Archives: IAB-Veranstaltungen

With the reproach of ‘dependency’, the receipt of welfare benefits is given a pejorative connotation, whereas securing one’s livelihood through paid work is seen as the epitome of ‘independence’ (Fraser/Gordon 1994). However, the assumption that receiving welfare benefits reduces work incentives has been disproved. Research has shown that employment continues to be an important goal for the long-term unemployed and poor (Dörre et al. 2013; Shildrick et al. 2012; Patrick 2017). Yet, access to the labour market is often difficult for people living in poverty for a variety of reasons such as health impairments, unpaid care responsibilities or lack of educational qualifications. When they do find work, it is mostly in precarious jobs with working conditions that are harmful to their health, leading to insecurity and, consequently, other forms of dependency.

Based on an ongoing research project on the welfare production of people living in poverty, the presentation focuses on the relevance of the labour market in their strategies of securing their livelihood: How do they position themselves in the face of the alternative of 'welfare dependency' and the insecurities of the labour market? It will be analysed how their labour market strategies develop and change in the context of individual biographies as well as labour market and welfare state conditions. The data include three interview waves with 40 poor households in Switzerland. Four standpoints with regard to welfare production were taken into account, which also imply different labour market positions: Working poor, who forego welfare benefits; single parents with limited availability for paid work; migrants, whose educational qualifications are often not recognised; and old-age pensioners, who are exempted from the obligation to work.

The findings suggest that particularly migrants without recognised formal qualifications pursue professional plans linked to the goal of social advancement and accept almost any full-time job in the low-wage sector. For single mothers, reconciling paid work with caring responsibilities is crucial, often leading them into fragmented work arrangements with no prospects for advancement. Lone mothers living on social assistance accept adverse working conditions in order to comply with the social norm of working, even if this does not significantly improve their standard of living, as they have to hand over most of their wages to the welfare office. For about half of the sample, labour market opportunities are reduced over the life course due to health impairments. A small number of cases deliberately refuse available employment opportunities in order to realise alternative life plans or roles, while at the same time refusing welfare benefits.

The presentation focuses on interviewees’ labour market strategies and examines the work and employment forms into which they lead them: regular low-wage work, marginal employment in private households, gig work, self-employment and various forms of informal work. It also looks at strategies beyond conventional employment, such as investing in cryptocurrencies, trading second-hand goods or subletting rooms.

Multidimensional poverty concepts conceptualize poverty as a combination of material and immaterial lack: a lack of material means which constitutes an important, albeit not the only cause for a lack of self-determination. At the same time, such multidimensional approaches have a strong normative impetus towards acknowledging and promoting the agency of people living in poverty. Thus, while this broader understanding of poverty has its sociological merits, it also leads to a theoretical dilemma: if the lack of self-determination is a defining dimension of poverty, can the poor have agency at all while they are living in poverty? Empirical poverty research mirrors this dilemma in that it mainly focuses on the limited choices of the poor and the detrimental effects of their choices and actions. Finally, there is no doubt that the lack of material means poses countless dilemmas in daily life for the poor, not least because choosing one course of action may jeopardize one’s welfare in other respects, e.g. risking one’s health by accepting a hazardous job (Wollf/de-Shalit 2007).

In this presentation I will analyse the agency of poor people from the theoretical perspective of the capability approach (CA). Agency as the freedom of leading one’s life according to one’s own values constitutes the empirical and normative yardstick for the CA. Moreover, the CA champions a view of human beings as “doers” and “judges” capable of having aspirations and shaping their lives, given adequate individual and social conversion factors (Bonvin/Laruffa 2018). I will discuss three theoretical issues. (1) If value-based choices are a marker of agency, how can we distinguish autonomous choices from adapted preferences stemming from habituation to poor circumstances? (2) All the different strands of the CA posit minimum standards (basic capabilities) for various material and immaterial conversion factors as conditions for genuine agency. For political and measurement purposes these standards must be the same for everyone. In contrast, in qualitative research individual cases constitute the starting point of analysis. How can we thus bring together general standards with individual ideas of ‘good enough’ living conditions expressed in qualitative interviews? (3) Agency is not a binary phenomenon but a gradual one. Referring to the debate on autonomy in feminist philosophy I propose to distinguish ranges of agency in different domains of life (Mackenzie 2014).

The presentation is based on empirical data from a qualitative long-term study of the practices of welfare production of poor households in Switzerland comprising three waves of interviews with 40 households and financial diaries over one month.