Abstract
This article demonstrates how unemployment is made productive through workfare activities for older disadvantaged job seekers. We suggest that the requirement to look for work, engage in education and training, and participate in voluntary work blurs the boundaries between employment and unemployment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with older disadvantaged job seekers, we demonstrate how this obligatory productivity is lived and felt, characterised by shame and frustration and framed by the temporality of waiting and searching for work. We suggest that this experience of ‘productive’ unemployment can be described as a dissonant state of ‘transitional stasis’, whereby job seekers are expected to transition out of unemployment and poverty while experiencing the long-term and ongoing effects of immobility.
Introduction
Unemployment is often understood as sitting outside of productive employment: a space of idleness that is both problematic and in need of management. The concern that idleness is dangerous for the continued growth of capital, and the maintenance of a ready labour force, has long prompted governments, across national contexts, to target the unemployed and their seeming unproductivity (see Bessant, 2000). The now entrenched public policy notion of ‘mutual obligation’ has created the conditions in which the unemployed must demonstrate ‘work readiness’ through mandatory work and education activities and job searching (see Considine et al., 2015; McDonald and Marston, 2005). In this article, we develop upon the existing scholarship on welfare conditionality by drawing on Adkins (2012, 2017) to conceptualise these activation strategies not only as crafting punitive policy regimes (see, for example, Redman, 2020), but also as cultivating unemployment as ‘productive’ in-and-of-itself. Our argument is not that mutual obligation provides productive employment, but rather that mandatory work-based activities muddy the boundaries between employment and unemployment through imposing practices and sensibilities expected of the unemployed as they await employment.
In this article, we bring particular focus to the experience of the older disadvantaged unemployed, demonstrating how the productivity of workfare policies – whereby welfare benefits are contingent on labour market activity – is lived and felt through three primary technologies: searching for work, volunteering, and engaging in education. Drawing on Adkins (2012) and Berlant (2011), we argue that these older job seekers are locked in a state of ‘transitional stasis’, framed by the temporal and affective relations of employment-to-come, and characterised by a frustrated and bleak assessment of their current and future employment prospects. The existential demand for an aspiring disposition, in other words, is written into the experience of unemployment making mutual obligation activities a ‘hopeful’ exercise of employment-to-come. Thus, the reliance on social security is meant to be a temporary, transitional measure before moving into employment but, in actuality, is a far more constant characteristic of their lives.
Existing research on unemployment has demonstrated the importance of contemporary mutual obligation policy trends, in particular on young people. The ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’ (NEET) category, for instance, has generated significant scholarly attention in relation to youth. Here, research points to the lack of ‘pathways’ from education into work, the significant transformations in labour market opportunities, and the ballooning issue of youth unemployment across national contexts (e.g. Andres and Wyn, 2010; Cuervo and Wyn, 2016; Furlong et al., 2017). We argue there is a need to consider the specific ramifications of these policy trends for different age groups. Transnationally, the issue of older age long-term unemployment and poverty has rising significance. Shifts in the nature of work (and the skills required), raises in the pension age, the growth of short-term contracts, and more stringent rules surrounding access to disability pensions have all contributed to intensifying the experiences of older job seekers (see Hamilton, 2010; Taylor, 2001). In Australia (the context for this particular study), there are significant increases in the number of older job seekers, in part due to changes in welfare governance which have curtailed access to various pensions and allowances (Australian Law Commission Reform (ALRC), 2012). From 2002 to 2012, there was an almost doubling of job seekers over the age of 55 to 98,050 or 18% of the total Newstart Allowance (welfare payment for job seekers) population (ALRC, 2012). In 2018, this number grew to 183,388 or just over 25% of all Newstart recipients (Department of Social Services (DSS), 2018).
For older disadvantaged job seekers, categories that are often ascribed to young people – precarity, insecurity, underemployment, and unemployment – are part of a longer biographical experience. Meyers’ (2017) research on ‘bounded agency’, for instance, identifies key biographical barriers that constrain the participation of the older unemployed in the job market. In this context, the long-term unemployed can implement strategies of ‘protective resistance’ in a climate of powerlessness and a sense of personal failure (Meyers, 2017; see also Beck, 2018). Here, the growing importance of ‘individual responsibility’ in mutual obligation policies has particular ramifications for older job seekers. As Shimoni (2018) highlights, anxiety surrounding the burden of an ageing society is coupled with a rise in the desire for entrepreneurial subjectivities. Yet, for older job seekers, ‘risk’ is not only the experience of new governance practices surrounding welfare, but also the way in which they are positioned as potential employees.
Importantly, policy discourses present older job seekers as ‘risky’ and ‘unattractive’ for employers (Ainsworth and Hardy, 2008). Accordingly, older job seekers are confronted with how to reduce the associated risk discourse by demonstrating their capacity to meet the demands of the modern workforce through ongoing optimisation and diversification of their skill set. Kossen and Hammer’s (2010) study of older job seekers, for example, reveals how a sense of disregard on the part of job service staff resulted in feelings of indifference and disrespect. These findings are consistent with other research that reveals that older job seekers report that compliance activities are prioritised over genuine assistance from job service agencies (e.g. Wickramasinghe and Bowman, 2018). Our research elaborates on these studies from an Australian policy context, with a particular focus on the above-mentioned primary technologies; through an examination of the consequences of these welfare conditions and activation policies, the affective dimensions of labouring in unemployment for job-seeking older people are brought to the fore.
In what follows, we draw on in-depth qualitative research with disadvantaged older unemployed people to demonstrate the ‘productive’ character of unemployment in the context of contemporary policy imperatives, framed by cruel temporal and affective dimensions of aspiring for employment-to-come. We build on recent research that explores the ways in which the unemployed explicitly resist an identification of being unproductive or a non-worker and the associated stigma attached (e.g. Riach and Loretto, 2009; Gerrard, 2017). First, we outline how unemployment can be understood as ‘productive’ and reflect, in particular, on the importance of temporality for older job seekers. To do so, we work specifically with Adkins’ (2012) notion of ‘eventful’ unemployment and Berlant’s (2011) notion of ‘cruel optimism’. Second, we explore how productive unemployment is experienced by older job seekers set within a biographical life experience of precarity and poverty, framed by an aspirational temporality of employment-to-come, but ultimately marked by the affectivity of futility and frustration.
Unemployment, productivity, and temporality
In her article, ‘Out of work, out of time?’, Lisa Adkins (2012) explores what she describes as ‘the productive event of unemployment’ to argue that the reserve army of labour thesis of unemployment does not capture the labour involved in being unemployed. She positions unemployment as ‘eventful’ in that it involves a range of activities (e.g. looking for work, training, workfare placements). These activities, Adkins states, ‘operate to ensure the perpetual market availability or perpetual job readiness, even if employment never arrives’ (p. 635). Arguing that unemployment is also ‘productive and alive’ (p. 637), Adkins suggests the blurring between employment and unemployment is articulated through a temporal logic of anticipation and value accrual in which both the employed and unemployed must demonstrate their production of value. In particular, Adkins notes the importance of women’s labour, arguing that post-Fordism cannot be explained simply as an expansion of women’s employment, but through a fundamental refiguring of employment/unemployment that poses a broader ‘folding of the economy into society’ (p. 638). A central tenet of the argument is that employment can no longer be understood as the counter-position of unemployment; employment is not a remedy for poverty, and it does not indicate being waged and having security.
The usefulness of Adkins’ explication is advancing a relational understanding of employment/unemployment in which the two are not binary states, but are intercontextual. Thus, ‘work is crucial’ to ‘those who are expelled or excluded from it’ (Weeks, 2011: 2), but not just because it is held as a marker of ‘productive’ and ‘good’ citizenship to which one ought to aspire. It is also crucial because the conditions, meanings, practices, and cultures of employment and unemployment are deeply connected and interrelated. The shift in contemporary employment, in which workers must demonstrate their value-accruing and productive capacities in ways that often confuse the boundaries between work and out-of-work time, is therefore reflected in the realm of unemployment. Those seemingly ‘outside’ of the employment relation are also imbricated in the practices of value production in ways that, conversely, blur the sociological boundaries between out-of-work time and work time. Thus, we work with the notion of ‘productive unemployment’ not to suggest a move towards employment, but rather as a means to address the ways in which unemployment is governed by a constitutive and compelling expectation of ‘productivity’, even when – as we go on to show – employment itself is out of reach.
Indeed, a cornerstone of the cultivation of ‘productive employment’ is the entrenchment of ‘mutual obligation’ or ‘workfare’ activities. In Australia, governance of the unemployed is explicit in the intention of shifting people on income support payments from ‘welfare to work’ through regulations and requirements centred around competencies acquired through government-approved programmes (Lantz and Marston, 2012: 854). Income support is activity tested, and recipients are mandated to participate across the following domains: improving their job skills, increasing their employment prospects, and, in certain circumstances, contributing to the community through, for example, volunteering (O’Halloran et al., 2020). Failure to demonstrate the required activity can result in the withdrawal of welfare payments.
These activities are part of a policy imperative, practised transnationally, to increase the individual responsibilities of the unemployed for their unemployment – a form of ‘responsibilisation’ (Kelly, 2001; Peters, 2017). As Mitchell Dean (1995) wrote 25 years ago, mutual obligation practices ‘seek ethical effectivity in the shaping of the relation of self to self’ (p. 575). At the time, Dean positioned this policy trend in relation to the construction of the ‘enterprising self’ (Rose, 1992) and the ‘active society’; mutual obligation was understood as a means to construct the value-accruing self and cultivate unemployment as an ‘active’ state, whereby job seekers were poised in anticipation of employment. In this understanding, unemployment is often positioned as being in ‘the shadow of economic relations’ (Adam, 1998: 67). In the contemporary context, however – and thinking with Adkins – we suggest that these activities are reflective of the reconstitution of unemployment and employment in contemporary labour relations. In other words, it is not just about the constitution of the self in relation to possible employment, but also about the constitution of labour relations in unemployment. This is why we see the notion of ‘productivity’ to be so important to the contemporary conditions of unemployment; the activation of unemployment reconstitutes ‘productivity’ into unemployment itself.
The obligation of the unemployed to demonstrate their search for employment and/or participate in ‘productive’ activities (most often training and volunteering) marks unemployment as requiring production: the production of value upon oneself to demonstrate ‘job readiness’ and (in the case of volunteering) the engagement in work that while deemed as ‘voluntary’ has many of the same qualities as paid employment. Underpinning the ‘mutual obligation’ policy approach is an assumption that mutual obligation activities are transformative in and of themselves. Moreover, ‘voluntary work’ is particularly significant here, given that its voluntary nature is undermined through its use within ‘workfare’ obligations. Arguably, it is a form of unpaid (or paid via welfare payments) work (see Kelemen et al., 2017). This means that the unemployed are effectively providing free labour (often to charities) while being positioned as being ‘helped’. Forced volunteering – or ‘voluntolding’ as Kelemen et al. (2017) term it – has crept into workfare technologies and now plays a formal role in demonstrating the ‘activity’ of mutual obligations. For instance, MacDonald’s (1996) study of voluntary work of the unemployed focused on ‘involuntary voluntary’ work as a youth initiative – largely outdoor, manual work for the ‘lads’, whereas now it is a routine feature of unemployment mutual obligation across ages. MacDonald’s (1996) young participants discussed the experience as about ‘having a laugh’, often rejecting its wider relevance for employment skills. More recently, Kelemen et al. (2017) research suggests gratitude and positivity, including a sense of personal development. We suggest the need to understand forced voluntary work in relation to the associated technologies of mutual obligation that ‘activate’ unemployment. And, as we examine below, the experience of forced volunteering, alongside looking for work and education and training, has very different meanings for the older unemployed.
These forms of activation within unemployment have a temporal logic. Adkins reflects that because unemployment is in fact not time away from productive activity (broadly understood), it temporally brings employment into unemployment. Not only is activated unemployment marked by the temporal patterns and demands of ‘being productive’ (looking for work, engaging in education, volunteer work), it is also experienced in relation to the ‘not yet’ arrival of employment. This understanding is complemented and extended by Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of ‘cruel optimism’, the contradictory state of perpetual aspiration and value accrual that underpins contemporary social relations. Berlant describes cruel optimism as the state whereby ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (p. 1), positioning it as an affectation of contemporary capitalism in which social mobility is desired and expected in the context of job insecurity and personal and economic precarity.
For Berlant, the temporal dimensions of cruel optimism are bound by the affective relation to desire – for something to come but which is contoured by precarity. Cruel optimism is linked to the foundational shifts in the relation between the state and citizen, in which precarity and responsibility for one’s own conditions are individualised. Reflecting on the contemporary stretching out of precarity across class and professional status, Berlant writes, ‘The haunting question is how much of one’s creativity and hypervigilant energy the situation will absorb before it destroys its subjects or finds a way to appear as merely a steady hum of livable crisis ordinariness’ (p. 196). Precarity, therefore, is more than an economic relation (although it clearly encompasses this); ‘it is structural in many senses and permeates the affective environment too’ (p. 192).
Berlant’s work draws largely on the cultural field, to set out the ‘fantasy’ of the ‘good life’ as a cultural form, but its conceptual resonance in sociology has led to a take-up of the idea of ‘cruel optimism’ in relation to employment and educational pathways. Arts and Van Den Berg’s (2019) analysis of the Dutch welfare state, for instance, suggests welfare technologies engender the affectation of desire – a desire for jobs, careers, and futures that are fundamentally unattainable. In the context of young people, a range of research has sought to demonstrate how new constitutive relations between state and young-citizen articulates a ‘cruel’ relation between educational pathways and employment, whereby education is both desired and an obstacle to flourishing (e.g. Bessant and Watts, 2014; Rootham and McDowell, 2017; Zipin and Dumenden, 2014). This uptake of Berlant’s work highlights the temporal resonances of cruel optimism; of the ways in which aspirational relations to the future shape the affectivities of the past and present.
We seek to extend these treatments of temporality and productivity in unemployment to draw attention to biographical precarity in the context of long-term unemployment for older people. Here, we consider how the policy prerogatives of ‘mutual obligation’ are not only a governing technology but also an impossibility – a fantasy that frustrates and disappoints. In doing so, we point to the temporal dimensions of unemployment. We suggest that for older people, the productive and temporal patterns of unemployment are experienced as a kind of ‘transitional stasis’: the policy expectation that unemployment and poverty are ‘transitional’ states that can be moved from, and yet are experienced by many as one of the most enduring characteristics of their past and present lives. The policy emphasis on the demonstration of work readiness and the willingness to learn new things for work reflects a perception (and aspiration) that unemployment is a transitional phase and one that people should not be in for extended periods of time. This policy framing constructs a future-orientation in which job seekers must be constantly thinking (and working towards) what comes next, often after years of unemployment and a fundamental lack of opportunities.
The study
This article draws on an in-depth qualitative and across-time study that examined the experiences of job seeking for older long-term unemployed disadvantaged people living in social housing in Melbourne, Australia. The research was undertaken through the Unison Housing Research Lab – a 5-year research partnership between RMIT University and Unison Housing, one of the State of Victoria’s largest social housing providers. The research was guided by the overarching question: What are the experiences of looking for work, and of engaging in education and training, for disadvantaged job seekers living in social housing? Underpinning our methodological approach, and reflecting our attention on the productive and temporal dimensions of unemployment, was a focus on the ‘everyday’. We sought to explore the routines, rituals, and other activities that constituted the affective and material experience of unemployment and job seeking for these participants (see Back, 2015; Highmore, 2002). Interviews investigated typical activities and daily routines in relation to job seeking and the affective dimensions to understand how these job seekers managed, lived, and negotiated the policy prerogative of ‘productive unemployment’.
The research focused on a small set of older disadvantaged job seekers and was premised on the need and worth of qualitative research that does not seek validation via larger data sets, but through rigorous, credible, and sincere exploration of subjective experience (see Tracy, 2010). As such, a central tenet of this research is the significant sociological value of in-depth exploration of subjective experience with small data sets. We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with six job seekers – four women and two men – aged 53 and older, of whom five were interviewed twice over the course of 9 months for a combined total of 11 interviews. ‘Disadvantage’ was identified according to dual signifiers of housing situation and source of income. We used purposive sampling, with all the participants recruited through Unison Housing staff who distributed information about the study to social housing tenants. In Australia, social housing is typically targeted at those considered in ‘greatest need’. Unison tenants, in particular, have experienced severe disadvantage with a recent survey of new tenants finding that 90% were reliant on government payments, 84% had previously been homeless, and on average it had been 7 years since they had been employed (Taylor et al., 2020). All participants were also required to have been recipients of ‘Newstart’ – the Australian job-seeking welfare allowance – for at least 12 months. Although the study sought the experiences of disadvantaged job seekers, our recruitment materials emphasised a broader approach that examined the daily lives of job seekers, their thoughts about current work and education opportunities, and their plans for the future.
With the participants’ consent, the interviews were recorded and transcribed for further analysis. Part of the consent process included discussing the purpose of the study and sharing our research questions. All participants have been provided with pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. The interview data were analysed using open coding, through which preliminary themes emerged and then classifications were applied (Gale et al., 2013). These themes were compared across the interviews through further coding to identify patterns and conceptual relationships.
Biographies of precarity
We start with an extended introduction to the six research participants, highlighting the biographical experiences of employment precarity across the lifecourse. All participants were older long-term disadvantaged job seekers living in social housing: Kylie, Kimberley, Clara, Sandra, Charles, and Lewis. For these participants – now in their mid-50s to early 60s – precarity was a lifelong experience punctuated by the conditions of poverty: the biographical experiences were characterised by diverse, sporadic, and sustained periods of unemployment (and underemployment) as well as low-paid insecure work. Charles, for instance, had work experience of storeman, musician, music teacher, and cleaner. Finding himself unemployed in his 50s ‘was the start of a downward drift’. ‘I didn’t realise’, Charles explained, that old people weren’t actually wanted in the workforce and yeah it became quite depressing. The more I tried, the less success I had, and it got to a point where I did just give up. I just gave up. And for a brief period, I fell into the trap of sort of drug use.
Eventually, losing all of his savings and finding himself homeless, Charles accessed social housing and used this security as a means to ‘get clean’. Now aged 62, and having 5 years of unemployment, Charles reflected on the effects of homelessness and unemployment, saying multiple times throughout both interviews that he had just ‘given up’.
Clara, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety, at the time of the first interview, had been waiting for a year and half to be transferred from Newstart to the Disability Support Pension. Aged 61, Clara had many years’ experience working in hospitality, from waiting tables, cooking, and management. Her working life had been interrupted at age 26 when the combination of being injured at work and her mother’s death meant that there were ‘a couple of years and I just lost the plot’. Clara later moved into hospitality training, where she delivered courses to job seekers. She later became a business owner, running a personal development company with her husband for 7 years, ‘making nearly a million dollars a year’. The marriage ended, resulting in the business closing and Clara moving to the United States to work as a day spa aesthetician. After that, she ‘had done a lot of things. You know, you do whatever you do’. However, with escalating alcohol and cocaine addiction, she ‘lost everything. I lost the house, lost all my money’. Clara returned to Australia in 2014 and after spending time in drug rehabilitation had been clean and sober since 2015.
It is important to note that while employment precarity was intensified as these participants grew older, their connection to employment was also contoured by significant life events and histories. Sandra (57) moved to Australia from Iraq in 1994 with her husband and infant son. In Iraq, she had trained and worked as a civil engineer, but her credentials were not recognised in Australia. In Australia, Sandra engaged in caring work for her family while her husband studied. She also undertook unpaid administrative work for her husband’s business. Her recent marriage separation left her financially insecure. Now that Sandra’s son had graduated from university, she said ‘it’s time for me, let’s start something. But I am now struggling to get a job’. Kylie (53) had been unemployed for 7 years. Previously, she had worked in a range of jobs including as a machinist, market researcher, and bicycle courier, although this had involved intermittent periods of unemployment. Kylie had developed carpal tunnel syndrome at school and this had affected her capacity to work at times. Since becoming unemployed, Kylie had done volunteer work, and she was studying for a certificate in gardening. She already had certificates in traffic control management, forklift driving, and light rigging.
Not only are these participants’ life histories characterised by employment insecurity and diversity, so too is their engagement in education and training. Lewis (58) left school at the age of 15 and had been working for a single organisation as a clerical assistant for 15 years. After taking a redundancy package, Lewis spent time working at various companies as a telemarketer. He had been unemployed since 1999, during which time he had completed a diploma and advanced diploma in information technology, but these had not secured him employment. Lewis had completed a work-for-the-dole programme with a not-for-profit food recycling business, where he subsequently took up volunteer work. Lewis was the only participant who chose not to be re-interviewed, stating that talking about his circumstances had been difficult and he did not want to repeat the experience. After leaving school at the age of 15, Kimberley (55) was employed as a cleaner and then in a series of administrative roles that included duties such as typing, banking, credit checks, and mail. She then trained and worked as a beautician, both on commission and for wages. For the past 22 years, Kimberley had worked as a telemarketer, but this had been interspersed with periods of unemployment of up to 2 years at a time. She struggled to find work in administration – despite past experience – without having computer literacy. At the first interview, Kimberley was employed as a permanent part-time telemarketer. However, by time of the second interview, Kimberley had lost her job in telemarketing after breaking her ribs and had just finished a work-for-the-dole placement with an opportunity (charity) shop.
The productivity of unemployment
For the job seekers in this study, the experience of unemployment was made productive by three primary activities: the labour of searching for work, volunteering, and education and training. The job seekers relayed a sense of frustration and dissatisfaction. These activities framed their daily routines and sense of self while unemployed; they provided a means to ‘do something’ and meet their mutual obligation requirements, but at the same time, they were often accompanied by feelings of shame and defeat. Ultimately, however, these activities were not viewed as work and were poor proxies for it. Due to the inclusion of volunteering within mutual obligation requirements, there is a blurring between volunteering and work-for-the-dole. In Australia, both of these require job seekers to work without wage and both are based on the premise that participation will increase skills and lead to employment.
Undoubtedly this work is ‘productive’, even if there are other aims more oriented to social inclusion, skill development, and opportunity, as it contributes to the business of these stores. It is also productive in the ontological sense. It is concerned with cultivating particular ways of being in relation to modern citizenship – the cultivation of an active, working citizen even in the face of unemployment (see Baines and Hardill, 2008). To manage the failure of finding work, and feelings of shame for not working, volunteering is both a governmental strategy to ensure there is ‘activity’ in exchange for government financial assistance and a strategic choice for job seekers to avoid stultifying unsuccessful job searches. In this sense, the supposed aspirational and educational basis of volunteering work is superseded by the requirement to carry out this activity and it is being relatively less taxing than the endless cycle of unsuccessfully applying for work.
The blurring between work-for-the-dole and volunteering work is clearly seen in Lewis’ experience. Lewis fulfilled his work-for-the-dole obligation at a recycling centre to the satisfaction of his employer. On completion, he enquired about paid employment and instead was offered volunteer work: [I asked] ‘how do I go about getting paid work?’, and they said, ‘well, you have to volunteer a little bit more’. [. . .] And I thought well hang on, I got some rave reviews from the people who were supervising me, and they were very thankful for the work I did, and I did ask, ‘oh, can I get a reference’, and no problems there. (Lewis)
This calls into question the transformative properties of work-based activities and their power to facilitate ‘work readiness’ and employment results. It also problematises the balance of responsibility in mutual obligation arrangements. While Lewis demonstrated his ‘work readiness’ by successfully completing the required duties and developing the necessary skills, this did not result in employment; yet, he was deemed proficient enough to continue the tasks as a volunteer. Moreover, the organisation recently relocated far from Lewis’ home, making it unlikely that he would be able to continue volunteering due to travel costs and times, returning him to the same situation he was in prior to his placement.
And yet, for the job seekers, volunteering provided an important way to push back against dominant notions of unproductivity and laziness that publicly and politically surround the unemployed. The political rhetoric surrounding ‘dole bludgers’ not ‘lifting their weight’ (see Peterie et al., 2019) has significant impact on those struggling with unemployment. Kylie, when asked at her second interview whether she was still volunteering, as she had been doing for the last 3 or 4 years while unemployed, was quick to respond, ‘Like it’s not as if I’m sitting around doing nothing!’. Importantly, however, volunteer work did not totally supplant the frustration of being unemployed. Kylie combined volunteer work with looking for work and was critical of others who used only volunteer work to satisfy their mutual obligation requirements. ‘To do something like that’, she said, ‘you’re not really getting ahead in life. But you’re just going one step back’. Instead, Kylie still applied for work each fortnight on top of her volunteer work.
For Charles, volunteering at an opportunity shop allowed him to put his previous skills to use: It gives me something to do. I have some past history and knowledge of antiques and stuff like that so, I have been able to help them determine what stuff is worth. [. . .] overall, I’d say the experience there is positive. (Charles)
Charles also used these skills to purchase things from the shop and then sell them at a profit privately, although he framed this – not surprisingly given the small monetary reward – as a method for getting by financially rather than as an enterprising act. Kimberley also volunteered 2 days a week, but found the conditions exploitative and degrading. Describing it as ‘free work’, Kimberley recounted a number of events at the opportunity shop where she volunteered as evidence of its ‘dehumanising’ character: There was another girl that was doing work-for-the-dole, she’s a very big lady but she sat on the chair and they told her . . . get off the chair. I go, how rude’s that!? The lady was a couple of years younger than me but she was only sitting for a minute because she was tired. It’s not like you’re sitting all day [. . .] You just sat down for one minute and you’re doing that and I thought it’s dehumanising. They’re a bad place. (Kimberley)
Kimberley, who described herself as a ‘strong person’, was intensely concerned about the possibility of her welfare benefits being sanctioned for not complying. Kimberley completed her time at the opportunity shop, but was looking to complete a course as a means to avoid more exploitative experiences.
Aspirational productivity
As explored above, there is immense policy emphasis on education and training as demonstrative of work readiness and ‘adaptable’ dispositions in response to labour market demands. Yet, for these older job seekers, education and training were often viewed as irrelevant or, at the very least, out of reach. Charles viewed the courses offered by his job service agency as being far more relevant to younger job seekers. Reflecting on this, he said, ‘I think it’s partly technology, you know, the human race has never stood still. Every time it moves [. . .] and I think I’m in that category where there isn’t really a place for me anymore’. This was reinforced for Charles by his experience with the job service agency. When asked about courses that had been offered to him, he responded, They’ve suggested it but never anything specific. Again . . . they don’t want to be in a position where I can turn around and say, ‘you said this course would be good for me’. So, they won’t recommend a course. They will just say try a course. They won’t be specific because they’ve then committed themselves and they can be held accountable. (Charles)
Here, Charles’ experience of being long-term unemployed was tempered by a sense of futility in both the search for work and the potential for re-training and skilling.
Sandra was the only participant who used education and training as her means to meet mutual obligation requirements. She travelled 5–6 hours a day from her home in regional Victoria to Melbourne to attend an English language course due to local courses costing too much, but the travel inflamed her ongoing chronic osteoarthritis. Sandra, having a university-educated background from Iraq as an engineer, aspired to becoming a secondary mathematics teacher and hoped that developing her English language would assist her entry into a university teaching course. She was also applying to complete a certificate in Business and Administration to support her getting work in administration in the meantime. Like Kimberley, without computer skills, she knew that she needed to re-train to obtain employment.
The impetus for these courses came from Sandra herself, without any assistance from her job service agency. When speaking to Sandra at the second interview, she had abandoned her hope of becoming a teacher, having not received a high enough score in an English language test to gain entry to a university teaching degree. Sandra resigned herself to seeking work in administration at a hospital, having observed that older people seemed to work there. She was frustrated that she did not have success finding employment that used her skills and knowledge, and with a system that seemed disinterested in this: I feel fortunate and sad honestly because I have got a degree and I don’t deserve all of these things and there was nobody just to hold my hand – come and we’re gonna help you, we’re gonna show you the way what are you gonna do, no. They didn’t, they didn’t. (Sandra)
As with the other job seekers, Sandra’s experience of education and training was characterised by a sense of futility and a lack of support. These narratives reflect a fundamental break down in the policy rhetoric around the need for maintaining and developing new skills in job seekers and the experience of older job seekers. The unemployment policies which view the need for training as a core part of job seekers’ mutual obligations were felt by the older job seekers as a requirement, but ultimately were unsuccessful in leading to employment and were not supported by the job service agencies.
The temporality of looking for work
Underpinning both volunteer work and engagement in education and training is an expectation of the potentiality for work and the requirement to be looking for employment. This perpetual expectation frames the temporality of employment; as Adkins (2017) notes, productivity is both lived through mutual obligation activities and the anticipation of employment. The perennial labour of searching for employment was particularly taxing for the participants as this was often considered to be a futile exercise and one that was not supported by their job service agencies.
I think they could be better off realising and accepting the actual facts of the situation, you know? It’s no good coming up with all the whiz bang ideas to try and trick people into looking for work or to force them into looking for work. The jobs don’t exist. They are non-existent. If I went back down to my job network provider and said look I’m sick of the op shop I want to go back to being a job seeker and I’m going to apply for 14 full-time jobs a fortnight, there would not be 14 jobs for me to apply to. I’d have to just phone up places and say have you got any jobs for a 62-year-old man. Which is a ridiculous thing, it’s like saying have you got any jobs for someone with no arms? (Charles)
Here, the particular difficulties faced by older job seekers were laid bare. Charles understood that he was not valued as a potential employee, and thus the affectivity of hopelessness framed his experience.
For the other job seekers, the labour of job searching was characterised by having to manage the poor services of their job service agencies, which were depicted as being overly bureaucratic, unhelpful, and process driven: They told me go and look for a job. I told them look I don’t know how to look for a job, and they requested me, for example, at the beginning to look for twenty jobs per month. So, I say to them I don’t have computer skill how can I do application? I want some help. They said just . . . they send me to the library that’s all. Nothing, nothing beneficial. [. . .] I told them look I can’t, I don’t have the skills to look. They said to me there is computer course if you want to go, it starts after two or three months and you have to pay for it. But that’s only the help, yeah. (Sandra)
Here, looking for work was overlaid by the management of the bureaucratic governance relationships established by mutual obligation and the prospect of having to outlay personal funds for computer literacy courses. In other words, the labour of looking for work was invariably accompanied by the labour of engaging with job service agencies and the government welfare organisation, Centrelink. However, as Sandra attested, the premise of mutual obligation was not being met by the organisations managing these requirements, and engagement did not equal the fulfilment of expectations.
The temporal logics of employment services, which are governed and managed by time-based appointments and caseloads, intersects and frames the experiences of older job seekers. Despite the rhetoric of tailoring responses to job seekers, the privatisation of employment services has not met the needs of older people. This was seen in Kimberley’s experience, whereby the pressure on her job service agency to meet targets overrode the personalised support needed by older job seekers to meet the demands of the contemporary workplace: See they get paid by appointments [. . .] they see too many people, but they don’t give you any education or . . . when people come in they don’t have jobs, they should say, ‘why do you think you don’t have a job, is it experience?’ Like I needed to know the admin on the computer, they don’t help. They don’t assess you properly and they don’t help you with anything and they say they have no funding. So, you have to do private courses on your own. (Kimberley)
Concern was also raised about the appropriateness of employment suggested by the job service agencies. Charles stated that he had only been sent for one interview by his job service agency, and the position was unsuitable for his age and physical condition.
The job agency I was with [. . .], in the three or four years I was with them, sent me out to one job interview [. . .] the company was looking for someone to hump meat carcases out of a freezer truck and all the men doing it were sort of in their twenties and early thirties, mostly huge football players and rugby players, and the guy just looked me up and down and just sort of couldn’t believe that they had sent someone out in their . . . I was in my mid-fifties at the time. You know, what’s this little old man doing here for this job and it was totally embarrassing. So, basically that was it. That was the last straw. I just gave up. I really gave up. (Charles)
Experiences such as this reduced the confidence the participants had in the mutual obligation of job networks to assist with finding employment. Charles’ experiences led him to question his employability, which in turn affected how he was viewed as valuable member of society, leading him to conclude, ‘you have to accept the large part of society does see you as worthless’.
For others, the labour of engaging with bureaucratic governance technologies centred on the need to move from job-seeking status to disability status. Rather than waiting for employment, some job seekers were waiting for the opportunity to move from Newstart to the disability or age pension. Kylie had been attempting for nearly 1.5 years to move to the disability support pension at the time of first being interviewed. She had managed this by getting repeat doctor’s certificates to verify that she could not work. Eventually, Centrelink had barred her from this, and she therefore had to demonstrate that she was looking for work: You have to go to a job club [. . .] it’s numbers crunching. [. . .] And I think, which I said to them, when I got a message from them saying I needed to be working eight hours a week, and it’s like I can’t. If I could I would. (Kylie)
At the time of the second interview, Kylie had successfully been moved onto the pension. This changed her outlook considerably. Removing the stress of dealing with job service agencies meant that she could now consider other activities. When asked what she thought might be different now, she replied, ‘Well I want to get better still, which was always the same. And maybe I could do a little bit of work. I thought about volunteering’.
Conclusion: the labour of transitional stasis
This article has brought in-depth empirical insight into the productivity of unemployment, taking into consideration the lifecourse. Focusing on long-term disadvantaged older job seekers, this research demonstrates how unemployment is made productive (Adkins, 2012) through mutual obligation requirements. We suggest this productivity is reflected in the labour required of the unemployed in managing their unemployment by increasing their individual responsibility through job searching, engaging in job service agencies, effectively producing free labour through volunteering and work-for-the-dole, and participating in formal educational programmes. Informing this labour is a policy expectation that, despite being older and having experienced long-term unemployment, job seekers will continue to develop, will learn new skills, and move on to employment. The policy imperative of mutual obligation compels job seekers to accrue value and perform activity, while at the same time the organisations managing these requirements are not necessarily fulfilling their responsibilities. Furthermore, as this research shows, this productivity is a highly constrained and at times frustrating experience marked by the temporality of anticipation – the hopefulness/hopelessness of employment-to-come. Drawing on Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism, this frustration is the prolonged expectation of looking for (and finding) work, which – in the experience of these older job seekers – is an often-futile exercise.
Thus, we suggest that these job seekers are locked in a state of transitional stasis, a contradictory state whereby their experience of unemployment is governed by a presumption of transition into employment, but their actual lived reality is prolonged and seemingly unending unemployment, accentuated by their older age. Older job seekers effectively manage this transitional stasis through a range of labour practices, which are in turn governed and surveilled by the bureaucratic mechanisms of job service and government welfare agencies. Looking for work, volunteering and engaging in education and training were all aspirational, but highly frustrating, forms of labour punctuated by a sense of failure, immobility, and being left behind. The conditions of unemployment, governed by mandatory work-based activities, job searches, and engagement in job service agencies, create layered – and highly vexing – experiences of ‘productivity’ driven by a perceived need to learn and maintain work skills, and ultimately with a perennially delayed hope of employment.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Juliet Watson receives funding to undertake research for Unison Housing.