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. We
now have a situation being implemented where there is 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.
Welfare reforms have led to increased emphasis on the
conditionality of social security payments and the ‘activation’ of their
recipients, avowedly to avert or correct ethical and psychological ‘dependency’
and other forms of debility, depression and etiolated work ethic, which are
widely thought to be both symptom and cause of unemployment. Failure to meet
conditions placed on eligibility for benefits is punished directly by benefit
sanctions (the part or total cessation of social security payments for a given
period of time), as well as indirectly by compulsory ‘support’ in the form of
workfare, ‘skills training’, psychological referral or psychometric testing.
The conditions are diverse in kind as well as wide-ranging: from age and
residence criteria, or restrictions on numbers of (paid) hours worked per week,
to possession of certain levels of qualifications and the capacity to
demonstrate positive opinions on employment. The expansion of conditionality in
this way is linked to the continually increasing rate at which Jobseeker's
Allowance (JSA) and Employment and Support Allowance claimants are sanctioned
(the three months to September 2013 saw JSA claimants sanctioned at a rate of
6% of claimants per month, the highest since the introduction of JSA in 1996).
Failure to participate in a training or employment scheme is the most
frequently occurring ‘failure’ that results in a sanction. These mandatory
interventions designed to ‘shift attitudes and beliefs’ have become an
important element of ‘activating’ the unemployed, and are the focus of this
paper. Although payments by the state to people without jobs have been tied to
desirable patterns of behaviour since their first institution, the unemployment
policies of reformed welfare states now aim at more complete and intimate
behaviour change through coercive mechanisms of greater scope
Workfare means the ‘work-for-your-benefits’ schemes in which
unemployed people are forced to work for a charity, business, social
enterprise, public service or government agency in order to continue to be
eligible for benefits. We also include the range of skills-building and
motivational workshops that are presented alongside such schemes—as part of a
range of activities that unemployed people are obliged to undertake—and schemes
that are composed of training courses in tandem with unpaid work (Skills
Conditionality is an example of the former; Traineeships and Sector-Based Work
Academies of the latter). The participation of unemployed people in schemes
with training elements is secured by the same means as work placement schemes:
through the threat—tacit or explicit, indirect or direct—of sanctions. Workfare
is central to normalisation of the idea that harsh sanctions should be used to
underwrite certain obligations of citizenship, and to singling out as the
paramount obligation the enforcement of work, with no regard to the specific
character of that work or to a person's other responsibilities. Workfare furthers
the separation of work and livelihood and normalises the idea that certain
groups of people are not entitled to payment for their labour and that lengthy
periods of unpaid labour (eg, internships or ‘volunteering’) are a precondition
for employment. In this way, it undermines the security, pay and conditions of
all workers and non-workers. Moreover, it demands that people assent to the
idea that paid work as it is currently organised is the only route to both
personal fulfilment and public value and obscures the economic reality of a
dual labour market that produces and relies upon the stratification of work and
the escalating inequalities in income and quality of working life.
Psycho-compulsion, defined as the imposition of
psychological explanations for unemployment, together with mandatory activities
intended to modify beliefs, attitude, disposition or personality, has become a
more and more central feature of activating the unemployed and hence of
people’s experience of unemployment. There has been little debate about the
recruitment of psychology—and, by implication, psychologists—into monitoring,
modifying and punishing people who claim social security benefits or research
into the impact of mandatory positive affect on an expanding range of ‘unproductive’
or failing citizens: those who are out of work, not working enough, not earning
enough and/or failing to seek work with sufficient application. A number of
reports produced for the Cabinet Office under both the previous Labour
government and the current Coalition have drawn centrally upon psychology and
behavioural economics for the legitimation and direction of behaviour change
policy or ‘instrumental behaviourism’. Psychology allied to behavioural
economics allows the sector to consolidate its self-conception as an industry
in its own right that sets its own standards and regulates itself. In this
setting, psychology (and ‘therapy discourse’ more generally) coproduces and
validates the core mythologies of neoliberalism, while simultaneously
undermining and eroding alternative discourses—of solidarity, collectivity and
interdependence. It functions not only to reinforce the view that achieving the
status of (paid) working citizen is ‘the pinnacle of human experience’ but also
to construct a very specific definition of the attitudes, beliefs and
attributes that constitute ‘employability’: the ‘right kind of subject’; the
‘right kind of affect’. The roll-call of valued characteristics familiar from
positive psychology, the wellbeing industry and public health—‘confidence,
optimism, self-efficacy, aspiration’—are imposed in and through programmes of
mandatory training and job preparation. They also feature centrally in the way
in which people receiving benefits frame their own experiences. The duties of
citizenship are expanded to include enforced rational self-governance so that
liberal subjects’ capabilities, inclinations and desires are in accord with
values and expectations that are identified as already given by a civil society
centred on the labour market. These kinds of policies, seeking to model in
unemployed people the imperatives of the market, are carried out by means of
the market, through those who are paid to ‘activate’ claimants and those who
benefit from their unpaid labour.
The imposition of psychological explanations for
unemployment functions to erase the economic realities of the labour market and
authorises the extension of state-sanctioned surveillance to psychological
characteristics. Compulsory positive affect and psychological authority are
being applied in workfare in order to (1) identify ostensible psychological
barriers to gaining employment and to inculcate attributes and attitudes said
to increase employability; (2) punish people for non-compliance (through
conditionality and benefit sanctions) and (3) legitimise workfare and other
coercive labour market measures. The consistent failure of workfare
interventions to achieve their stated aim of improving work outcomes—both in
the UK and internationally—has resulted in a much greater focus on
psychological or ‘soft outcomes’, said to ‘move people closer to work’. ‘Soft
outcomes’ disarticulate work and wages by treating a job as something that may
be gained by possessing the right attitude to work (an attitude for which one
must labour) and work as something to be valued because it evinces and activates
the right attitude in the (potential) employee—rather than because it allows
one to purchase a living. At the same time, the means by which soft outcomes
are regulated (sanctions: for failures in attitude and in compliance with the
actions demanded by active labour market measures) link together more closely
than ever a person's failure to manifest the right attitude and their inability
to afford to purchase a living. Efforts to achieve these ‘soft outcomes’ are
evident in the course content of mandatory training programmes run by major
workfare contractors like A4e and Ingeus and are increasingly apparent in the
personal testimonies of claimants.
In a scheme recently announced, claimants will undergo
interviews to assess whether they have a ‘psychological resistance’ to work,
along with attitude profiling to judge whether they are ‘bewildered, despondent
or determined’.Those deemed ‘less mentally fit’ will be subject to more
intensive coaching, while those who are ‘optimistic’—such as graduates or those
who have recently been made redundant—can be placed on less rigorous regimes.
This classification system will be used to recruit to a new scheme obliging
those who are long-term unemployed to spend 35 hours a week at a job centre. Jobcentres
and the premises of welfare-to-work contractors are not neutral settings for
interventions or decisions about the relative degree of unemployed people's
material hardship, ‘willingness to work’, ‘readiness’ for work or ‘resistance’
to work: they are intensely anxiety-inducing and intimidating locations that
bear witness to marked imbalances of power.
The participation of psychology and psychologists in the
delivery of coercive goals in welfare reform clearly raises ethical questions. here
is no evidence that work programme psycho-interventions increase the likelihood
of gaining paid work that lasts any length of time. In perpetuating notions of
psychological failure, they shift attention away from the social patterning of
unemployment and from wider trends: market failure, precarity, the rise of
in-work poverty, the cost of living crisis and the scale of income
inequalities. They contribute centrally to the reification of paid work and the
concomitant devaluing and discounting of all other activities, contributions, values
and commitments. Above all, psychology is implicated in what amounts to a
‘substitution of outcomes’, where the modification of psychological attributes
stands in for delivering actual improvements in household income or increasing
the availability of real paid work.
Psychological fundamentalism—also evident in the burgeoning
well-being industry—together with the rise of psychological conditionality, has
a very direct impact on the lives of people claiming welfare benefits. This
impact has barely been documented and highlights the need for deeper research
scrutiny and more pressing questions about relationships between psychology and
the medical humanities.
1 comment:
It shows you the 'left' and 'right', are identical.
Stalin: "if you don't work you don't eat".
Thatcher; no such thing as a free lunch!
Bit rich from Mrs thatcher seeing as she married a millionaire!!!
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