks of ‘welfare reform’ is the classic voodoo sociology of our time.
There are many ways to demonstrate the stupidities of this thinking. Alan Mackie’s blog for Uncertain Futures neatly dissects some of the claims made in the name of ‘employability’. Another approach is via basic supply-demand economics. If the supply of unemployed workers outstrips the demand for them then labour market factors might be at least in part be causal of unemployment. At the end of 2014 there were over 28 applications for every single engineering and manufacturing apprenticeship in Teesside. The same pattern can be seen on a bigger canvas. In the US in 2011, the McDonald’s fast food chain held a hiring day. They were looking to recruit 50k new staff. They had 1 million applications. They eventually took on 62k new workers, an acceptance rate of 6.2%, which meant it was harder to get a job at McDonalds than a place at Yale University.
These sorts of statistics still only give a snap-shot picture of a fixed moment in time. A better way to understand the contemporary labour market — and to dispel this form of voodoo sociology — is to look at the dynamic movement of working lives. For instance, Research conducted by DWP in 2013 found that 73% of young adults who made a claim for JSA in 2010–11 had made at least one previous claim in the prior four years and 29% had had four spells on JSA. Our own research on Teesside provided a qualitative investigation into the realities of ‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’, i.e. how workers churn between what are typically low-paid, low skilled and insecure jobs at the bottom of the labour market and time out of work (usually but not always in receipt of state unemployment benefits). The title of the book was Poverty and Insecurity — these seemed to be the two words that did most to sum up the experiences that were recounted to us by men and women, younger and older people alike, who were caught up in the ‘low-pay, no-pay cycle’. We used Titian’s painting of Sisyphus for the book cover image. Forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down at the end of the day seemed to give a feel for the combination of hard work and/ but lack of progress in the lives of the people to whom we talked.
So what does this tell us? One simple lesson is that attempts to divide ‘them’ from ‘us’, to separate ‘shirkers’ from ‘strivers’ and the undeserving indolent from ‘hardworking families’ are ideologically driven. They don’t have a basis in fact. The government’s own research shows this. According to what we found in Teesside, a person might be a ‘hard-working striver’ one month and an ‘unemployed skiver’ the next — and this was overwhelmingly the product of the vagaries of a casualised and insecure labour market that still needs a ready supply of cheap, ‘flexible’ workers. There is no real idle ‘underclass’ of workshy dole scroungers living it up on ‘Benefits Street’. This is modern mythology of a very powerful kind. And of a sort that serves a purpose — to mask the real causes of poverty and unemployment in the UK and, in so doing, to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’.
Robert MacDonald is Professor of Sociology at Teesside University
Twitter: @RFMacDonald
