With unemployment on the rise again, its time to look back at the results of research undertaken in the last major wave, in the 1980s. This article was written at that time as a summary of my own research and that of several other scholars. The general pictuyre is that unemployment has costs that go beyond the financial, hitting people's social capital, psychologicalnwellbeing, and more.
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The Social Costs of Unemployment Ian Miles Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex March 1985 Paper Presented to Institute of Local Government Studies Research and Intelligence Conference, Leicester, March 1985 What Sort of Social Costs? In one use of the term, ‘unemployment’ describes the state of society, as ‘affluence’ or ‘permissiveness’ supposedly did in previous decades. As such, the perception of ours as an ‘unemployment-ridden society’ has its own consequences for everyday life. These may be both costs and benefits for political actors, for example – the standing of the governing party may be diminished, but its overall strategy of economic restructuring (with lower wages costs and labour ‘stickiness’) maintained. People who have had little first hand experience of unemployment are influenced by the general climate – thus even in a relatively prosperous part of the country young people often claim that their expectations of working life have been trimmed in order to be sure of getting a job at all.
Transcript
The Social Costs of Unemployment
Ian Miles
Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex
March 1985
Paper Presented to Institute of Local Government Studies
Research and Intelligence Conference, Leicester, March 1985
What Sort of Social Costs?
In one use of the term, ‘unemployment’ describes the state of society, as ‘affluence’
or ‘permissiveness’ supposedly did in previous decades. As such, the perception of
ours as an ‘unemployment-ridden society’ has its own consequences for everyday life.
These may be both costs and benefits for political actors, for example – the standing
of the governing party may be diminished, but its overall strategy of economic
restructuring (with lower wages costs and labour ‘stickiness’) maintained. People who
have had little first hand experience of unemployment are influenced by the general
climate – thus even in a relatively prosperous part of the country young people often
claim that their expectations of working life have been trimmed in order to be sure of
getting a job at all.
There has been considerable political debate around these issues, and a number of
attempts to estimate, say, the degree to which political attitudes have been changes, or
wage demands have been inhibited. But the research literature into social costs of
unemployment usually views ‘unemployment’ in less global terms. It deals with
unemployment as a circumstance of specific individuals (or, sometimes, families or
communities). The incidence and nature of unemployment is of course seen as being
related to broader political-economic developments – but its specific conditions are
also related to features of the persons immediately involved. Instead of thinking of
the costs of unemployment in terms of amounts of benefit expended, and productive
labour unutilised, the focus is on the experience of the individuals involved.
It is with this second sense of ‘unemployment’ that I will be concerned here, mindful
that while this makes it possible to draw on more precise methods of social research,
the other sense of the term is also highly significant. The social costs of
unemployment can be thought of as rippling out from the impact on the unemployed
person (figure 1) – to her or his family and social network, to the wider community.
The conditions of unemployment can be thought of as threefold. Most obvious are
the economic dimensions: unemployed people tend to have incomes depresses below
the norm, their families tend to be poorer, and their communities thus suffer from an
absence of spending power, with concomitant effects upon the availability of
marketed services1. There are important social dimensions, too: people gain status
from having jobs (even traditionally ‘low-status’ jobs are often better than none at
all), while the treatment that is meted out by some bureaucracies to unemployed
people follows the classic pattern of stigmatisation – and some politicians and media
sources continue to lambast ‘scroungers’. And, not surprisingly, there are
psychological dimensions, such as the experience of continuing insecurity and
uncertainty, and the sense of failure associated with repeated job rejections and the
like.
Mischievous readers of the research literature on unemployment and ill-health,
sometimes raise the paradox that much research has demonstrated that work, too, is
dangerous for one’s health. Are we damned if we do and damned if we don’t work,
then? The paradox begins to disappear, however, when we take into account the fact
that the factors mentioned above are also ones that characterise poor employment, the
jobs that are generally held to be most damaging to health. Poor wages, conditions of
subordination and lack of control, and stress generated by uncertainty of monotony,
are indicative of a poor quality of working life.
This brings us to one of the main problems with interpreting statistics that seem to
bear on the costs of unemployment. The ripple analogy outlined above may conjure
up the picture of pebbles being tossed into a pond – with the main questions being
how many pebbles there are (the level of unemployment) and how much of a splash
1 The special chapter on unemployed people in the 1984 edition of Social Trends provides statistics on the income and expenditure of households with and without unemployed members, and it is in general a useful up-to-date compilation of statistics on the circumstances of unemployment. Davies et al (1982) provides a good analysis of ‘incomes in and out of work’.
2
3
Figure 1
The ‘Impacts’ of Unemployment
TIME
Relations Change Over Time: Unemployment Affects Transitions
Wider Community
Friends FamilyUnemployed Person
Economic
Psychological Social
each one makes (the degree of ‘impacts’). But the picture is more complicated, for
the pebbles do not fall randomly into the pond. Some people are more prone to
become, and to stay, unemployed than are others. To some extent this may reflect
their ‘personal characteristics’ (health history, work attitudes, educational
qualification, etc), but to a large extent it reflects broader features of their labour
market location (region lived in, industrial sector worked in, etc).
The practical consequence is, predictably enough, that unemployment tends to be
concentrated among those people who are already most likely to be vulnerable to the
social costs of economic change – because of working for low wages, in poor working
conditions, and living in poor housing and other environments. This makes it rather
difficult to assess the costs of unemployment directly – they are heavily entangled
with the unequal distribution of well-being that already exists in our society (figure 2).
Thus becoming and staying unemployed is more likely to happen to, roughly, younger
and older members of the working age population, unskilled manual workers (and, for
women, clerical workers), some ethnic minorities, and, of course, inhabitants of
depressed areas. And to talk of the unemployed as if these people were a
homogenous mass is misleading for another reason, too. At any time there are flows
into and out of unemployment – while around a third of people currently recorded as
unemployed have been so for a year or more, another substantial proportion have only
been unemployed for a brief period, and many of these are perhaps better described as
‘sub-employed’, being between jobs2. (But some unemployed people ‘flow-out’ in
other ways – into categories of ‘invalid’ or ‘dead’ – and may thus depress the
statistical association between unemployment and ill-health.) There are different
experiences of unemployment, and different types of unemployed person – the costs
of unemployment, then, are unlikely to be evenly spread even among unemployed
people.
2 The most informative study of unemployment flows is Daniel (1981); for recent data see Employment Gazette (1983); for an analysis of long-term unemployment, White (1983); and for a study of subemployment, relating this to local labour market experiences, Norris (1978).
4
Researching Unemployment and individual Well-Being
In the 1970s, researchers were often concerned with the ‘stages of unemployment’
which supposedly led to discouragement and reduced motivation to look for jobs;
more recently, despite the problems in disentangling these various factors, a large
volume of research has sought to investigate the links between unemployment and
individual well-being. Researchers have particularly focussed on physical and
psychological health. Almost without exception, studies indicate considerable
impacts of unemployment on psychological well-being. The links to physical health –
except insofar as this directly influenced by health-endangering behaviours like
parasuicide – appear to be weaker, but there is enough evidence of a relationship for
the World Health Organisation to take it very seriously, and for the consensus view in
a number of sponsored workshops to be that such relationship does exist3. It has thus
been forcefully pointed out by a number of researchers that there is no justification for
orienting policies other than on the presumption that unemployment does have non-
economic costs for the individual concerned.
Let us briefly outline a number of research strategies and examine how they have
contributed to our knowledge of these issues (figure 3). Research can be carried out
at the aggregate level, or it can centre on individual differences; it can be cross-
sectional or study changes over time; and it can utilise professional diagnoses or self-
reports. The more that different strategies support the same conclusions, the more
confident we may be in the latter.
The best-known exponent of aggregate studies is Brenner, although his approach has
been followed by several other researchers – some very critical of his conclusion.
Brenner uses time-series analysis, and data from professional sources. He examined
national statistics spanning several decades, and found evidence that showed a linkage
between levels of unemployment at one period and mortality rates at a somewhat later
period. Some commentators regarded this as statistical trickery – although the fact
that extremely similar relationships have been established for a range of countries
3 The W.H.O. has sponsored several large workshops at which papers and research results were exchanged, for example a meeting in Lidingo, Sweden in December 1983, whose proceedings are to be published in Social Science and Medicine; proceedings of an earlier symposium are available as John et al (1983).
5
6
Figure 2
Factors Confounding Relationships Between Unemployment and Well-Being
Social and Spatial Aspectsof Labour Market Segmentation
‘Peripheral’ Jobs, Lower Wages, Lower Security
Vulnerable Social Groups
Likelihood of Losing Job
Likelihood of Lengthy Unemployment
Experience of UnemploymentPoverty, Social Disadvantages, Poor Living Conditions
Financial AspectsNon-financial Aspects
Poor HealthLowered Well-Being
7
Sociological Processes
*a UNEMPLOYMENT LEVELS
*b INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE OF UNEMPLOYMENT
*c INDIVIDUAL HEALTH CONSEQUENCES
*d IMPACTS ON WELFARE SERVICES
Figure 3
Strategies of Research Into Costs of Unemployment
1) A. Aggregate Analysis - Uses National of Regional Data on Incidence of Unemployment, Mortality etcvs
B. Individual-Level Analysis - Relates Individual Differences in Economic Status and Well-Being
2) A. Cross-Sectional Studies - Compare Different Individuals or Groups at One Point in Timevs
B. Time-Series Analysis - Focuses on Trends and the Impacts of Changesvs
C. Intervention Studies - Attempts to Intervene in Developments
3) A. Professional Judgements - Uses Routine or specially Requested Data from GPs, Coroners etcvs
B. Self-Report - Uses Self-Completion Questionnaire or conventional Survey Interviews
*a
Typical Research Strategies
*d
1A2B3A
1B2A, (2B)3A, (3B)
1B2A(2B)(2C)3A
does make it unlikely that Brenner has, in effect, simply juggled the figures to
produce a more or less neat, but meaningless, match. Nevertheless, there are still
problems: some replications have failed to confirm the original results for slightly
different time periods, and it is unclear in any case who is bearing the social costs of
economic fluctuations. (For example, the heightened mortality rate might reflect an
intensification of work which managements can more readily achieve in times of
higher unemployment – thus it may not be unemployed people themselves bearing
these costs.) While Brenner’s work forms part of the patchwork of evidence, it would
not seem to be justified, at our present level of understanding, to follow him in
asserting that a 1% increase in unemployment will lead to an increase in mortality
(some 17,000 extra deaths per year), nor that it is reasonable to compute the costs to
the health service of such an increase.4
The great majority of studies have concerned individual differences: the health status
of employed and unemployed people are contrasted; most often this has involved
cross-sectional analysis, although there have been a number of studies where
individuals have been tracked over time.
Cross-sectional analyses regularly show considerable differences in well-being
between employed and unemployed people, and these differences are not abolished
when statistical controls are applied (to take into account variations in age,
occupational background, etc so that as far as possible like individuals are contrasted).
Many of these studies are based on sample surveys of one sort or another, although
Stokes made use of a more ‘quasi-experimental’ approach – he found that
psychological well-being was much more depressed among the redundant workers
from a closed factory in Bradford than among continuing employees of a similar
factory5. Like most of the studies, Stokes used self-report or interview measures,
where the respondents answered a set of standard questions about themselves. Some
studies have used professional judgements, however, as was the case in analyses
4 Brenner’s original US studies (eg Brenner, 1973) were extended to the UK (1979) and to a larger sample of countries (1984), while his estimates of the costs of unemployment were presentes in brenner (1976). A review of several aggregate-level studies is Dooley and Catalano (1980). Critical replications of Brenner’s work reaching divergent conclusions, are Stern (1981) and Mcavinchey (1983).5 Stokes (1981)
8
based on the Regional Heart Survey study carried out by GPs6. Perhaps the most
telling professional judgement of all concerns ‘cause of death’ – and the Moser et al
study7, working on the OPCS Longitudinal survey, that compares individuals who
were employed and unemployed at the time of the 1971 Census in terms of their
subsequent mortality. Although the statistical controls here leave something to be
desired, the results are striking. For one thing, they show strong associations between
mortality and a measure which only tells us whether the individual happened to be
unemployed on a particular week. And they also enable us to look at the experience
of at least one other family member, which few other studies have made possible
(figure 4).
While it is possible to control for many background factors, the suspicion may remain
that in some way it is ill-health provoking unemployment rather than vice-versa –
though even with hysteria about AIDS rampant, I am not aware of any suggestions
that current levels of unemployment are due to some ill-health epidemic. But, as
figure 2 illustrated, it is hard to disentangle cause and effect when so many factors are
entwined. Time series studies are rather more powerful as a means of addressing
questions of causality. Unfortunately, few such studies have concentrated on physical
health issues – many physical problems are unlikely to happen in a small sample over
a short time, and thus large and costly research designs are called for. Measures of
physiological stress, however, can be made over time, and Swedish and American
studies have demonstrated wide swings in these indicators over a period of job loss8.
Impressive results have emerged from time-series studies of psychological well-being.
Several studies have focussed on school-leavers, assessing their psychological
morbidity via standard self-report measures while they were at school and
subsequently. The results of these studies show that the scores of groups who gain
and fail to gain jobs diverge markedly9. It would be surprising if psychological
distress were not to eventuate in physical ill-health fairly often, but the upsurge in
unemployment research is too recent to have documented such longer-term impacts.
6 Moser et al (1984). See also the earlier Fox and Goldblatt (1982).7 Cook et al (1982)8 The famous American study by Kasl and his associates (Cobb and Kasl 1972, 1977, Kasl 1979) has recently been replicated in Sweden by Levi and his associates (eg Brenner et al, 1983). Of particular interest is that both studies report high levels of physiological stress immediately prior to job loss.9 Two main projects have addressed the situation of school-leavers using time-series data; that of Donovan et al (1983) and that of Banks and Jackson (1982), Jackson et al, (1984)
9
10
Figure 4Some Results of the OPCS Longitudinal Survey
Results for men aged 15-64, relating economic status at time of 1971 census to 1971-1981 data on mortality.
Mortality Rates of Unemployed Men
A (1) Standardized for Age Alone SMR 136 (2) Standardized for Age and Class SMR 121
B Standardized Rates of Mortality for Lung Cancer 154 Circulatory Disease 109
C Class Differences: SMR of ‘social class 1’ 103 ‘social class 5’ 124
Mortality Rates of wives of Unemployed Men 120 (Suicide 160)
Note: SMRs of 100 would be expected if the mortality rate corresponded to that of the general population, with background factors taken into account
Source: Moser et al (1984)
A large sample of the workforce in this country provided data for the National
Training Survey, and Metcalf and Nickell10, reanalysing material on individuals’ work
histories (over 1965-75) found weak associations between unemployment and major
illness – with the like in which unemployment preceded illness being stronger than
the reverse.
A substantial number of studies11, then, utilising a variety of research methods and
instruments, have demonstrated impacts of unemployment on individual welfare –
backing up, incidentally, a mountain of more qualitative reports from doctors, health
visitors, social workers and sociological researchers. The costs of economic
restructuring are thus being borne to a disproportionate extent by certain social
groups. Policy makers should be aware that these costs extend beyond the financial
hardships of unemployed people. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the costs
are not just a product of financial hardship, as we shall see.
Understanding the Costs of Unemployment
Having to make do on unemployment or supplementary benefit restricts one’s range
of activities: this alone might suffice to account for psychological malaise, with
people being unable to live according to their aspirations or have sufficient control
over their environments. A wage, too, is a token of social value, of one’s making a
useful contribution to society.
Economic hardship could be related to physical ill-health (for the whole family)
through its effects on diets, housing and access to services. These factors lead many
observers to stress the role of reduced incomes in the social costs of unemployment,
and for some to argue that is only benefits were at levels more comparable to wages
and/or living costs, all would be well.
However, there are several reasons for thinking that – while financial factors remain
critical – the social and psychological dimensions of unemployment also play an
important role. One of these is the evidence for considerable continuity over some 10 Metcalf and Nickell (1979)11 For example, Fraser (1980), Kelvin and Jarrett (1983), Mackey and Haines (1982), Miles (1984b), Spruit (1983) and Watkins (1983)
11
fifty years in the implications of unemployment for individual well-being, despite the
fact that levels of absolute poverty now are much less than in the 1930s. On the basis
of a review of the literature which led to this conclusion, Jahoda proposed that these
must be non-financial factors playing an important role12. She argues that in our
society employment provides important latent functions in addition to its manifestly
supplying a wage – and defines these functions as activity, social contacts, time
structure, collective purposes, and status (figure 5). These five ‘categories of
experience’ usually accompany the wage nexus; in our late-industrial society, few
other institutions provide them all.
My own work has, in part, been concerned with testing and elaborating upon this
account. The results of a number of cross-sectional studies confirm, first, that the five
categories of experience do vary between employed and unemployed people as
postulated – in other words, employed people report on average much higher levels of
activity, social contacts, etc. than their unemployed peers. The majority of employed
people surveyed give themselves high scores on four or five of these measures: few
unemployed people do. And, as far as we can tell, these are not just differences in
attitudes – the answers to the interview measures of the categories of experience
correlate with more direct measures based, for example, on diary records (time-
budgets) of the respondents’ activities13.
Second, our studies provide support for a supplementary hypothesis derived from
Jahoda’s analysis. Access to the categories of experience is associated with lower
levels of the psychological malaise typically experienced by unemployed people.
While cross-sectional research cannot conclusively establish whether a more buoyant
psyche leads to particular coping activities, or vice versa, the picture that emerges is
that those unemployed people who maintain high levels of activity, social contacts,
etc. perform better in terms of measures of mental health. Nevertheless, they still tend
to fall below employed people in this latter respect (figure 6).
12 Jahoda (1979, 1982); for the detailed literature review, see Jahoda and Rush (1980)13 Miles 91983a, 1984a), and a series of as yet unpublished studies currently collected together as Miles, Henwood and Howard (1984). This research has been supported mainly by the Joseph Rowntree memorial Trust.
12
Figure 5
Jahoda’s Analysis of the Impacts of Unemployment
Enduring Features of the Psychological Impacts of Unemployment
Five Categories of Experience Provided by Employment
REDUCED PARTICIPATION
REDUCED INTERACTION
DISRUPTED TIME SENSE
SENSE OF MEANINGLESS, ANOMY
LOW SELF-ESTEEM
ACTIVITY
SOCIAL CONTACTS
TIME STRUCTURE
EMBEDDING IN COLLECTIVE PURPOSES
STATUS
Thus, while this line of research does suggest that unemployed people could avoid
some of the worse impacts of unemployment by keeping themselves active – the sorts
of things that people we interviewed reported included cultural activities (theatre, rock
music), local politics (including working with the Unemployed Workers Centre),
sport and voluntary work – it would seem that this will only rarely provide the social
and psychological benefits associated with having a regular job. Furthermore, it
would mistaken to see this entirely in voluntaristic, ‘get on your bike’, terms. As
individuals, people differ in the psychological and material resources they can bring
to bear on creating themselves meaningful lives outside of employment (for example,
in one study I found that only some 15% of unemployed men actually owned
bicycles), and their social resources also differ (not only in terms of family support,
which can be very important, but also in terms of community facilities that are
available to them).
Most research on unemployment in the UK has centred on male unemployment, and
often even more narrowly on middle aged white men or school-leavers. It is in
practice difficult to undertake work comparing the experiences of men and women,
because many women ‘disappear’ from the labour market, even after losing a struggle
to maintain a full-time job14. And, while there seems to be little difference between
registered unemployed men and women in terms of psychological well-being, in
terms of the standard measures used in our research, their experiences tend to differ –
if only around the meaning of employment to their sexual identities (for men
employment is often tied to masculinity and potency, for women it often provides an
independent source of income which legitimates having their voice heard in family
decision making).
There has been little effort to integrate the psychological and medical analyses of
unemployment with what we know from other sources about unemployment flows
and the assignment of social groups to labour markets of different types. In recent
reviews of the research literature, Peter Warr15 has noted a range of factors which
14 There are no adequate critical accounts of the range of relevant experiences, but helpful guides to the scene include AEGIS (1984) and, in more of a self-help mode, Dauncey 91982, 1983)15 Verbal reports of her work by Claire callender, have been particularly illuminating here. Coyle (1984) provides a detailed account of the experience of some ‘redundant women’, while Bowlby et al (1982) survey the impacts of recession on women in two new towns. Miles et al (1984) provides comparative analysis of data on young and older men and women.
13
research indicates as differentiating between people suffering higher and lower levels
of unemployment. Age seems to be related in a U-shaped position: middle-aged
people seem to experience worse psychological health when unemployed.
Surprisingly, there is only a weak relationship between length of unemployment and
psychological ill-health (though reported physical ill-health is higher among the long-
term unemployed, probably contributing to their continued joblessness). Social class
as such appears to play little role, but financial strain and attitudes to work (namely,
how valued it is in ones’ life) are important factors. (Our research suggests these
factors may be linked together as in figure 7.)
Finally, it is important to note that while we have been focussing on social costs of
unemployment, a small proportion of people find unemployment to be beneficial.
Warr notes that up to 15% of respondents consider their health to have improved since
job loss (about half the number consider their health to have deteriorated). They
appear to be reporting both relief from bad physical working conditions (or from
existing health problems being exacerbated by work) and from psychological stress at
work. (This does not mean that these individuals are not experiencing other negative
consequences of unemployment, but treating the as ‘personal’ rather than ‘health’
problems, however. Recall that even ‘self-actualising’ unemployed men in figure 6
seem to have depressed well-being.) The point is, it is not ‘unemployment’ or
‘employment’ in the abstract that impose social costs and benefits, but particular
social circumstances: here and now, the negative circumstances are concentrated in
the experience of unemployment, but this does not mean that the are absent
elsewhere. On the one hand we need to avoid ‘medicalising’ unemployment –
portraying it as a problem of the health services (rather than a broader political
problem), and perhaps increasing the likelihood of unemployed people becoming ill
(as self-confirming prediction: if you believe something is making you ill, you may
cease to take adequate care of yourself). On the other hand, we should avoid
‘normalising’ it – by over stressing the possibilities for personal growth, and ignoring
the very real difficulties most unemployed people face.
14
Who Else Is Affected?
There is a plethora of commentary and claims, but rather little systematic
documentation, of the costs of unemployment for other individuals than those
themselves unemployed. Practically every welfare agency has argued that the
problems with which they deal have worsened as a result of high unemployment.
Often these claims are plausible, though it may by in the interests of these bodies to
engage in a measure of special pleading in a time of general economic stringency.
Sometimes their claims gain validation from other sources – for example, the
Samaritans’ suggestion of a relationship between unemployment and suicide is
supported by the finding of parasuicide rates among unemployed people almost
twenty times higher that those among employed people in Edinburgh16.
Many of these claims come from family-oriented groups: the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and marriage advisory services, for example. And
it would be remarkable if unemployment did not have implications for other
household members. But, apart from the analysis of impacts on family finances, there
have been few concerted studies. As for the purely economic issues – as noted above,
financial hardship is liable to have implications for nutrition and housing conditions,
social status and other variables – there have been a number of studies which show
that most families (even low income families) suffer notable falls in income if the
male ‘head of the household’ becomes unemployed17. Furthermore, unemployed men
with large families, while suffering the lowest drop in living standards, face most
difficulty in making ends meet, because they are already poor. More of the family
budget of unemployed people goes on basic necessities – social activities are
curtailed, and the provision of presents and ‘extras’ for school for the children is a
source of continual worry in many families.
16 Warr (1981, 1982, 1983a,b)17 Platt (1983)
15
Does this have an impact on interpersonal relationships in the family? ***18Madge19
reviewed studies of the impact of having a jobless father on children, and concluded
18 Needs sorting out19 Madge (1983). For an overview of implications of unemployment for families, see Rimmer and Popay 91982). The study carried out for the DHSS by Fagin and little (1984), on impacts of unemployment on family health, is also relevant here – even though the health Minister could summarise it as saying merely that unemployment had different effects on different people.
16
Figure 6
Relations Between Access to Categories of Experience and General Health Questionnaire Scores
-1
-9
-7
-5
-3
-1
1
3
5
Gen
eral
Hea
l th
Que
sti o
nn-
aire
Sco
res
0 1 2 3 4 5
X
X
X
XX
X
X
Access to Categories of ExperienceEmployed Men
Figure 7
Model of the Psychological Impacts of Unemployment
FINANCIAL STRESS(Money Worries)
WORK INVOLVEMENT
(WIS)ACCESS TO CATEGORIES
OF EXPERIENCE (ACE)
PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING
(GHQ)
Social Environment
Attitude and Personality Factors
that the evidence, while limited and inconclusive, did suggest that physical and
emotional stress was a likely consequence. McKee and Bell20 studied some 40
families in Kidderminster in depth: as well as conflicts related to men’s loss of the
breadwinner role, financial hardship was a source of conflict between husband and
wife21. Other stresses were noted: people ‘getting on each others’ nerves’ through
overlong occupation of the same space, especially when domestic chores were
involved: and some reduction of the wife’s range of social contacts. As in other
recent studies, little evidence was found for any breakdown of traditional sex roles.
Unemployment may have the potential to be a ‘creative crisis’ – in practice it often
seems to be associated with a lining up of threatened individuals behind established
roles, even if these are a source of stress and unhappiness.
One line of research has sought, more controversially, to document another type of
impact of unemployment – its relation with crime and ‘antisocial attitudes’. The
research to date is ambivalent on these points – except insofar as it fails to support the
popular mythology of large-scale ‘fiddling’ on the part of unemployed people.
Research using aggregate methodology like Brenner’s does suggest links between the
unemployment rate and some crimes, bur again these results are controversial, and
may reflect the effects of more general negative feelings about the future of the
community than those feelings of despair experienced by unemployed people ****22
themselves23. Furthermore, there are severe problems with crime statistics – and
unemployed people are prone to find themselves handled in a different way by police
and courts than are their employed peers.
Rather more definite relationships exist between unemployment and the local
economy. While systematic documentation is rare, there have been various accounts
of the relationship between declining employment and problems with local services, 20 Of particular interest here are the studies of Mckee and Bell (1984) and Morris (1983a,b)21 Remarkable research in the US using data originally provided in the 1940s, has been able to demonstrate increases in marital discord during periods of economic hardship confronting families – concluding this was largely due to men’s lack of adaptive resources (Elder and Liker 1983). A related study indicated, notably, that the ability of women in the late 1960s to cope with the problems of old age was related to their experiences in the 1930s (Elder and Liker, 1983). This is one of the few studies to be able to pinpoint very long-term consequences of unemployment on family members.22 Check Footnote – Morris (1983a,b)23 A study suggesting likns between youth unemployment and delinquency is Philips et al (1972); more anecdotely, links between unemployment and crime have claimed by the Association of Chief Officers of probation and Northumbria Police in recent years, as well as by numerous journalists, eg Quayle (1982)
19
and several researchers have attempted to estimate the impact on local service
employment of other job losses24.
As the ‘ripples’ of unemployed expand, it is correspondingly difficult to identify the
contribution that unemployment makes to social malaise over and above those
problems already woven into the web of social inequality. While it is surprising that
relatively little attention has been given to the families of unemployed people (and
what there has been largely looks at unemployed fathers’ families, ignoring women’s
and youth unemployment), it would be challenging to attempt to identify the role of a
factory closure in community change, for example where this is in a community based
on a single employer25. But from what evidence is available, at the very least we can
conclude that increased unemployment under present circumstances will at best
compound existing social problems.
Some Policy Issues
Unemployment poses many challenges to public service workers and local authorities.
Some of the policy initiatives that have been attempted are set out in figure 8. In
looking at the implications of unemployment for individual well-being, we hinted at
the important role that could be played by community organisations and facilities in
enabling unemployed people to gain access to activity, social contacts, etc. that they
have lost. There has been surprisingly little systematic action research or evaluation
of those attempts that have been made to provide more opportunities for action by
unemployed people. However, what we know from anecdote, and a few case studies,
suggests that attempts to develop provisions for unemployed people have been only
successful in part. They may have substantially improved the lives of their
24 For example, Benwell CDP (1983)25 Buss and Redburn (1983) study the consequences of plant closure for community mental health in US steel town; see also the classic Marienthal study (Jahoda et al, 1971)
20
Figure 8
Local Policy Initiatives Concerning Unemployment
Policies aimed at Unemployment’s:
Circumstances Consequences
Policies aimed at:
Individuals
Assistance with welfare rights and financial entitlements. Assistance with financial aspects of social services (housing, childcare, etc). Opportunities to be involved with other projects of self-help groups
Nutritional education and assistance (eg school meals). Counselling for psychological problems, and life choices. Health education: including training professionals related to unemployment
Communities
Tailoring of public facilities and services to low-income groups. Provision of cultural and leisure facilities. Provision of education facilities. Voluntary work schemes. Community workshops. Unemployed Worker’s Centres. Welfare Rights Campaigns. Public education against stigmatization of unemployed. Local job creation schemes. Improved access to Trades Unions and other campaigning organisations. Social experiments reducing restrictions on earnings for claimants.
Redirection of health and social services to areas in most need. Public health and nutrition campaigning (eg by Community Health Councils). Emergency counselling services (eg telephone hotlines). Local monitoring of health and social trends related to unemployment. Pressure for more sensitively to plight of unemployed in various public authorities and utilities (eg fuelboards). Local community support networks.
participants – but a much lower proportion of unemployed residents of the area in
question have typically taken part that was anticipated by the organisers26.
There are a number of factors possibly involved here. One is the flow aspects of
unemployment, which means that many unemployed people (often the most active)
are unlikely to remain clients of, or actors in, an organisation; while others may be
chronically uncertain of their future prospects. Under such circumstances it is
difficult to constitute a self-help group, let alone a social movement. The experiences
of job loss and unemployment themselves may lead to lowered self-esteem, less
willingness on the part of many to put themselves in situations which could result in
painful self-disclosure or possible social failures. And articulate, middle-class
‘joiners’ are less liable to find themselves unemployed: while their efforts to provide
assistance to unemployed people may be experienced by them as ‘charity’, or be
promoted in ways that quite simply fail to resonate with their interests and needs.
Thus initiatives do have to recognise the social and psychological dimensions of
unemployment. Opportunities are required for unemployed people to meet and learn
from each others’ experiences, to make use of community resources, to gain in
strength and confidence through collective action – while this need not necessarily
centre on issues directly connected with unemployment itself, and could take a variety
of political, economic of cultural forms.
But, as we have argued above, at present ‘adaptation to unemployment’ seems to be
more costly to the individual in psychological terms (let alone financial ones) than
having a job. Are attempts to improve the lot of the unemployed people no more than
palliatives that could actually impede a return to full employment – or a major
upheaval in our notions of employment and unemployment, such as a redistribution of
work? Is it not possible, rather, that strategies that can empower unemployed people
could actually enable these people to make their experiences and needs more a part of
the political effort process? Efforts to cope with the problems of unemployed people
here and now may be related to efforts to restructure employment in a more beneficial
way: cure is not always the enemy of prevention.
26 No footnote - check
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