"There's nothing”: unemployment, attitudes to work and punitive welfare reform in post-crash Salford

JEFFERY, Robert, DEVINE, Dawn and THOMAS, Peter (2018). "There's nothing”: unemployment, attitudes to work and punitive welfare reform in post-crash Salford. Sociological research online, 23 (4), 795-811.

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Abstract

This article explores attitudes and barriers to work and the impact of punitive welfare reform in the city of Salford (Greater Manchester). Contextualising our discussion in relation to the contemporary landscape of inequality and social class in the UK, we draw attention to the trends towards the expansion of low paid work, precarity and stigmatisation, and highlight the need for more qualitative, geographically sensitive, studies of how these phenomena are being played out. Describing the economic context of the City of Salford and the current state of its labour market, we then present the findings from qualitative interviews with a sample of low income, mostly working-class participants, who describe their orientations towards employment, perceptions of the labour market, barriers to employment and interactions with punitive welfare reform. Ultimately, we conclude by noting that both strategies of neoliberal statecraft aimed at the reduction of the charitable state described by Wacquant are at play in Salford and that their result is a discouragement from claiming welfare and a recommodification of labour.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Key words: unemployment, punitive welfare reform, benefits sanctions, precarity, neoliberal statecraft
Research Institute, Centre or Group - Does NOT include content added after October 2018:	Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute > Communication and Computing Research Centre
Departments - Does NOT include content added after October 2018:	Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities > Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418787521
Page Range:	795-811
Depositing User:	Robert Jeffery
Date Deposited:	13 Jul 2018 09:03
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 07:08
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/21919

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