Key unemployment policy under attack

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