Enormous reductions in public sector spending produce unemployment. And unemployment makes for poverty, misery, hopelessness, illness and anomie. Some of the cuts to public sector spending will remove work from society: Forgemasters’ employees will join the queues outside Sheffield job centres, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living on the benefit breadline, sinking into depression, needing care.

Other public sector cuts will not remove work, but transfer it from public sphere to private sphere, from commodity form to non-commodity form. Children, the infirm elderly and the sick will carry on needing care (and social care isn’t part of the NHS ringfencing). Someone will have to step in when budget cuts mean fewer care assistants or fewer public nursery spaces. This might sound like Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action: neighbours helping because the fat state is ought to slim down. But care that is contingently gifted like that leaves the recipient at risk, even assuming that the needy are known and noticed (which might not be the case if layers of administration are removed). And it leaves the caregiver exhausted by the double burden of paid work and care.

It is often the case that unpaid care is done by women (see the Women’s Budget Group analysis), and, though the ideological conservatism that drives the desire for a small state is not quite the same conservatism that essentialises gender divisions and wants women to be placed in the home, married and looking after children, the coincidence might be felt to be fortuitous by some. At nowaytoamakealiving, we are always angered by the failures of imagination and empathy that generate policies intended to increase inequality and worsen lives.

taken with camera phone

To the left, big, bold letters and colours: the store is closing down and everything must go, “step right up, bargains galore”. Thrill at 20% off a new kettle. Take home a pottery owl, only £42.99 (down from £59.00). It’s an exciting chance, you consumer monkey. Be seduced by these prices.

taken with camera phone

The second is a different appearance of emotion in capitalism; this is not the capitalism of the romanticised commodity exchange discussed above (Illouz, 1997), nor quite the cold intimacy of managed emotion in capitalism (Illouz, 2007). It’s the organisation appealing to sentiment, to empathy, to feeling and not sensation. Fevre (2000) suggests this is rare, arguing that the triumph of ‘common sense’ as a form of reasoning means that rationality is imposed in places where it ought not be. That is, an organisation might easily fail to make the case for care, seeing the job losses that result from the store closing as merely the inevitable outcome of recession: there’s no use crying over spilled economic inevitabilities. After all, it’s common sense that unemployment rises in recession, but never mind, there’ll be a recovery eventually. Certainly, it seems that some of the customers have to be reminded to see past this, to connect the bargain to the pain. I can’t help thinking that there’s a few people making decisions about cutting the budget deficit who could do with a copy of this sign in their office.

References

1. Fevre, R. W. (2000) The Demoralization of Western Culture . Continuum, London.
2. Illouz, E. (1997) Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . Berkeley: University of California Press.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.

Since then, it’s fair to say that Sheppey has struggled. Although new industry has been established, Sheppey ranks highly on ‘indices of deprivation’ (health, poverty etc). It was hit badly in the 1980s recession, and the situation is mixed today. The steel mill remains a significant employer, as do the three prisons, but the local economy is now dominated by the import business – of cars and fresh produce. Overall, the picture is volatile with a high percentage of people employed in relatively vulnerable industries. Educational attainment is well below the average for the South East. And life expectancy is several years lower in some parts of Sheppey than it is in other areas in the borough of Swale and the South East more widely.

When Ray Pahl carried out research on Sheppey in the late 1970s and 1980s – published in what became a seminal sociological text, Divisions of Labour (1984) – he drew attention to social polarisation between households. Some combinations of work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) allowed people to ‘get by’ effectively; others did not. There is ongoing concern that current developments (e.g. housing rather than jobs-led regeneration) may further reinforce social divisions across Sheppey.

The Living and Working on Sheppey project explores the recent history and changes in working lives on Sheppey in the last decades of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st. The project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England through its South East Coastal Communities Programme, is a combination of new research and secondary analysis of Pahl’s earlier data. A first strand is based on interviews conducted by local people with older members of the community about their memories of Blue Town (Sheerness) and the naval dockyard before its closure in 1960 and their experiences of changing times since. A second strand invited young people about to leave school to write essays in which they imagine what their futures will hold in terms of work and family life, a repetition of an exercise undertaken by Pahl 30 years ago.

A montage of Blue Town High Street by TEA

The project team includes Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman, and Clive Arundell (University of Kent), Graham Crow (University of Southampton), Jenny Hurkett and Alice Young (Blue Town Heritage Centre), the UK Data Archive, the artists group TEA, and Ray Pahl as consultant. The contribution of the artists group TEA is the creation of a short film of a ‘walk’ along Blue Town High Street based on a model constructed from archives, the ‘reality’ in 2010, and imagination — a montage of past, present, and future (as in the image above).

A workshop on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Blue Town Heritage Centre will present the work of the project and invite comment and discussion about it. This event is free of charge but places are limited and registration is required. Anyone interested in attending – or if you would like any other information about the project – please contact Alice Young, Project Coordinator, Blue Town Heritage Centre, 69 High Street, Blue Town, Sheerness, Kent ME12 1RW; telephone: 01795 662981; email: seccproject@hotmail.com.

References

Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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

1. Bauman, Z (2005) Work, consumerism and the new poor. 2nd Ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
2. Layard, R., Nickell, S. and Jackman, R. (1991) Unemployment: Macroeconomic Performance and the Labour Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Ransome, P. (2005) Work, consumption and culture: affluence and social change in the twenty-first century. London: Sage Publications.