Abstract
AbstractA defining feature of U.K. welfare reform since 2010 has been the concerted move towards greater compulsion and sanctioning, which has been interpreted by some social policy scholars as punitive and cruel. In this article, we borrow concepts from criminology and sociology to develop new interpretations of welfare conditionality. Based on data from a major Economic and Social Research Council‐funded qualitative longitudinal study (2014–2019), we document the suffering that unemployed claimants experienced because of harsh conditionality. We find that punitive welfare conditionality often caused symbolic and material suffering and sometimes had life‐threatening effects. We argue that a wide range of suffering induced by welfare conditionality can be understood as ‘social abuse’, including the demoralisation of the futile job‐search treadwheel and the self‐administered surveillance of the Universal Jobmatch panopticon. We identify a range of active claimant responses to state perpetrated harm, including acquiescence, adaptation, resistance, and disengagement. We conclude that punitive post‐2010 unemployment correction can be seen as a reinvention of failed historic forms of punishment for offenders.
Highlights
Punishment pervades the 21st century British social security system, which is designed to deter citizens from relying on the state (Department for Work and Pensions [DWP], 2011)
We explore how claimants experience punitive social security and focus on three key questions: what suffering is caused by welfare conditionality and sanctioning; what strategies have been deployed by claimants to minimise state perpetrated social harms; and how can this be conceptualised? First, we outline the qualitative longitudinal research design, methods, and sample
This article draws on data from the jobseeker stream of the research, consisting of three waves of qualitative longitudinal research (2015–2017) with jobseeker's allowance (JSA) claimants interviewed after periods of 6–9 months
Summary
Punishment pervades the 21st century British social security system, which is designed to deter citizens from relying on the state (Department for Work and Pensions [DWP], 2011). The “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” sanctions system (Adler, 2018) is the second harshest in the world (Immervoll & Knotz, 2018), with penalties of 100% removal of benefit income for up to 3 years.. Claimants who miss one Jobcentre appointment have their payments reduced or removed for 28 days. If they make the same mistake three times, the penalty is 91 days. The value of JSA, already low by international standards, was cut — first by a 1% below-inflation limit to annual uprating (2013–2016) and by freezing benefit levels from 2016 (Dorey & Garnett, 2016). All of which has succeeded in instilling “fear and loathing” of the system in many claimants (Alston, 2018, p. 6)
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