Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain

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Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain

Book•

Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain

Tracy Shildrick¹, Robert MacDonald, Colin Webster², Kayleigh Garthwaite³•Institutions (3)

Newcastle University¹, Leeds Beckett University², University of Birmingham³

01 Feb 2013-

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study the low-pay, no-pay cycle and its patterns and people's commitment to work in a deindustrialised labour market, concluding that ill-health and caring are the ties that bind.

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Abstract: Introduction Precarious work, welfare and poverty Researching the low-pay, no-pay cycle The low-pay, no-pay cycle: the perspectives and practices of employers and 'welfare to work' agencies The low-pay, no-pay cycle: its pattern and people's commitment to work Searching for jobs: qualifications, support for the workless and the good and bad of informal social networks Poor work: insecurity and churning in deindustrialised labour markets 'The ties that bind': ill-health and caring and their impact on the low-pay, no-pay cycle Poverty and social insecurity Conclusions.

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DOI•

Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs

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江俊儒

01 Dec 2011

1,252 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Fuel poverty from the bottom-up: Characterising household energy vulnerability through the lived experience of the fuel poor

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Lucie Middlemiss¹, Ross Gillard¹•Institutions (1)

University of Leeds¹

01 Mar 2015-Energy research and social science

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify six challenges to energy vulnerability for the fuel poor: quality of dwelling fabric, energy costs and supply issues, stability of household income, tenancy relations, social relations within the household and outside, and ill health.

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Abstract: Recent quantitative and qualitative evidence documents a dramatic reduction in average direct UK household energy consumption in the last decade. The ‘fuel poverty gap’ in the UK (average shortfall that fuel poor households experience in affording their energy bills) has also grown substantially in that period. Here we draw on the literature on vulnerability and on recent qualitative interviews with fuel poor households to characterise the experience of energy vulnerability in the UK. Using our qualitative data, we explore energy vulnerability from the point of view of our interviewees. In doing so we identify six challenges to energy vulnerability for the fuel poor: quality of dwelling fabric, energy costs and supply issues, stability of household income, tenancy relations, social relations within the household and outside, and ill health. In analysing these challenges we find that the energy vulnerable have limited agency to reduce their own vulnerability. Further, current UK policy relating to fuel poverty does not take full account of these challenges. Any attempt to address energy vulnerability coherently in the future must engage with structural forces (policies, markets, and recognition) in order to increase household agency for change.

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306 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame ‘the poor’

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Tracy Shildrick¹, Robert MacDonald¹•Institutions (1)

Teesside University¹

01 May 2013-The Sociological Review

TL;DR: In this paper, life history interviews with sixty men and women in north-east England who were caught up in "the low-pay, no-pay cycle" were conducted.

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Abstract: Drawing on life history interviews with sixty men and women in north-east England who were caught up in ‘the low-pay, no-pay cycle’, this article describes how people living in poverty talk about p...

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241 citations

Cites background or methods from "Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..."

...…Board of The Sociological Review demonstrated that four-fifths of the sample could be described as ‘recurrently’ or ‘persistently poor’ (with the remainder being varied cases including one-off, life-time movements away from or into poverty) (see Shildrick et al., 2012 for fuller discussion)....
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...For them, the mantra that ‘employment provides the best route of poverty’ rang hollow (see Shildrick et al., 2012)....
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...…sorts of people most likely to fit theories of ‘a welfare dependent underclass’ (Johnston et al., 2000; Webster et al., 2004; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005; Shildrick et al., 2012).2 Poverty ‘is a moral concept as well as a descriptive one’ (Spicker, 2007: 93) and interviews were heavily loaded with…...
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...Techniques for recruitment included leaflets and posters in the neighbourhoods, contacts from previous research studies in the locality (eg Johnston et al., 2000; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005) and ‘snowballing’ from early interviews (see Shildrick et al., 2012 for a fuller discussion)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes.

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Lynne Friedli, Robert Stearn¹•Institutions (1)

Birkbeck, University of London¹

01 Jun 2015-Medical Humanities

TL;DR: The coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions is described and the implications of psycho- policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets are considered.

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Abstract: Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect. Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted. This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit. The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics. This paper describes the coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions and considers the implications of psycho-policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets. We draw on personal testimonies of people experiencing workfare, policy analysis and social media records of campaigns opposed to workfare in order to explore the extent of psycho-compulsion in workfare. This is an area that has received little attention in the academic literature but that raises issues of ethics and professional accountability and challenges the field of medical humanities to reflect more critically on its relationship to psychology.

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155 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Hungry? Food Insecurity, Social Stigma and Embarrassment in the UK:

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Kingsley Purdam¹, Elisabeth Garratt¹, Aneez Esmail¹•Institutions (1)

University of Manchester¹

01 Dec 2016-Sociology

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the discourse of food aid and the demonisation of those living in poverty, the scale of malnutrition, and the experiences of food bank users by drawing on survey data and case studies.

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Abstract: In the context of the economic recession and welfare reform in the UK there have been ongoing political debates regarding food insecurity Food has an important role in defining people’s identities, yet the rapid growth in the number of food banks and food donation points in supermarkets and schools suggests a normalisation of food aid Moreover, an estimated three million individuals are thought to be at risk of malnutrition in the UK We examine: the discourse of food aid and the demonisation of those living in poverty, the scale of malnutrition, and the experiences of food bank users by drawing on survey data and case studies Substantial numbers of people were constrained in their food choices, whilst food bank users had concerns about the social stigma of food aid It is questionable whether the present policy approach is economically and politically efficient given the impact on people’s health and well-being

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141 citations

Cites background from "Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..."

...…of zero-hours contracts, reductions to working-age benefits and rising costs, including housing rents and home energy, have exerted pressure on household budgets (Alakeson and Cory, 2013; Office for National Statistics, 2014; O’Hara, 2014; Resolution Foundation, 2014; Shildrick et al., 2013)....
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References

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Open Access

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Book•

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

[...]

Loïc Wacquant

01 Jan 2009

TL;DR: The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy.

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Abstract: The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.

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2,164 citations

"Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..." refers background in this paper

...This argument is persuasive and has been made by others such as Wacquant (2009) in his book Punishing the Poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity....
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DOI•

Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs

[...]

江俊儒

01 Dec 2011

1,252 citations

"Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..." refers background in this paper

...Willis (1977) has, for example, speculated that structural unemployment might underpin the development of a 'white ethnic culture of wagelessness' among some sections of white youth....
[...]

Book•

Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization, and Welfare

[...]

Andrew Glyn

01 Jan 2006

TL;DR: Andrew Glyn as mentioned in this paper provides a clear and concise history of the problems facing the economies of Europe, Japan, and the US during the latter half of the twentieth century and questions whether capitalism has really brought the levels of economic growth and prosperity that were hoped for.

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Abstract: This accessible and persuasive book challenges the notion of our capitalist destiny. It provides a clear and concise history of the problems facing the economies of Europe, Japan, and the US during the latter half of the twentieth century and questions whether capitalism has really brought the levels of economic growth and prosperity that were hoped for. Andrew Glyn then looks at the impact that the rapidly developing economies of China and the South are likely to have on the older economies of the North. As the race is on to maintain growth and protect competitive advantage, Glyn asks: is the "race-to-the bottom" inevitable as the anti-globalizers predict, with welfare states being dismantled to meet competitive demands? Or is there an alternative model, which sees a strong commitment to welfare provision as essential to economic growth? Can we afford not to tackle inequality at home as well as abroad?

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360 citations

"Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..." refers background in this paper

...Glyn (2006) in Capitalism Unleashed examines the extraordinary turnaround of the fortunes of capital and labour over the past thirty years....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Merton with Energy, Katz with Structure:: The Sociology of Vindictiveness and the Criminology of Transgression

[...]

Jock Young¹•Institutions (1)

City University of New York¹

01 Aug 2003-Theoretical Criminology

TL;DR: The authors traces the impact of economic and cultural globalization pointing to the consequent rise of widespread resentment and tension both within the First World and internationally, and concludes that "globalization can be seen as a source of instability and division in the world".

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Abstract: This article traces the impact of economic and cultural globalization pointing to the consequent rise of widespread resentment and tension both within the First World and internationally. Globaliza...

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193 citations

"Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..." refers background in this paper

...Young (2003) explains popular demands for punitive welfare with reference to © 2013 The Author People, Place and Policy (2013): 7/2, pp. 107-110 Journal Compilation © 2013 PPP relative deprivation which engenders a feeling that those who work a little or not at all are getting an easy ride....
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...Young (2003) explains popular demands for punitive welfare with reference to...
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Journal Article•DOI•

A culture of worklessness? Historical insights from the Manor and Park area of Sheffield

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Del Roy Fletcher

01 Sep 2007-Policy and Politics

TL;DR: This paper examined the historical evidence for such cultural explanations of unemployment in one of the pilot locations and found little evidence of a lower cultural commitment to work among residents, and the danger is that in failing to learn from the past, such explanations may herald an increasingly punitive policy response.

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Abstract: UK policy makers are increasingly seeking to tackle persistent worklessness in some communities. It is in this context that the Working Neighbourhoods Pilot was launched which targeted concentrations of worklessness in 12 localities across Great Britain. The latter posited that a 'culture of worklessness' has developed in some communities, which prevents residents from accessing employment. This article examines the historical evidence for such cultural explanations of unemployment in one of the pilot locations. The author finds little evidence of a lower cultural commitment to work among residents. Moreover, the danger is that, in failing to learn from the past, such explanations may herald an increasingly punitive policy response.

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20 citations

"Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low..." refers background in this paper

...This is supported by much of my own work exploring the work undertaken by residents of deprived working class communities (see Fletcher, 2007)....
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...This is supported by much of my own work exploring the work undertaken by residents of deprived working class communities (see Fletcher, 2007). However, they find that precarious work is not providing a stepping-stone to better work. This begs an important question about the sustainability of such a cultural attachment to work when it manifestly does not materially improve the lives of working people. Willis (1977) has, for example, speculated that structural unemployment might underpin the development of a 'white ethnic culture of wagelessness' among some sections of white youth....
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