‘The Generation Game? Family, Poverty and Unemployment’

‘Meet the families where no one's worked for THREE generations - and they don't care’

Headlines like this are not unfamiliar in the press, and newspapers and many public figures have been speaking about families with a culture of worklessness. Where do these ideas come from and are there really many families where three generations have never worked and communities where there is a culture of not working? These are particularly pertinent topics with the current changes to welfare and what is being said to justify it.

I attended the Poverty Alliance seminar on the 15^th October entitled ‘The Generation Game? Family, Poverty and Unemployment’ ,which explored these questions. We heard from three speakers and then had time to discuss with them and each other. I found it a very informative day and have outlined the key points made and discussed below.

So where does the idea of a culture of poverty come from and why is it so popular?

Dr John Welshman is a historian and the author of ‘Underclass-A History of the Excluded Since 1880’. His research has found that the idea of an underclass where worklessness is the norm is not a new concept, but one that has been reinvented many times since the early 18^th Century. In recent times in the 1970’s there was a focus on the ‘cycle of poverty’, in the 1980’s there was a debate around the idea of an ‘underclass’. The Labour Government in the 1990’s talked about the ‘socially excluded’ and in the 2010’s it switched to a discussion around ‘troubled families’. Today many policy makers talk about a small number of families being responsible for a large number of problems in society, in a similar, but much more explicit way than found previously.

Dr Welshman has identified that across all of the discussions of an underclass over the last two centuries lie key concepts. These include the belief in intergenerational continuities.  He argued that the concept of a workless underclass is a social construction that policy makers support because of ideological and political reasons. It is popular because it can be reassuring if you believe that the bulk of problems are caused by just a few. Also because it implies that it is about more than poverty. As Dr Welshman said, though 130 years of research has demonstrated otherwise, the idea of an underclass and a culture of poverty refuse to be killed off because it is ideologically and politically useful, (for all political parties).

Contributing to the 130 years of research into the idea of a culture of poverty are Professor Tracy Shildrick and Professor Robert Macdonald whose latest research has been funded and published by the Joseph Rank Foundation. They shared with us about this research which sought to answer two questions:

Is it true that in the UK there are families where three generations have never worked? And is there a culture of worklessness?

To answer these questions they used a critical case-study approach with families experiencing extensive worklessness in deprived neighbourhoods in Glasgow and Middlesbrough. Despite extensive searching, they couldn’t find any families with three generations who had never worked. And they quoted other research that found that only 0.5% of workless people were in families where two generations had never worked. Even the Department of Work and Pensions, who have spoken of three generations of workless families, has said that there is no statistical information to support the idea of families where three generations had never worked but that their evidence is based on personal experiences. 

While Shildrick and Macdonald found no evidence of three generations of families that had never worked, what they did find is families with lots of periods of unemployment.

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o was this large amount of unemployment because of a culture of worklessness that has been passed down the generations? The researchers interviewed 20 families with at least one unemployed parent and one unemployed child in lengthy one to one interviews. What they found was strong pro-work attitudes, with the older generation keen for their children to have different lives to them, and the younger generation keen to find work but having little success in job searching but saying that they don’t want to end up like their parents. They found no evidence of a culture of worklessness.

What Shildrick and Macdonald argue is that a much more common experience for people is a cycle of work and unemployment. This is exacerbated by a complex web of hardships and traumas. As one interviewee said they just ‘stack, stack, stack’. Hardships may include ‘failed’ schooling, anti-social behaviour/offending, problematic drug and alcohol misuse, physical/sexual/emotional abuse, violence/domestic violence, mental and physical ill-health, poverty. It was suggested that often interventions are unsuccessful because they don’t see the underlying troubles. 

To see a copy of the Joseph Rowntree Summary of the research ‘Are cultures of worklessness passed down the generations?’ click here.

The final speaker we heard from was Dr Sharon Wright who highlighted policy trends around unemployment from the 1990’s to the present.

Policy trends highlighted included the declining value of benefits, an extension of the conditionality of benefits, stigmatising anti-welfare rhetoric and the application of NIARU (Non-accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, an economic theory that says that it is necessary for unemployment to exist to prevent inflation. Alongside these, practise trends have included the downgrading of Jobcentre Plus support to ‘self-help’ to minimise footfall and the contracting out of Work Programme Support. The National Audit Office has concluded that the effects of these include pre-programmed systems undermining personalised help, users being asked to engage in inappropriate activities or enter unsuitable employment. As she said, it is important that we remember that we are in a time when there are fewer jobs than there have been in previous decades, and so we cannot just tell people to find a job when in 2013 there have been 5.1 unemployed people chasing every vacancy. We need to understand properly what is going on in the lives of people who are long-term unemployed to develop appropriate policies that help them to find the work that they are looking for. Recent policy design has misdiagnosed the problem as people simply not having a job and so mis-designs the cure.

Key points that came out of all that was said on the day are that there is no evidence for many generations not working, and that the concept of a culture of worklessness does not exist and is unhelpful as it ignores much more important issues at play such as the cycle of ‘work, no work’ and the web of hardships that may lie behind this for many unemployed people.

What then we may ask can we as individuals and organisations do to counteract the rhetoric of work-shy, lazy,  unemployed people that is often heard from the press and policy makers? 

Key suggestions that were made included:

·         Challenge the myths

o   speak up and challenge people when they talk about  families with three generations of unemployment and a culture of worklessness

o   Challenge journalists who write about it-write letters

o   Provide the media with alternative stories. (One journalist present said that the media are looking for stories and will most likely welcome them)

·         Find out the local jobs plan for an area and work together with schools etc to make sure that the right skills are developed in young people.

As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report says, ‘Policy-makers and politicians need to abandon theories - and resulting policies - that see worklessness as primarily the outcome of a culture of worklessness, held in families and passed down the generations.’

Becky Stojanovic, FiCD