News

Service delivery of jobseeker's allowance and the New Deal needs to be sensitive to the frustrations of working-class men, new research has stated.

The research reveals underground networks of working-class men organising resistance to the compulsory elements of the government's key programmes for social inclusion. They provide details on coping with the systems and how to generate solidarity with other claimants, including a 25-page "Jobseeker's Allowance Survival Guide".

Ruth Rogers, a researcher at the University of Luton's Department of Applied Social Studies, said the opposition groups tended to be directed at working-class men. This raised significant questions concerning the status of masculinity and the gendering of unemployment policy.

- "Discourses of Resistance and the Hostile Jobseeker, Benefits: A Journal of Social Security Research," Policy and Practice, February 2002, The Policy Press