This issue of Futures of Work has been guest edited by Richard Machin, Associate Professor in Social Policy at Nottingham Trent University, and Annie Harper, Assistant Professor in the Yale School of Medicine’s Program for Recovery and Community Health.
This series of articles addresses the intersections between employment, welfare systems, poverty and debt. How do societies address poverty and tackle the shifts taking place in labour markets that make work less attainable, less remunerative and less predictable – particularly for people with disabilities? How do we manage the associated rise in personal debt? Are our welfare systems up to the task of giving people the support they need not simply to survive but also to flourish as our economies change? How have neoliberal political economic norms and policies impacted work and welfare, and what does the future hold as those norms and policies shift? The articles are from writers living and working in both the United Kingdom and the United States. While the contexts are different, there are significant overlaps in experiences and challenges faced, as well as in pathways to a fairer work environment.
The pieces by Reynolds, Herring and Eaton address the issue of disability benefit systems. All three discuss the experiences that people with disabilities have as they navigate complex systems that have onerous application and redetermination processes, assume throughout that applicants and recipients are malingering to avoid work, and provide too little money for people to live. They explore policies that on the one hand valorise and, in theory at least, support people to return to work, but on the other hand present a financial calculus that makes going back to work extremely difficult. These complex, punitive and contradictory systems not only leave people with incomes that they can barely survive on, but in many cases keep people out of the very work that could improve their quality of life both emotionally and financially, and end up making people more vulnerable due to stress, anxiety and shame.
Dayaram’s piece addresses the ways in which people survive when they don’t earn enough to live on, through taking on debt and suffering mental health problems as a result. The debt burdening those whom she and other advisors seek to assist is caused by an economic system that leaves a gap between income and expenses. Despite a system that exists in theory to provide guidance and support, even while that debt is increasing and becoming more complex, there are fewer resources available to advise people. Dayaram focuses on the immediate issue of helping people manage debt but recommends more upstream policies to reduce its burden. In their piece, Herring & Harper draw attention to a specific type of debt that arises directly from the contradictory logic of disability benefits, whereby people struggling to navigate the thorny wilderness between reliance on benefits and employment often find themselves having received an ‘overpayment’ of benefits, such that they end up in debt to the government.
The supported employment programmes that are key to the valorisation of work inherent to these disability benefit systems are themselves deeply problematic. Hall describes how as the disability system in the UK intensifies the demand that people with disabilities ‘go back to work’, the supported employment workforce that is supposed to bring this about is itself poorly supported. She discusses the potential for a different approach under the newly elected government, which is more holistic and harnesses local knowledge. However, she voices concern that ‘conditionality-led action’ is ineffective and that significant systemic change is required to check economic inactivity (for example, in the National Health Service and social care). Evans addresses this issue in the US context, showing how even the best-supported employment programmes cannot change the fact that the jobs available to people with disabilities typically offer a low wage, with little job security. The premise of supported employment, that working is good for a person’s self-esteem and wellbeing, is not realised in our current economy.
Evans also draws attention to the larger structural context shaping supported employment programmes, describing the neoliberal economic policies that need a ‘reserve army’ of workers to function, a role that people with disabilities are forced to play. Atterbury’s piece takes this a step further, considering how the rise in Artificial Intelligence is transforming the neoliberal labour market. Atterbury looks to the future, arguing that the jobs taken by AI will increasingly deny even the precarious jobs that supported employment directed to people with serious mental illness. In theory, having AI take on insecure jobs is a good thing, but when people are demeaned or excluded by the labour market, they need some other way to sustain themselves. And even though precarious jobs are problematic, they do offer people a means of social connection. As AI takes over, this will be lost.
What is to be done? The articles by Eaton and Cooper & Perry highlight the importance of having people with lived experience play leading roles in advocacy efforts to change policy and create new systems. Eaton describes the ways in which those struggling to navigate so-called benefit cliffs – whereby a person receiving assistance may lose that assistance entirely if their income fluctuates – are engaging in direct advocacy with elected representatives. Cooper & Perry use the example of the Salford Poverty Truth Commission that resulted in important changes in Salford council policy – improved debt-recovery systems, help for people in debt, waiving of the fee for birth certificate copies – came through the leadership of people with lived experience.
Hall, Dayaram and Cooper & Perry express some hope that as governments change, policies will improve – specifically in the UK, where at the time of writing a new Labour government has just come into power. But Reynolds, also writing in the UK, is less hopeful. And as the articles by Evans and Atterbury make clear, the structural causes of the problems – neoliberalism and, more recently, the rise of AI – cross party lines in both countries.
Richard Machin is an Associate Professor in Social Policy at Nottingham Trent University. He specialises in social security, financial wellbeing and poverty. Before moving into academia, he managed a local authority welfare rights and money advice service.
Annie Harper has a PhD in Social Anthropology and is Assistant Professor in the Yale School of Medicine’s Program for Recovery and Community Health where she studies the intersections between finances, poverty and mental health.
Image credit Nik via Unsplash