six - Re-connecting with ‘what unemployment means’: employability, the experience of unemployment and priorities for policy in an era of crisis

Summary

Introduction

To plan for a society that involves all its members and actively promotes their participation in its work, we have to recognise more fully what unemployment means and how it affects not only those who are forced to waste substantial parts of their working lives, but also the great majority of the population. Until we do, the heaviest costs are borne by many of the poorest members of society, and that whole society is diminished. (Sinfield, 1981a, p 157)

“In the old days, the problem may have been unemployment, but in the next decades it will be employability. If in the old days lack of jobs demanded priority action, in the new world it is lack of skills.” (Remarks by the Prime Minister, Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, 2 January 2008)

It has been more than 40 years since Sinfield's (1968, p 13) seminal cross-national study highlighted the costs and consequences of long-term unemployment – the ‘national and individual misfortune’ of ‘lost productivity and life wasted’. Writing at a time when long-term unemployment was generally low in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, he was then sharply critical of policy makers’ lack of concern over the less acknowledged social and individual consequences of labour market exclusion. While economists were able to estimate the cost in lost taxation revenue of rising joblessness, Sinfield noted that the personal and psychological impacts of long-term unemployment on individuals appeared to be of less concern – ‘it is easier to discover that a man's income has dropped by fifty percent … than what it means to him to be unemployed after fifteen years of regular work’ (Sinfield, 1968, p 52). Writing some years later, as the UK entered a period of deep recession and high unemployment in the early 1980s, the same author returned to the theme of how we need to ‘understand more fully what unemployment means’ and attack the full range of causes and consequences, supply-side and demand-side factors linked to long-term unemployment (Sinfield, 1981a, p 157). As the UK again faces the impact of a period of severe recession, and policy makers grapple with the consequences of increasing job losses, there is a need to renew our efforts to understand the impacts on individuals, and offer advice on what works in supporting long-term unemployed people to cope and move towards work.