Unemployment as a way of life

Abstract

The recession of 1982/83 pushed a cohort of the unemployed into long-term unemployment. The remaining members of this cohort are now at unemployment durations of three or more years. They continue to have a strong effect on the measured unemployment rate as well as on average unemployment durations. The recession effected a qualitative change in the nature of unemployment in Australia. A sizeable population of the long-term unemployed now exists for the first time since the Great Depression. Psychologists, and more recently the media, have approached the question of unemployment through the concepts of stress, depression, ill health and suicide; as a personal misfortune. At the same time government policies concerned with training program s for the unemployed suffer from a lack of understanding of long-term unemployment as a way of life. I approach the life of long-term unemployment through two simple sociological concepts. The first is that long-term unemployment may become a way of life in all respects habitual and ‘normal’ for the subject. The second is that the life of unemployment can not be understood apart from an understanding of the social organisation of wage labour. The second of these ideas depends on the commonplace that unemployment is the absence of employment. 1 use this as a methodological principle: the culture of long-term unemployment is most easily understood by regarding the structures and relations that wage labour commonly provides in industrial capitalism , and by considering the effects of their loss. The first of the ideas 1 develop from the insights of Alfred Schutz into the nature of the ‘world taken for granted’. I extend his insights, viewing the life of long-term unemployment as the product of a process of cultural change in which the taken-for-granted life of employment is lost and that of unemployment is embraced. I review the implications of this understanding of long-term unemployment for the design of training and job-creation schemes as well as for broader issues of social change. Show more