Conclusions

Abstract

As I conclude this book in the enduring fallout from the global recession, policy sympathy for those without jobs is stretched thin. Britain’s Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, for example, warned his fellow Conservatives at their October 2012 conference of the current “culture of entrenched worklessness and dependency” and called for “a renewal of personal responsibility within the welfare system.”¹ With reforms in 2014, Duncan Smith introduced what he referred to as “the final nail in the coffin for the old ‘something for nothing’ culture,” essentially reinstituting a genuinely seeking work requirement for people applying for benefits.² In March 2014, United States Senator Paul Ryan, a regular Republican voice on poverty issues, was even more explicit, identifying a “tailspin of culture … of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work.”³ While women today are recognized as workers in a way they were not in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “problem of unemployment” is still articulated in terms of a problem particularly affecting men,⁴ and the assumption that men need work to fulfill family responsibilities remains strong.⁵ To politicians like Duncan Smith and Ryan, long-term unemployment figures suggest growing numbers of loafers.