Our government’s obsession with workfare in order to prove that it’s not soft on the undeserving poor continues unabated. This time it’s an ’empowerment white paper’ from DCLG (here), which somehow makes paid employment into the most enjoyable and empowering thing one can ever do. Even call centres?
‘The Empowerment White Paper, to be published in the Summer, will set out how the untapped talent of communities can be unleashed to ensure everyone has a greater say in improvements to public services, local accountability and opportunities for enterprise’
Of the three elements of empowerment mentioned here, two are about improving democracy, and one is about entrepreneurship. However, in the ‘Unlocking talent’ discussion paper, five pages are devoted to reducing worklessness, while about one and a half cover the public services and accountability. I’m not quite sure why getting a job empowers you to be involved in participatory democracy, especially as it reduces the time you have for ‘getting involved’. Of course, getting a job does empower you by reducing your reliance on the state, and empowers you as a consumer, but I didn’t think that was the point.
Anyway, now for the bad social science. Part of their ‘evidence shows that those in employment are happier, healthier and less likely to be involved in crime’ (DCLG 2008, p.4). The truth, of course, is far more complicated.
Firstly, this short and authoritative statement is based on a number of papers (Strategy Unit 2002, Meghir and Machin 2000 and one other) that don’t really support it.
The paper (M&M) on crime showed that ‘falls in the wages of low-wage workers lead to increases in crime’, suggesting we should increase the minimum wage!
Early on, the Strategy unit paper reminds us that correlations don’t tell us the direction of causation. Given that an employer is looking for people who are fun, or at least nice to work with (I always did this), miserable people are less likely to get jobs. I can’t think of many jobs where being pessimistic is an asset.
And we should always be on the look out for spurious correlations, and in this research they are legion. The data this paper uses, suggests that workers have greater life-satifaction than non-workers. But of course, in an unequal world the workers have more money than the non-workers, they socialise more with their colleagues (’cause if you’re unemployed while all your mates are working, you’ve no-one to go out with), and they aren’t bored stuck at home with no money.
In order to research this properly, we should do either a randomised controlled trial, but my ethics committee would turn this down, or some kind of matched survey. In the latter, instead of comparing a sample of workers with non-workers, the research would compare like-with-like. Each unemployed person would have as much money, activity and lifestyle (and so on) as the comparator employed person. Let’s see if the middle-class, middle-aged retiree on a £50k pension aged 50, is happier or less happy than his/her equivalent who still has to work to sustain the lifestyle. Or let’s compare the young minimum wage cleaner (less than £12k), with someone who get’s £12k from a trust fund. This might give a result that is consistent with the fact that almost no-one who wins the lottery carries on working full-time (NS 2005). In fact, lottery winners are happier as they ‘do what they like’ and enjoy an ‘easier life’.
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