Unemployment, Wellbeing and the Power of the Work Ethic: Implications for Social Policy
Abstract
Unemployment is associated with a range of health and social problems, such as poor physical health and wellbeing. In response, welfare state research has recently considered the ways in which the harmful effects of unemployment can be ameliorated through social policies. This article argues that such policy suggestions have disregarded the role of the work ethic in shaping the experience of unemployment. In societies that glorify employment as a signifier of identity and status, it is unsurprising that those without employment suffer. Previous research supports this view, showing how subscription to the work ethic is associated with wellbeing amongst unemployed people. Original analysis of the European Values Survey confirms the importance of the work ethic, showing how unemployed people with weaker work ethics have significantly higher life satisfaction than those with stronger work ethics. The article concludes that the most effective way of dealing with the deleterious effects of unemployment is to challenge the centrality of employment in contemporary societies.
Key words: active labour market programmes; basic income; life satisfaction; welfare-to-work; worklessness.
Introduction
The evidence base on the health and wellbeing impact of unemployment is unequivocal. Unemployment is associated with significant declines in wellbeing and physical health (Paul and Moser, 2009). Such declines often last into the long-term, with unemployed people failing to recover from drops in wellbeing and physical health, and have a ‘scarring effect’, with unemployment more harmful than other distressing life events, like divorce, separation and bereavement (Clark et al., 2001; Lucas et al., 2003).
Whilst evidence has been building for decades, sociologists and social policy researchers have only recently questioned the role that social policies might play in mitigating these negative effects. From this literature, two strategies stand out. The first is a job guarantee, whereby people are offered a job after a period of unemployment. In practice, job guarantees are relatively rare; they are usually reserved for economic crises and targeted at specific groups, like young and disabled people. In the UK for example, policy proposals by influential economists (Layard, 2004; Gregg and Layard, 2009) led to the Future Jobs Fund: a job guarantee for young people introduced by New Labour and then abolished by the coalition government in 2010. Similarly, in 2013 the European Union (2014) advocated a guaranteed job or apprenticeship for unemployed young people across its member states.
The second strategy is to expand active labour market programmes (ALMPs): policies that link social security benefits to participation in labour market schemes, such as training, work experience and intensified employment support. The rationale of using ALMPs to combat the social effects of unemployment is that some ALMPs – especially work experience schemes –mimic the purportedly positive psychological and social environment of paid work. For example, in offering people the chance to utilize skills, work collaboratively and have a routine, ALMPs may produce psychosocial benefits. This is supported empirically, with an expanding evidence base showing positive wellbeing effects of ALMP participation (Strandh, 2001; Andersen, 2008; Wulfgramm, 2011; Sage, 2015).
Despite differences in ambition (job guarantees are far more expensive than ALMPs), both solutions stem from the same logic: that it is the absence of paid work that explains the negative effects of unemployment and, as such, policies should promote work, either through the direct provision of paid work or via work-mimicking environments. On one level this is understandable; unemployment is defined as lacking but seeking paid work, so the absence of employment is its most obvious trait. Further, the most influential theory of unemployment – Jahoda’s (1982) latent deprivation model – conceptualizes employment as producing positive psychosocial ‘functions’ or side effects: time structure, social activity, collective endeavour, regular activity and status/identity. Gheaus and Herzog (2016) make a similar case, arguing that employment enables people to realize four goods that provide meaning to life: excellence, social contribution, community and social recognition. Subsequently, the lack of employment can result in people losing access to these functions or goods. It is this loss, according to Jahoda, that explains the decline in health and wellbeing amongst unemployed people. Paid work, it is implied, is something akin to a human need.
This article challenges this argument: that the best way to ameliorate the health effects of unemployment is to reinforce work, either through job guarantees or ALMPs. First, it argues that a neglected influence on the health of unemployed people is the power of the work ethic. In other words, that unemployed people live in societies where paid work yields status, identity, respect and human worth. The damage of unemployment is thus not the absence of paid work but the failure to conform to a powerful social norm. Second, this is shown through a review of empirical evidence, which shows (a) how ‘exposure’ to the work ethic is associated with the wellbeing of unemployed people and (b) how the day-to-day, lived experience of paid work – what Jahoda called the ‘functions’ of employment – has only a weak association with wellbeing. Third, an original empirical example of the influence of the work ethic is shown. Analysis of the European Values Survey shows how unemployed people with a weaker work ethic have higher wellbeing compared to those with a stronger work ethic. Fourth, the article concludes with implications for social policy. It makes the case that the most effective way of dealing with the health and social fall-out from unemployment is to weaken the social and moral value of paid work.
The Relationship Between Work and Wellbeing
As argued, the evidence on unemployment has led to a strong assumption in policy-making that equates paid work with happiness and good health and, conversely, unemployment with the opposite (Department for Work and Pensions, 2016). Importantly, an implicit basis of this assumption is that the relationship between employment and good health is in some way inevitable or even natural. In other words, work is innate to human flourishing and the experience of a meaningful, worthwhile and healthy life. If this argument is accepted, then the promotion or even enforcement of work (or a work-like environment) on unemployed people is a logical, even benevolent, solution.
An alternative, critical perspective on unemployment casts doubt on this assumption and frames job guarantees and ALMPs less as solutions and more as amplifications of the underlying problem. This perspective is rooted in the argument that the empirically observed determinants of wellbeing – like employment – are reflections of prevailing norms and orthodoxies that impart socially desirable ways of living. As such, the causes of wellbeing are not fixed but change and are reconstructed over time. Employment is not inevitably conducive to human happiness and health. Rather, this relationship is driven by the social, moral and political importance societies attach to paid work. It is no surprise that employed people state they are happy in societies that glorify employment.
Edwards and Imrie (2008: 338) develop this point, arguing that wellbeing is correlated with “idealized forms of behaviour or ways of being”. People, for example, might not find work innately pleasurable but are content that they subscribe to powerful social norms. This echoes Nussbaum’s (2012: 11) critique that forms of happiness can be “negative, inasmuch as they are based on false beliefs about value”. This notion – that happiness is socially conditioned – is central to Sen’s critique of subjective wellbeing as a barometer of social progress:
Consider a very deprived person who is poor, exploited, overworked and ill but who has made satisfied with his lot by social conditioning (through, say, religion, political propaganda or cultural pressure). Can we possibly believe he is doing well just because he is happy and satisfied? (Sen, cited in Kroll and Delhey, 2013: 21).
Rojas and Veenhoven (2013: 418) describe this as the cognitive theory of happiness, in that “happiness is the product of human thinking and as such has its roots in social constructions”. The significance of social construction is also put forward by Diener (1984), who uses the examples of how certain personality types – such as being extroverted – are associated with wellbeing because of “particular cultural milieus” that are biased towards them. Thus whilst evidence shows extroversion is associated with high wellbeing (Costa and McCrae, 1980), extroverts are not innately happier than introverts; rather, social practices, institutions and norms favour those with extroverted personality traits.
The influence of the social environment on happiness is further supported by the impact of social comparisons on wellbeing, whereby happiness relates to how people evaluate their lives compared to others: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ (Diener et al., 1999). Sets of standards – such as income, occupation, consumer goods, property and foreign holidays – inform these comparisons, yet such standards are not fixed: they change over time and between societies. As what is desirable and enviable evolves, social standards change, social comparisons change and the determinants of wellbeing change too.
Related to work, this suggests that the wellbeing associated with employment is rooted in conformity to social norms and feelings of high social status relative to, and at the expense of, unemployed people. Cole (2007) argues this view, critiquing the notion that employment is inherently good for wellbeing. Rather, Cole contends that employment has positive effects because of the centrality paid work commands in societies dependent on waged labour. There is, Cole (2007: 1135) argues, a conviction that “paid work is in some way central to human, especially adult male, experience”. It is this conviction – reinforced by social, cultural and ideological forces equating employment with human identity – that accounts for the robust association between paid work and wellbeing. Alternatively, it is the denigration, revulsion and fear of unemployment that makes those without work feel so unhappy or unwell. This is supported by qualitative research, with both Frayne (2015) and Sage (2017) describing how unemployed people often dread being asked “what do you do?” for fear of negative social judgement.
Through this perspective, the wellbeing associated with employment is explained by the significance of paid work to perceptions of social status, identity, worth and contribution. Ideologically, this is maintained and reproduced through the ideal of the work ethic: the belief that the moral way to live one’s life is through paid work. In the UK, political parties and the media aggressively promulgate this ideology. From ‘hardworking people’ to ‘strivers’, the explicit inference from much political messaging is that paid work is essential to living a worthwhile life. Whilst politicians laud the work ethic, in popular culture a range of ‘poverty porn’ (Jensen, 2014) television programmes invite viewers to condemn the lives of those who purportedly resist the work ethic. The culmination of these trends is that unemployment is viewed as Janlert (1997: 97) describes: as a “deviation from the norm, a defect in character, a type of disease”.
Unemployment, Wellbeing and the Work Ethic: Two Premises
If the relationship between wellbeing and unemployment is in part derived from the centrality of the work ethic, the negative effects of unemployment can be seen as a socially forged, historically contingent phenomenon of industrial societies. As Frayne (2015) shows, the glorification of work, and the acceptance of this by the population, is a relatively recent phenomenon: work was tolerated rather than celebrated in pre- and early-industrial societies. Importantly, two premises follow this theory. First, the degree and intensity of individual exposure to the work ethic should explain the severity of unemployment’s effects. Some people for example are less exposed or committed to the work ethic and, as such, their health and wellbeing should be less affected job loss. Second, there should be little in the day-to-day, lived experience of both employment and unemployment that explains their relationships with wellbeing. In other words, it is not the actual activity of working, or the absence of this activity, that explain the wellbeing effects of employment and unemployment. Rather, it is how people interpret and attach meaning to their labour market status that matters. Both of these premises challenge Jahoda’s influential theory, which states it is the loss of the ‘latent functions’ of employment, such as routine and structure, that explains why unemployed people are so unhappy compared to those in paid work.
Differential exposure to the work ethic
Empirical evidence from across the social sciences tends to support both these premises. First, the influence of the work ethic on wellbeing has been demonstrated in studies that compare individuals with varying levels of commitment to the work ethic norm. Strandh et al. (2013) for example found that unemployment was more detrimental for Swedish women compared to Irish women. Their explanation was that the personal identity of Irish women is less strongly tied to the psychological need and social pressure to work compared to Swedish women. In 2016, 79.2 per cent of Swedish women were employed compared to just 64.2 per cent of Irish women (Eurostat, 2017). In Sweden, this is the consequence of a long-term strategy of promoting female labour force participation, via policies like shared parental leave and subsidized childcare (Duvander et al., 2005). Subsequently, Swedish women are strongly integrated into the labour market and the loss of employment appears to affect their wellbeing more than less well-integrated Irish women. A broader but comparable finding was reported by Eichhorn (2013), whose cross-national study found unemployment had a larger wellbeing effect in countries where work had a higher normative value (see also Fleche et al., 2011). Collectively, these studies demonstrate how the commitment to work varies, producing observable differences in the wellbeing effects of unemployment.
Additionally, recent studies into retirement and wellbeing show how reducing exposure to the work ethic can have positive effects for wellbeing. Hetschko et al. (2014) showed how the wellbeing of long-term unemployed people increased significantly after they retired, despite controlling for other changes in circumstances such as income gains. The observed change in wellbeing was linked to the qualitative change in social category: retired people were no longer subjected to the work ethic and, as such, the identity of ‘being unemployed’ disappeared. This can be explained by how retirement frees people from the demands of labour market participation; there is no expectation to work and thus no shame in not working. For retirees, the link between social status and waged labour is broken by the transition into a new social category where the expectation of employment disappears.
The daily experience of work and unemployment
Second, there is a body of evidence showing how the objective, day-to-day experiences of employment and unemployment do not explain some observed wellbeing differences. Dolan and Metcalfe (2012) discuss this by comparing evidence from two different measurements of wellbeing: (a) evaluative measures, whereby people rate their life satisfaction and (b) experience measures, which quantify emotions in real time. Whilst a strong association exists between wellbeing and employment status using evaluative measures of wellbeing, empirical findings are more ambiguous vis-à-vis experience measures. These diverging results suggest that whilst employed people are more satisfied with their lives than unemployed people, a comparison of experienced, daily emotions shows minimal differences between the two groups.
There are numerous studies supporting this claim regarding the differences between evaluative and experience measures. First, Knabe et al. (2010) compare the wellbeing of unemployed and employed people using evaluative life satisfaction and the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), which asks responses to complete a daily diary and describe their emotions whilst engaged in particular activities. Whilst Knabe et al. (2010) find large and significant differences in life satisfaction by labour market status, they find no differences when comparing day-to-day experiences using the DRM. This is largely because the activity of working is generally disliked by employed people, whilst unemployed people are able to devote more time to highly valued activities like socializing. Although unemployed people enjoy leisure slightly less than those in paid work, the extra time they can devote to leisure cancels out any differences in experienced wellbeing. Knabe et al. (2010: 869) argue that wellbeing differences between employed and unemployed people are less related to day-to-day experiences and more related to conformity with social norms: “people usually see being employed as a desirable aspect of life because it gives their lives meaning and helps them obey a cultural work ethic”.