Unemployment

Unemployment

A state of involuntary joblessness. Although many adults have chosen not to be in paid employment, for instance being home makers or retired from the labor force, having a paid job is normal in developed societies. Individuals who wish to have a job but who have failed to obtain one are referred to as “unemployed,” whereas those voluntarily out of the labor market may be described as “nonemployed”.

Unemployment denotes the existence within a society, geographic area or social group of significant numbers of adults seeking paid work, and the prevalence of such a condition. It has been a chronic feature of modern societies, which are based on paid employment. Except for the 30-year period after World War II, these societies have normally not provided enough paid work for the adult population. Unemployment has been the cause of frequent social and political conflict, as well as considerable social and psychological distress.

The high levels of unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s led many writers to question the viability of returning to full employment, and the whole future of paid work. According to Andre Gorz in his Farewell to the Working Class (1980) and Paths to Paradise (1984), the last decades of the twentieth century are witnessing the emergence of permanent mass unemployment societies. As more and more paid work is being replaced by microelectronic and telecommunications systems in 'the robot revolution', goods and services can be produced with less investment, fewer raw materials and less labour. It is likely, therefore, that these societies will experience 'jobless growth', that is, economic growth may occur but it will not be associated with equivalent expansions of employment. These developments will not only generate mass unemployment, Gorz concludes, they will also alter the socioeconomic class structure of employment societies. Under pressure from accelerating Technological change, workers will become divided into three substrata: a privileged aristocracy of 'tenured workers', heavily unionized, with full-time jobs; and two substrata forming a 'non-class of non-workers', comprising the permanently unemployed, condemned to poverty and idleness, and a growing number of 'temporarily employed' workers in low-skilled jobs with no job security and no definite class identity (see Working class). The only desirable way to avoid these sharp social divisions and permanent mass unemployment is to separate having a job from receiving an income; and to develop a democratic, post-employment society in which socially necessary work is reduced to a minimum and distributed equitably in order 'to do more things by ourselves in our free time' (Gorz, 1984).

Although some short-term unemployment is often unavoidable, as people move between jobs, recent years have seen raised levels of long-term joblessness with substantial negative impacts upon those involved. Both cross-sectional studies (comparing people who are unemployed against those who are in jobs) and longitudinal research (following individuals as they move between the two conditions) have demonstrated that unemployment is a significant source of stress. It can give rise to greater anxiety, depression, insomnia, and general distress, reduced self-esteem and confidence, and sometimes disrupted family relations (Fryer, 1992; ...