August 12, 2009 Work Identity and Worklessness
For years sociologists have been telling us that identities in late modernity are fluid, not fixed, and that they’re based in our consumer lifestyles not our work (Ransome, 2005). Bauman (1995) says that what marks out the poor is not the absence of paid work but their failure to consume (or to consume in the right way). And whilst benefit regimes are ever more punitive and worklessness ever more morally troubling, so much so that to be living on benefit is to be labelled a benefit cheat, and to be long term sick is to be a malingerer. Work is a sign of virtue still. And being a good worker requires a commitment to work. But even so, says Bauman, it is consumption that is the integrative force.
Nonsense. It’s work. And the centrality of work, however conceived, to identity is never more clearly revealed when the chance to do it is removed. When business closures or downsizing mean job losses. When Woolworths can’t outlast an economic downturn so women with 20 years of experience lose their purpose (Panorama, BBC, 13th April 2009). Even when inflected with other identity-anxieties (of nationality, as in the Immingham dispute; of gender in arguments over family breadwinner status), it is work.
And there will be more of this. I remember one thing that made sense in A level economics class: hysteresis. Named by economists (see Layard, Nickell and Jackman, 1991), but needing a sociological vision to explain it, refers to a short term rise in unemployment which then sticks. The unemployed find it increasingly hard to get back into work. The longer unemployment lasts, the more likely it is to last a long time. And this is not because unemployment produces fecklessness and a desire to sit around on those generous benefits, as the discourse of benefit-dependency suggests . It is because of the social and psychological impact of joblessness in a world where work matters, and where work identity matters. It is because of losing connection to the world outside home other than in mediated ways. It is because, regardless of fault, when hard work is a virtue not working means a lack of virtue. And it is also about a loss of skills. But to only refer to skill is to miss out the central significance – unemployment is felt and lived with, it is more than a status.
Bibliography
- Bauman, Z (2005) Work, consumerism and the new poor. 2nd Ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
- Layard, R., Nickell, S. and Jackman, R. (1991) Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Ransome, P. (2005) Work, consumption and culture: affluence and social change in the twenty-first century. London: Sage Publications.