Lucian Freud painted Sue Tilley, a job centre employee, four times between 1994 and 1996. The most famous product of the relationship is ‘The Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ (1995), now in the possession of Roman Abramovich. The large oil painting depicts the life-sized obese naked body of white, middle-aged, short-haired Tilley, asleep on a tattered sofa. The painting is difficult to interpret, its representation of Tilley ambivalent in both political and gender terms. It is part of what might be seen as the project of Freud’s work, to reduce the human body to an un-idealised mass of flesh. That project culminated in the famous official portrait, ‘HM Queen Elizabeth II’ (2000–2001), in which the kitsch realism conventional in such patriotic exercises is supplanted by an unkindly masculinising fleshliness or meatiness of the sovereign’s face. The equivalent subversion in ‘The Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ is of the tradition of the idealised female nude. One thinks of the Velázquez ‘Rokeby Venus’, vandalised in the National Gallery by the suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914. In its refusal of the history of art’s traditional idealising gaze, Freud’s painting opens itself up to a feminist appropriation, perhaps even a celebration of the assertive presence of expansive human substance. But at the same time, the potential for misogyny in the painting is difficult to avoid. Misogyny’s canonical writers – from Jonathan Swift to Martin Amis – refused to idealise female flesh too, and surely we are being invited to find Tilley disgusting. But the painting doesn’t tell us to feel any such thing. If you’re disgusted, that’s on you. The painting is one of those artworks where the effect is derived not from its committing to a particular prejudice ‘internally’, as part of an aesthetic convention with established rules, but from wagering that prejudice exists ‘out there’ in its viewer.1 That’s its tension. No one gets to feel neutral about another person’s body.
‘The Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ is an exemplary visualisation of désœuvrement: the philosophical concept of worklessness discussed in the previous chapter. In its resistance to the idealising sublimation of the traditional nude, it gestures to an absence of the work, in the sense that it refuses the status of the work of art as great masterpiece or object of classical beauty. In its content meanwhile, it seems pulled between two political positions on the idea of worklessness in the sense of unemployment. On the one hand, a ‘left’ reading might see the benefits supervisor as an allegory for the hypocrisy of a system that demands we work, while being the very image of physical idleness itself. As Walter Benjamin observed, in Franz Kafka’s fictions, government workers are always somehow lazy, grubby, and sloppily turned out, such ‘that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites’.2 And isn’t there something of Kafka in the way the lumpy body and the lumpy sofa resemble each other? Gregor Samsa woke up as an ‘enormous vermin’; Tilley wakes up as an enormous sofa. A right-wing viewer of the painting could be drawn to the benefit supervisor’s maternal hand apparently offering her breast in her sleep, making her the bad, overbearing mother representing the nanny state (and, perhaps, at the same time, the benefits-dependent single mother, the bête noire of then-Prime Minister, John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ agenda). Simultaneously, in her near-foetal position she is another avatar of the moralisation of worklessness: the obese child, bloated out of proportion on junk food by her irresponsible parents.
Tilley worked for job centres around north and central London between 1978 and 2015. Her career began just prior to the transformation in the status of employment in political discourse in the West that characterised the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, and ended, as far as Britain is concerned, on the eve of the new Conservative majority government’s shambolic rolling out of ‘Universal Credit’: an approach aimed at merging tax credit for the low waged with unemployment and incapacity benefits.3 As for the painting, Tilley sat for Freud over the years just prior to New Labour’s 1997 victory, and we suggest that the ambivalences we have identified in the paintings are shared in the political status of unemployment in that moment more generally.
As Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon wrote at the time, these years marked the culmination of a long change in the notion of ‘dependency’. In the seventeenth century, the independence of ‘out-of-doors’ (non-resident) servants made them an object of anxiety (‘much as the anomalous “dependence” of “welfare mothers” does today’). In the industrial era, by contrast, ‘those who aspired to full membership in society would have to distinguish themselves from the pauper, the native, the slave, and the housewife’ – each now figured as avatars of a newly undesirable concept of dependency – ‘in order to construct their independence’, now the most desirable of conditions. While the paternalism of both high industrial and post-war welfare regimes could find ways of seeing the dependency of certain groups as proper and normative (the wife and children as ‘dependants’ within the family for instance), Fraser and Gordon argued the neoliberal 1980s and 1990s were eroding all positive cognates for the term, and indeed adding new negative ones. By a sleight of semantics, in the new discourse of chemical, drug, and alcohol dependency, dependency as an economic category became interchangeable with a pharmacological one.4 We see this fudge completed today in the discourse of ‘benefit dependency’, an economic-cum-psychological category some have gone as far as to figure as a neurologically inscribed and hereditable one, to be resolved only by controls on the reproductive rights of the unemployed.5
Yet despite the ideological contribution they and their outriders made to the representation of unemployment in the 1980s and early 1990s – and despite their policies’ substantially increasing it – the right-wing governments of the period were actually conspicuous for their failure to substantially alter the structure of welfare.6 The welfare queen was a favoured folk devil and justification for harsh cuts in the Reagan presidency, while Thatcherism was associated with a ‘get on your bike and look for work’ callousness towards the mass unemployment its policies created. But despite a devaluing of benefits and tightening of eligibility, the Thatcher years actually represented the peak of unconditional benefits paid by the state in Britain, including for the unemployed.7 The first wave of neoliberalism’s pursuit of the monetisation and marketisation of all spheres of life stumbled, then, at désœuvrement’s final hurdle: unemployment itself. Instead, in the US and parts of Europe, it fell to historical parties of the left to oversee this last push against welfare, as the jewel in the crown of their conversion to neoliberal orthodoxy: framed as the condition for their returning to power after long spells out of government. For Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, the stated plan was to ‘end welfare as we know it’; Tony Blair’s New Labour – our focus in the next section – ‘pushed the institutional “reform” of the welfare state to much deeper levels than even the Thatcher and Major governments’.8 And in Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s SPD pursued an equivalent programme of reforms, ‘Agenda 2010’ and ‘Hartz IV’, in the early 2000s.
New Labour came to power proposing a set of ‘New Deal’ programmes – for lone parents, for those on disability benefits, for the young – combining compulsory training, work programmes, and some sanctions that were intended to be balanced by a new minimum wage and greater state funding for childcare. ‘Jobseeker’s Agreements’ had been introduced at the end of the John Major government, initiating the recategorisation of unemployed people as ‘jobseekers’ that would define subsequent policy. From now on, payment of benefits would be highly conditional, and the state of being unemployed would be redesigned to be more like a job. While our account of the ideological basis for these changes is critical, it would be callous to underestimate how miserable being unemployed can be, and there were clearly those in New Labour who were perfectly well-intentioned about wishing to improve the chances of the marginalised. At the same time, it is hard to see how a party that had ruled out any rollback of the neoliberal restructuring of the economy since the late 1970s could have effectively intervened in the lives of people whose traditional job opportunities had disappeared. Lacking tools for more systemic intervention into the kind of work that was actually available, New Labour fell back on an inchoate, depoliticised, and sometimes euphemistic vocabulary clustered around the idea of ‘jobseeking’ that established conditions for damaging and illiberal effects that would only reach their full scale later on. As our critique runs, first, the party worked to a basically mystifying norm of ‘community’ and – in a repetition of the habit pointed out by Jean-Luc Nancy – made work identical with membership of it. Second, in characteristically neoliberal fashion, it tried to use welfare policy as a lever to create a new kind of subject capable of navigating conditions it claimed to be powerless to alter, even as it conspired to perpetuate those conditions.
A basic conflict and discrepancy between the two aspects of the ‘Blair philosophy’ – its ‘communitarian side’ and its ‘modernising, targeting, moralising streak’ – was observed early on by the cultural critic Stuart Hall. Hall remarked:
[I]t is difficult to believe fervently in ‘the politics of community’ and at the same time to hold unshakably to the view that the task of government is ‘to help individuals to help themselves’, especially when the ways of implementing each so often point in diametrically opposed directions.9
The entrance price for returning to the New Labour community was to consent to be transformed into the most aggressively anti-communitarian entrepreneurial subject. While community became New Labour’s ‘key leitmotif’ and ‘key collective abstraction’, its binary opposite was ‘social exclusion’, a reformulation of long-term unemployment analogous to the redefinition of the unemployed as jobseekers.10 In Ruth Levitas’s analysis, the way in which the concept of social exclusion was adopted into New Labour’s armoury and – after 2000 – into that of the European Union introduced a vagueness as to which intellectual tradition’s use of the idea was being invoked by any given politician or group. In its academic origins, social exclusion had belonged to a broadly left ‘redistributionist discourse’, a broadly right ‘moral underclass discourse’, as well as a continental ‘social integrationist discourse’ focused on citizenship and work. Each tradition agreed that the social impact of poverty extended beyond simply having a low income, but had entirely different (and highly conflictual) ideas about what this impact consisted of, and how it could be remedied.11
This blurring of the term’s political meaning had far-reaching ideological effects. The characteristic managerial jargon in the naming of New Labour’s new ‘Social Exclusion Unit’ provided cover for the fact that it sometimes drew on the more dehumanising and victim-blaming frame of the ‘moral underclass’ tradition. A key voice of this trend was the American political scientist Charles Murray, whose view that certain kinds of poverty are genetic in origin (meaning that welfare programmes are bound to fail) and that – on average – lower IQ scores for black people are biologically inherent, did not prevent him being critically welcomed by elements in the New Labour milieu.12 Certainly, his essentialising and biologising ‘underclass’ vocabulary dominated representations of the party’s policies in the British media. A further problem was that the metaphor of social exclusion in general falsely implied a main ‘included’ body of society that was suffering no such problems, when in fact inequality among the ‘in’ group of the employed was considerable and growing, and the divide between many of the ‘included’ and the definitely ‘excluded’ was highly porous. As for ‘community’ – both the cure for the excluded and their projected destination – anyone who tried to be specific about what it entailed ended up resorting to what Richard Seymour describes as ‘the values of a provincial fifties suburb’.13 Concerned talk of a withdrawal from citizenship on the part of the long-term unemployed was also self-fulfilling, for it licensed the extra-legal and illiberal criminalisation of everyday life on estates and in town centres in the form of curfews and Antisocial Behaviour Orders, alienating and stigmatising the ‘excluded’ yet further. Fear that such people had slipped out of the citizenry justified treating them as less than citizens. As such, in what Richard Power Sayeed has represented as a consistent pattern in New Labour rhetoric, ideas with a partially radical and left-wing heritage were transformed into a cover for de-politicising or even actively reactionary tendencies.14
As Peter Mandelson summarised the approach, it was ‘about more than poverty and unemployment. It [was] about being cut off from what the rest of us regard as normal life’.15 But what counts as ‘normal life’ is not a static given. Rather, it is under continuous construction and reinforcement. The problem might be better understood with reference to Anthony Giddens, the celebrated sociologist who, as one of New Labour’s ‘few intellectual ornaments’, did most to provide the appearance of intellectual substance to Blair’s broadly opportunistic programme.16 Giddens’s pre-New Labour works already anticipated its distinctive Weltanschauung. ‘In conditions of high modernity’, Giddens wrote in 1991, ‘we all not only follow lifestyles, but in an important sense are forced to do so – we have no choice but to choose … [and] the more post-traditional the setting in which an individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking’.17 In contrast to the ‘subcultures’ posited by Birmingham School cultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s, there is little possibility that Giddens’s ‘lifestyles’ might be actively altered by those who end up living them: they are simply imposed by a ‘post-traditional’ culture presented as unchangeable fact. Similarly, while hinting at the coercive violence of a system where ‘we have no choice but to choose’, Giddens does not make the qualification – as David Harvey does in his analysis of neoliberalism – that within such a system we ‘are not supposed to choose to construct strong collective institutions (such as trade unions) … [and] most certainly should not choose to associate to create political parties with the aim of forcing the state to intervene in or eliminate the market’.18
Applied to welfare, such a one-sided theory of the relationship between culture and subject could only conclude that an ‘overbearing welfare state cannot equip individuals with the necessary capacity to navigate life successfully’ and that welfare must be recalibrated ‘to assist individuals to cope with new and changed risks’.19 Sure enough, as Tom Slater describes, under New Labour ‘workfarist policies were presented as “options” where “client groups” could “rationally choose” what they felt was best for them, even if to “stay at home on full benefit”, to use the words of Gordon Brown, was not an option’.20 If life in New Labour’s ‘high modernity’ could indeed feel like a whirl of lifestyles, in which it was ‘psychologically crucial’ for subjects to adopt the ‘protective cocoon’ of continuous ‘risk profiling’ to be able to choose between, it said more about the party’s obsession with imposing a simulacrum of consumer ‘choice’ in more and more spheres of life, than about any normative accuracy of Giddens’s theory.21
In practice, qualifying the unemployed to navigate ‘risk’ involved ‘cocooning’ them in micro-management, as well as the transformation of non-work into a kind of para-work. Benefits officers like Sue Tilley were re-branded as ‘personal advisers’, ‘whose job entail[ed] monitoring and liaising with claimants to speed their return to paid employment’, alongside private firms paid to run training schemes.22 The unemployed were literally ‘put to work’, in that the management of their activities became yet another hitherto unmonetised sphere of life newly opened out to private capital extraction. As Ivor Southwood describes, the experience of unemployment itself was ‘turned into a pastiche of a job, complete with mock workplace, clocking in and out times, and managers to report to’.23 This change could be seen as a formalisation of the ‘work-for-labour’ that to a greater or lesser extent always surrounds labour: the work performed by a worker in order to be in a position to sell her labour on the labour market in the first place. Only now, it was endowed with the formality of a boss, a workplace, and – in the implicit redefinition of benefits themselves – a wage.24
Slater outlines the ‘substantial interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical literature’ that has found that the American welfare reforms that provided the model for these changes in the UK ‘do not lift people out of poverty, but rather remove them from welfare rolls, expand dramatically the contingent of the working and non-working poor, and affect their daily existence negatively in almost every way imaginable, aggravating extant class, racial and gender fractures in society’.25 As we argue in this chapter’s final section, such effects have come to be realised under subsequent governments to an extent that justifies a totally new vocabulary for talking about employment and unemployment.
In Patrick Kack-Brice’s horror movie Creep (2014), an aspiring film director takes a job advertised online, which requires him to drive out to a woodland cottage to make a memorial film for a purportedly terminally ill employer to leave as a message to his unborn son. The ‘found footage’ is what the viewer sees. The employer’s eccentric behaviour becomes more and more troubling as the job proceeds, and suffice to say, the film concludes with the employer – revealed as a serial killer – closing the door on a cupboard full of DVDs of victims who have effectively been tricked into creating the films of their own deaths. Creep thus reverses the logic of the founding texts of such meta-horror movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (both 1960). Whereas the scandalous intimacy between the camera and the killer’s gaze in those films had the effect of equating cinema and murder (rather literally in Peeping Tom: the murderer’s blades are attached to a camera which is used to capture his victims’ final moments), in Creep it is the hidden workers of film-making itself who are the quarry.
A kind of meta-cinema, then, Creep is in some ways less cinematic than a real-life American case it subtly recalls. In 2011, Richard Beasley, a down-on-his-luck preacher fleeing prostitution and drug charges, decided to find a new way to support himself in the informal online economy increasingly normalised since the financial crash.26 Advertising on Craigslist – a platform for anonymised adverts for goods and services – Beasley claimed to be seeking a permanent caretaker for a secluded Ohio farm, ‘used mainly as a hunting preserve, overrun with game’, with ‘a stocked three-acre pond’, ‘some beef cattle’, and the ‘nearest neighbour a mile away’. Beasley met with candidate after candidate out of the hundred-plus who applied, screening for age, close family, and how connected to their communities they were. One at a time, the successful candidates were instructed to meet Beasley and a young accomplice, bringing with them a vehicle and any portable property of value. Beasley killed three men that way (another escaped), selling whatever they brought. The crime represented a strange nexus of forces coinciding at that moment. Both murderer and victim were in some way products of the post-2008 recession, or were at least moved to a certain recklessness by its conditions; and both were taking up the new digital ‘platform’ economy’s invitation to find business in otherwise inaccessible relationships. Beasley might even have claimed to be acting like a perfect gig economy entrepreneur. His algorithm-like identification of a huge reserve army of unskilled, unemployed, middle-aged white men, unmarried or divorced, missed by no one, and desperate to believe in the impossible American pastoral he conjured, was also in some ways vindicated by later events.27 This was exactly the constituency to which Donald Trump appealed, tipping the balance against the Democrats in Ohio and Rust Belt states like it.
A hipster in his thirties, Creep’s fictional victim seems far from Beasley’s forgotten men, and the difference is compounded in Creep 2, where the protagonist is a young YouTuber who responds to the serial killer’s unnerving invitation in the hope of getting some good content for her flailing channel. Yet the comparison of these three positions implied in Creep’s twist on the Beasley case sets up a pattern of precariousness and personal vulnerability that cuts across generational and class lines. Coding the movie as a fiction of the platform capitalism recession also gives it a surreptitious answer when the viewer makes the cries conventional to all horror movie audiences as the tension builds: ‘why is he staying?!’, ‘you’d just leave wouldn’t you?!’, ‘get out while you can!’. In the gig economy, it can be difficult to say ‘I would prefer not to’ to a job, however strange, risky, or impossible.
In November 2011 – days before Beasley’s arrest in Akron, Ohio – Occupy Wall Street supporters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park were performing a group reading of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), the canonical American short story and totem text for the anti-work movement.28 The story depicts an odd and withdrawn law clerk who bewilders the employer-narrator one day by refusing to perform any task he is commanded to do, repeatedly and simply replying: ‘I would prefer not to’. This foundational refuser of work is discovered to be secretly living in the law offices he refuses to labour in (in Zuccotti Park they said he was ‘occupying’ them), which eventually leads to his arrest and death in prison. Finally, the narrator-employer hears that Bartleby had previously worked in a ‘Dead Letter Office’, responsible for destroying letters whose recipients, unbeknownst to the sender, were already dead when the letter arrived. Was Bartleby’s subsequent career the result of the trauma of this most harrowingly alienated of labours? The text prefers not to commit, though Melville periodically implies that the bourgeois employer-narrator – for all his performance of profound awe at Bartleby’s fate – is quite out of his depth when it comes to interpreting the events of his own story.
The narrative mileage Bartleby derives from its ‘I would prefer not to’ finds a precise reversal in Creep’s resigned compliance in the face of a job offer it would be unwise to accept. Yet we should pause before claiming for Creep the novelty of an updated Bartleby for the gig economy era. The fact is that Melville’s own time already yields many examples of such fictional ‘anti-Bartlebys’. Melville’s tale of a surprising refusal of work can be read alongside this less celebrated, more surreptitious genre of stories, which take their energy precisely from characters failing or being unable to act like Bartleby and make such a refusal in the face of impossible, ridiculous, unappealing, or too-good-to-be-true kinds of work. We could include here Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, where Tom Pinch, abandoned by his exploitative employer Pecksniff, journeys to London, only to find a job offer already waiting for him. The job is described by an intermediary:
‘The salary was small, being only a hundred pounds a year, with neither board nor lodging, still the duties were not heavy, and there the post was. Vacant, and ready for your acceptance’.
‘Good gracious me!’, cried Tom; ‘a hundred pounds a year!’
The job is too good to be true, and is the weirder for the employer’s offer seeming to have come out of thin air:
‘The strangest part of the story … is this. I don’t know this man from Adam; neither does this man know Tom’.29
The gothic or sinister potential in Tom Pinch’s situation is then exploited by the several Sherlock Holmes mysteries initiated by a similar exchange:
If these people had strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few governesses in England are getting a hundred a year. Besides, what use was my hair to me? Many people are improved by wearing it short and perhaps I should be among the number. (‘The Copper Beeches’)
It seemed altogether past belief that anyone … would pay such a sum for doing anything so simple as copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (‘The Red-Headed League’)
‘We have judged it best that you should come late. It is to recompense you for any inconvenience that we are paying you, a young and unknown man, a fee which would buy an option from very heads of your profession. Still, of course, if you would like to draw out of the business, there is plenty of time to do so’.
I thought of the fifty guineas, and of how very useful they would be to me.
‘Not at all’, said I, ‘I shall be very happy to accommodate myself to your wishes’. (‘The Engineers’ Thumb’)30
There is Jonathan Harker’s increasingly awful experience in Transylvania at the start of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which nonetheless does not put him off his commission:
What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner?31
And a whole category of the ‘don’t take it’ job is the situation of many governesses with odd employers in nineteenth-century fiction, concluding with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw:
‘For several applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It sounded dull – it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his main condition’.
‘Which was – ?’
‘That she should never trouble him – but never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone’.32
As we saw in Chapter 1, the industrial era is often associated with an increasing standardisation of employment in the West; yet these examples suggest the period’s fascination with the plentiful hinterland of exploitative, unaccountable forms of short-term employment. The platform capitalist gig economy, and the fictions that come with it, have brought these nineteenth-century beginnings to their conclusion. You can disappear from work. Your work can make you disappear. And Bartleby can’t say no.
Occupy’s joyful group reading was the latest in a long line of activists and philosophers who have taken strength from Bartleby’s heroic passivity and wrongfooting of his employer.33 And yet as Southwood has noted, we should today have more reservation about throwing ourselves in with Bartleby’s example.
If Bartleby had been an agency worker the fiction would have turned out rather differently. If one fancifully imagines a temporary data enterer who preferred not to perform the tasks assigned to him, this would present today’s office manager with no such terrible insight.34
At a time of the complete disposability of the worker, the ‘bullshit’ nature of much of our work (‘copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica’), and the vulnerability – as Beasley’s victims found – that this imposes on us, it may be that the ‘other’ tradition of anti-Bartlebys constitutes the one we should be turning to. Bartleby dies. But not without claiming the obsessed fascination of his employer, colonising the very speech of everybody around him (all the characters end up compulsively using the verb ‘prefer’), and positioning himself as one of the great objects of interpretive labour in American literature.35 It is not so, as our next section proposes, for the Bartlebys of today.
Malemployment and disemployment
In an account of factory life in Bolton, Lancashire in the 1890s, the journalist C. Allen Clarke reflects:
[E]re the speed of the machinery was accelerated to the present pitch, the spinners had time for a chat, and even a nap at their work; while the weavers could snatch a page of reading from a book, or do knitting or sewing, but not so today. In some places they are even ‘timed’ when using the ‘conveniences’; and only allowed so many minutes for nature’s necessities, being fined if exceeding the limit fixed.
The yet-earlier forms of industrial labour Clarke looks mistily back to involve a comingling of work with our ‘personal’ selves. Today’s critiques of post-industrial labour often focus (as we do in Chapter 3) on how it demands we make use in our work of aspects of our private identities, emotions, and bodies that previous labour models left to ‘free time’. Yet in an inverted image of the all-colonising tendencies of such emotional labour today, Clarke imagines early industrial textiles as in some ways redeemed by the idea that it was not insistently separate from activities the workers would like to be doing anyway. Chatting, reading, knitting, and even napping are stitched into the working day, in an idealised balance of work and life that borders on the unalienated. Clarke contrasts this with the situation of his own late nineteenth century, which will be familiar to anyone in low-paid service work now. There is some grim scatological humour in the contrast Clarke sets up. The workers would be happy if they could bring their ‘private’ knitting and reading to work: industry responds by taking account of their shits in its profits. For Clarke, this pattern even extends to the workers’ holidays, which no longer exist in opposition to work, but have become its quasi-medicalised concomitant: ‘the factory young men … freely confessed that they saved up money for holidays, for no other purpose but that of recruiting their health in order to keep up at their work during the rest of the year’.36
In twenty-first-century Britain, we are told that more people are in work than ever, and that those few stragglers who remain out of work are being returned to productive society by a streamlined acceleration of the 1990s welfare reforms called ‘Universal Credit’. Earlier, we argued that the ideological mission of the 1990s welfare reforms was not merely to reduce the numbers of unemployed, but to eradicate the concept altogether by extending work into the condition of worklessness itself: reconceiving unemployment as just another category to be ‘put to work’ in the lifework regime. Here we claim that the material result of this is that a simple opposition between employment and unemployment – with their respective moralised cognates of success and failure, health and sickness, autonomy and dependency, prosperity and struggle – can no longer be sustained. Great numbers of people living lives that would formerly have been categorised as belonging to either state might now be better understood as existing in malemployment or disemployment.
To be malemployed is to perform work that is insufficiently remunerated to live on, anti-social, precarious, physically and mentally unhealthy, contains substantial unpaid elements, is invasive, micromanaged and undignified, and/or sustains ‘in-work poverty’: work that is, which super-charges the deleterious practices seen by Clarke in his account of factory work at the end of the nineteenth century. Our second category, disemployment, meanwhile, is the experience of those who have been removed from unemployment figures, are not collecting benefits, but who have not reappeared within the job market; those in other words, who have simply been expelled or cancelled from the official economy as such.
A decade after the financial crash of 2008, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, produced a report on the condition of Britain’s poor. It found a fifth of the population currently living in poverty and predicted that half of all children will be living in poverty by 2022 failing serious change.37 The report followed the underexposed but historically extraordinary move by Britain’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), which, based on the period 2014–2016, revised its predictions for life expectancy in Britain downward for the first time in more than a century. Between 2015 and 2017, around 70,000 people died that the ONS’s models had previously assumed would live. The first wave of deaths were older women, with older men and then all people of working age increasingly dominating the statistics year on year.38 How can we explain such destruction, when the Conservative Party’s 2017 manifesto claims both that ‘employment is at a record high’ and that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’?
Britain, in common with much of Europe, had indeed recovered its pre-crash employment levels by 2015, and unemployment continued to fall in subsequent years. Yet as Jason Heyes and others have noted, while ‘the UK government is fixated with the quantity of jobs in the economy and the rates of employment and unemployment in aggregate’, these conventional metrics ‘reveal nothing about the quality of jobs and whether they provide workers with a means of achieving an acceptable standard of living’. ‘Skills’ remains the keyword in policy conversations about how people can improve their work and get ahead, yet ‘many workers find that the skills and knowledge that they possess are not fully utilized in their jobs’.39 A great number of us are over-skilled for the de-skilled work that is actually available, and no amount of individualised retraining will magic into existence secure high-quality jobs for everyone who is qualified for them. Such ‘underemployment’, where an officially employed worker cannot get as many hours as she wants or needs, or is performing work well below the skills and training the state has encouraged her to acquire, is occurring alongside a partner phenomenon of ‘overemployment’, where workers must take more jobs or more hours than is bearable in order to sustain a minimal level of living. A similar dynamic is found in differences between earning groups. As David Frayne observes, ‘we are confronted with … a perverse situation in which the highest-ranking workers are plagued by long hours, whilst growing numbers of people suffer because their labour power is no longer useful’.40
Under/overemployment are terms gaining traction in academic analyses of work, and tend to be framed – as in Heyes’s study just quoted – as a problem of ‘well-being’, from the perspective of asking what the ‘just right’ amount of work, remuneration, and level of skill would be to keep workers happy. We suggest that a tougher approach is needed, one that identifies official indifference – or worse – to the question of whether one should be earning enough to support oneself in order to count as employed, as symptomatic of a wider phenomenon of malemployment. The concept collects what are ordinarily seen as quite separate negative phenomena. We argue that a collective term is needed to recognise these as the collective outcome of a situation where work is defined only as value extraction, or as a quasi-moral end in itself, and so leaves all questions about its purpose in our common lives to one side. Malemployment might be work falsely categorised as self-employment, so that it has all the demands of employee life, with none of the security. It might be micromanaged, as in coffee chains where workers’ emotional behaviour is constantly monitored, with collective punishment for teams with glum members; or as it is for call centre workers, who, like their industrial forebears in Clarke’s account, find their bathroom breaks put on a clock. It might be work where a layer of team leaders or supervisors – impotent and under-payed themselves – are incentivised to use the withholding of shifts and other underhand tactics to discipline colleagues.41 It might – for all the talk of the unhealthiness of unemployment – be chronically bad for our health in itself. In the UK 1.2 million people reported suffering from work-related illnesses in 2013/14, so that, as for Clarke’s factory workers, all free time (and much company money for ‘well-being’ programmes) is spent ameliorating its bad effects.42 And it might be at the heart of a perverse mini ecosystem of malemployment of its own, such as it is for those forced, as a condition of their benefits to work at foodbanks, so that they end up ‘both a foodbank user and a volunteer, … preparing food parcels for themselves’.43
Malemployment, then, brings together practices that cut across conventional class and social boundaries. But perhaps more remarkably, it also encompasses kinds of work status from both sides of the traditional employment/unemployment divide. Malemployment breaks with the conventional binary oppositions relating to employment/unemployment and creates cases where it is hard to firmly tell the difference. In malemployment, employed and unemployed alike can be made insecure, poor and unhealthy by their work and lack of it. At the bottom end, employed and unemployed can even perform exactly the same work in the same branches of the same companies, eat from the same foodbanks, and return at night to the same sheltered accommodation. For all that the political agents that have fomented these developments represent themselves as working against inefficient state intervention, both kinds of malemployment have to be subsidised by the state: directly in the benefits supplied to unpaid and unemployed workfare participants, indirectly in tax credits and other in-work benefits for the poverty-pay worker (not to mention the cost to the NHS in work-related illness).
Like New Labour in 1997, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition came to government in 2010 with a raft of new welfare measures. New Labour made inroads into the commodification of unemployment and its reconceptualisation as a kind of work in itself, but the Coalition was considerably more ambitious. Iain Duncan Smith was appointed Secretary of State for Work and Pensions following six years on the backbenches as chairman of the Social Justice Policy Group, which advanced conservative solutions to poverty. Before that, Duncan Smith had endured a short and unpopular tenure as Conservative Party leader in opposition, conspicuous for its aspiration to ‘resume’ the Thatcherite project ‘where it left off’, and – in the words of one of his shadow ministers redolent of the radical right – ‘end the serfdom of the NHS monopoly’ with a US-style private insurance system.44 In government, Duncan Smith oversaw new workfare schemes that attempted to make unemployment yet more indistinguishable from work. As these measures set in over the course of 2012, one began to see adverts for supermarket shift work with pay listed as ‘JSA [Jobseeker’s Allowance] + expenses’, workers on short-term contracts were dropped in favour of workfare participants, and recruitment freezes were imposed by companies participating in workfare schemes.45 Public outcry and concerted activism tempered sanctions for those refusing to participate in these schemes and pushed supermarkets to formally hire more of those who did. But the point is that this was a welfare regime that inaugurated itself with a programme that was at best indifferent to the obvious objection: either there is work to be done or there isn’t. And if there is, it ought to be properly paid. So much for unemployment’s resemblance to employment: to take the inverse – employment that resembles unemployment – as of 2018, 55 per cent (in London, 60 per cent) of those declared homeless and living in temporary accommodation are working.46 To be employed is no longer any guarantee against the historical living conditions of the most abject unemployment.
There is justification, then, for revising the category of unemployment as now belonging in a spectrum with employment – no longer as qualitatively separate from it – and forms of both as constituting the category of malemployment. What, though, of disemployment? One of the ironies of the direction of travel on welfare established by New Labour is that its focus on the inadequate ‘citizenship’ of the socially excluded (and ambition to restore it to them) has now been inverted, so that a kind of revocation of citizenship has become one of the welfare system’s explicit disciplinary powers. The people on whom this discipline is effected we propose to call the ‘disemployed’. Since the introduction of the National Insurance Act in 1911, the unemployed could, under special circumstances, be indirectly fined through the withholding of benefits. As of 2012, however, Duncan Smith placed sanctions at the heart of the benefits system, radically increasing the period benefits could be withheld for and the range of sanctionable offences, as well as extending sanctions from the unemployed to single parents, long-term sick, and disabled people. ‘While sanctions used to be applied to unemployed people who were held to be responsible for losing their jobs’, observes Michael Adler, ‘they are now much more concerned with the job-seeking behaviour of all claimants who are not in employment and with conformity to the administrative requirements that are imposed by personal advisers’.47 The system for adjudicating who is excluded from benefits in this way is not effective. Sanctionable offences – like assessments of the fitness of individual sick and disabled people for work – are decided by outsourced companies who are necessarily motivated by profit rather than fairness towards those in the system. In 2018 it was reported that nearly 70 per cent of claimants who appealed decisions barring them from disability benefits were successful in their claim that they had been denied wrongly. Forty per cent of those initially refused do not appeal because it would be too stressful.48
Universal Credit, the baroque system conceived to bring Duncan Smith’s initial reforms to completion, has expanded the ranks of the disemployed yet further. Southwood argues that the system ‘is designed to be impractical and convoluted and to put low-paid and unemployed claimants at risk of debt and homelessness through routine payment delays and arbitrary sanctions’.49 Alston’s comments in the UN report on the ‘digital by default’ requirements of the system seem to agree, as Alston ‘wonders why some of the most vulnerable and those with poor digital literacy had to go first in what amounts to a nationwide digital experiment’; adding that ‘we are witnessing the gradual disappearance of the post-war British welfare state behind a webpage and an algorithm’.50 Imagine for a moment that we accept the imperative to bring down the welfare bill and to encourage those who can to work; and also that we concede that the system is entirely well-intentioned and efficient. It remains impossible to reconcile the routine use of benefits sanctions – generally meaning the withdrawal of an individual’s sole income – with a belief in the liberal state’s responsibility to guarantee a baseline living standard for its citizens. Benefits cannot at once be the guaranteed baseline living standard and a legitimate lever of discipline to be withdrawn. Given how profound its implications are for the very basis of liberalism, Del Roy Fletcher and Sharon Wright note that there has been ‘surprisingly little political debate’ on this question.51 And yet the outcome is the production of a disemployed caste, who – like the many case studies in Jeremy Seabrook’s book, Cut Out: Living without Welfare (2016) – are still not in work, may be quite unable to work, but who have now been excluded from the benefits system. People, that is, who have been removed from the gaze of the ordinary economy altogether.52
So far from returning the disadvantaged to the condition Mandelson described as ‘what the rest of us regard as normal life’, the post-2012 reforms have extended the quasi-criminalisation of ordinary activities (claimants who make simple mistakes in complex bureaucratic processes are punished automatically, or have debts imposed in reprisal for overpayments made in error by the Department for Work and Pensions itself) and created a substantially new mechanism by which swathes of the population can be ejected from the legitimate economy and ‘normal life’ altogether. To draw on the work of Saskia Sassen, it is possible to frame this invention of disemployment as part of a wider crisis of the liberal order based around new kinds of ‘expulsions’:
There is a de facto redefinition of ‘the economy’ when sharp contractions are gradually lost to standard measures. The unemployed who lose everything – jobs, homes, medical insurance – easily fall off the edge of what is defined as ‘the economy’ and counted as such. So do small shop and factory owners who lose everything and commit suicide … These trends redefine the space of the economy. They make it smaller and expel a good share of the unemployed and the poor from standard measures. Such a redefinition makes ‘the economy’ presentable, so to speak, allowing it to show a slight growth in its measure of GDP per capita. The reality at ground level is more akin to a kind of economic version of ethnic cleansing in which elements considered troublesome are dealt with by simply eliminating them.53
Sassen’s work associates such expulsions of individuals performed inside economies with those performed without – wars that obliterate countries’ whole infrastructure, aggressive immigration controls and a growing relaxedness about making people stateless or separating children from parents – and the expulsions involved in land being made unliveable by climate change and more direct forms of pollution.54 Through this frame of new international manifestations of ‘expulsion’, the creation of the malemployed and disemployed in Britain could be seen as parts of the population of the developed world being pressed to join the 60 per cent of the world population that already sustain themselves outside the protections of the formal economy (most of them in the developing world).55 At home, the disemployed find an analogue in the tolerance for expulsions behind the Grenfell Tower disaster and the Windrush deportation scandal, widely attributed to the government’s policies of delegating public spending cuts to local government, and the ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policy (discussed in Chapter 1) respectively. The violence resulting from the redefinition of unemployment since the 1990s is precisely the violence Nancy identified as emerging when labour and community are treated as identical.