Cultures of Unemployment

A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty

Godfried Engbersen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367161262
• eBook ISBN: 9780429723001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The "cultures" of unemployed people in the United States and abroad are complex, varied and offer explanatory power when analyzed, as they are here, in a systematic way. The authors use case studies and survey data to devise a framework for a better understanding of the effects of welfare state policy on the chronically unemployed. They analyze the

Part One
Introduction

Chapter 1
Cultures of the Welfare State

In the 1980s, both the United States and the Netherlands were confronted with problems that had sizeable consequences for welfare states and the quality of life of vulnerable people. The people most affected were the unemployed, single-parent families, the disabled and other groups who depended on state benefits. Three developments should be cited in this connection.

First, national economies were confronted with a process of economic restructuring. The reduced role of manufacturing, the growing significance of the service industry and the internationalization of capital transfers and control over them were among the repercussions. Deindustrialization had shattering effects for whole regions and cities, particularly inner cities, which were unable to compensate for the loss of jobs in manufacturing, in particular jobs for unskilled workers (see also Bluestone and Harrison 1982, Kloosterman and Elfring 1991). At the same time, economic restructuring caused growing labor insecurity in the welfare states of Western Europe, including the Netherlands, and in the United States. This labor insecurity manifested mainly itself in high rates of long-term unemployment, particularly in the Netherlands, and in the growth of part-time, temporary and flexible work. For today's new generation of workers, the labor market no longer guarantees a secure labor career. The segmentation of the labor market has led to insecurity in other aspects of life as well. The return of poverty to such countries as Great Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands in the 1980s was evident all over. An obvious difference however between the situation in the Netherlands and in the United States is that the majority of the Dutch poor do not work, whereas a substantial percentage of the American poor do have jobs, albeit insecure, part-time and low-paid jobs (Ellwood 1988, Jencks 1992).

Second, austerities affected national social policies in the 1980s, which will go down in history as the era of "the crisis of the welfare state," In many countries, the level of various welfare arrangements deteriorated. The United States and Great Britain are the clearest examples (Katz 1989, Dahrendorf 1988), but in the Netherlands budget cuts also affected housing, health care and public assistance, to which we further refer as "welfare." The welfare state crisis not only was expressed in retrenchment policy, but was even more obvious in the changing views on social policy in general. There was a revival of mistrust in the makability of society and growing concern about the perverse effects of social policies (see Murray 1984 and Mead 1986). A debate on the perverse repercussions of the social security system took place in the United States, and the unintended effects of the system were widely discussed in the Netherlands (Schuyt 1991, Engbersen and Van der Veen 1992). In progressive circles, it was often said that the social system was outdated, and was too focused on income replacement and not enough on reintegration into the labor market ("active or activating labor market policy").

Third, in the past few decades Europe was confronted with a growing influx of migrants. Large numbers of workers migrated with their families from the Mediterranean area to the Western welfare states. These migration flows altered the very countenance of the large cities and metropolises. Multi-cultural urban centers emerged in relatively homogeneous countries. In addition, there are now more than one million refugees in the European Community. As a result, the countries of Western Europe made their admission policies much stricter, although they were often unable to reduce the influx. In some countries, (for example in southern Italy) there has been large-scale illegal immigration. In addition, the integration of officially recognized refugees and immigrants who arrived decades ago and are already "settled" has created a wide range of problems. Many of them are now either unemployed or unable to work due to disabilities, and their children also have difficulties finding a place in the labor market. For a complex of reasons, there are now "poor immigrant" neighborhoods in the large cities where many residents are out of work. Because of the large-scale immigration, poverty has more and more become "colored." In the Netherlands, relatively few people are of non-Dutch descent, 5 percent of the population (compared to a black population of 12 percent and a Spanish-speaking population of 7 percent in the United States). But 42 percent of the immigrants in the Netherlands live in the four largest Dutch cities (wrr 1989).

The developments described here—economic restructuring, budget cuts on welfare arrangements, and the influx of migrants—have given rise to debates on new poverty, on the development of a "split level society," and on the emergence of an "underclass" and ghettoes in Europe. Recurrent concepts in these debates have been "marginalization," "social isolation," "social exclusion" and "welfare dependence." In the United States, comparable debates have addressed welfare dependence, poverty, ghettoization and the underclass, and precisely the same causes have been frequently referred to: economic transformations and social policies that are inadequate to deal with them. In addition to migration into the United States, internal migration flows have also come to play a significant role, particularly the outmigration of stable employed Afro-American families to the suburbs, leaving the most vulnerable groups behind in extreme poverty areas (see Wilson 1987).

Despite the similarities, there are obvious differences in emphasis. In Western Europe, the topic of new poverty related to long-term unemployment occupies a central position in the debate, whereas in the United States attention is mainly focused on the urban underclass and the problems of the ghetto.¹ There is, for example, the far greater visibility of urban poverty in the United States and the marked segregation of black Americans. In some European countries, there is a high level of long-term unemployment. Despite these differences, some basic research questions are more or less the same:

• Does an "underclass" emerge and what is the social composition of this underclass (see Wilson 1987 and Dahrendorf 1988)? What are the main social, economic and cultural determinants of underclass formation?
• What are the perverse effects of the social security system? Does welfare generate permanent state dependence? Are the long-term unemployed "calculating" citizens who misuse the welfare system (see Murray 1984 and Jordan et al. 1992)?
• Do the poor or the unemployed share the same values and aspirations of the wider society, or do they develop a "culture of poverty" or a "culture of unemployment" that perpetuates their marginal position (see Lewis 1968 and Gans 1991)?

These questions led to poverty debates in the 1960s and at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Large numbers of studies were published that give totally different answers to these basic questions.

In this book we give some Dutch answers to the questions concerning the emergence of an underclass, the perverse effects of social policy and the culture and rationality of unemployment. Therefore, we make use of the cultural theory framework, developed by Mary Douglas (1978) and Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky (1990). In Chapter 10 we apply this theoretical framework to the American poverty debates and make some comparisons with regard to the cultural heterogeneity of urban poverty and unemployment.

This book is based on an in-dept study of the daily lives of unemployed individuals in three Dutch neighborhoods with high unemployment rates. In the following chapters, we describe the problem of mass long-term unemployment in the Netherlands in the 1980s and report on the coping strategies of 271 long-term unemployed in terms of work, time, money and rights and obligations. In this first chapter we portray the main dimensions of the Dutch welfare system and sketch its dynamic development. It is difficult to understand the meaning of problems of unemployment without any insight into the main characteristics of the Dutch welfare state regime. Such an analysis will show that the Dutch case has its unique dimensions but also has a resemblance with other European welfare states. Thus, the results of this unemployment study are relevant for other European countries. Here, Douglas' cultural theory is used on the level of social systems to analyze and comprehend the macro developments that have taken place within the Dutch welfare state.

In the final chapters we apply cultural theory to the level of unemployed individuals and demonstrate that they do have a certain amount of choice in how they cope with long-term unemployment. The choices they have are in part a function of two dominant cultural tendencies in the Dutch welfare state, an active individualistic one and a passive deterministic one. The macrocultural possibilities are reflected on the micro level. This analysis has enabled us to distinguish various cultures of unemployment in the wider social context of one welfare state regime. People are not simply victims of their circumstances, even if they are "hit" by long-term unemployment. In much the same vein, societies are not predestined...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• PART ONE INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO EMPIRICAL STUDY
• PART THREE ANALYSIS AND COMPARISONS
• Appendixes
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• About the Book and the Authors
• Index