The Moral Economy of Grey Labour

Out of their obsession with growth, Labour's welfare regime wants pliant and productive subjects

I

Does anybody else feel like their body and brain aren’t working properly anymore?

I wake up on a summer morning and my joints ache. I have been plagued over the past four years with a series of stress-induced conditions, namely temporomandibular disorder and tension muscle dysphonia. My knees and back suffer the consequences of a decade in and out of poorly paid, terribly protected, informalised construction labour. I am 32 and I take medication for body pains, have a special pillow to sleep on and find myself bowing out of certain activities for fear of doing myself greater damage. The mental health implications are not particularly great either.

The prevailing sense is that more and more people suffer from similar problems. The amount of the population out of work and not seeking a job now constitutes more than one in five working-age people. This cohort of the economically inactive outnumber the officially unemployed by 6 to 1. Employment participation rates have declined by 4% in the past four years, with 3.7 million workers declaring that they have work-limiting health conditions. This is an increase of 1.4 million people, a figure parallelled amongst those not participating in the labour market. For people aged 16-34 years old, they are as likely to report a work-limiting health condition as someone aged 45-54 did ten years ago. Much of this increase is a product of mental ill-health. Even more profoundly, demographic ageing and changes in the age structure have contributed to 63% of the actual rise in economic inactivity between 2019 and 2021. Of the 3.5 million 50-69 year olds inactive in 2022, 45% reported ill health as the main cause of their inactivity. Over 90% of work capability assessments have reported mental ill-health and people of all ages seeking medical treatment for mental illnesses rose by over two-thirds between 2000 and 2014. These astounding figures, taken from Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council’s Pathways to Work Commission Report, signal the dilemmas the new Labour government confronts. 

Underlying the report’s findings is a sense that work just isn’t working for people anymore. In a survey of thousands of South Yorkshire residents, over a third of the respondents said “the idea of working makes me anxious.” Whilst just under half strongly agreed that they would be more fulfilled were they working, 28% were unsure and a quarter disagreed. Of the 9.38 million individuals out of work and not actively seeking employment, only 1 in 5 want work, a drop off from the 25% recorded in 2016. Whilst the average male born in Barnsley will have almost 7 years less good health in their life compared to the national average (the equivalent figure for women is 3.5 years less good health), full-time workers in the region earn a weekly wage which is £48 lower than the English average (a gap which rises to £64 for women). For vast swathes of the population, the prospect of low-paid, overworked and insecure employment is not worth the stress.

This is a situation that fills the current government with dread. On the one hand, the annual welfare budget sits at £266.1 billion, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies reporting that spending on disability and incapacity benefits for working-age individuals is likely to increase by a further 15.4 billion by 2028-29. As it currently stands, 4.2 million working-age individuals currently receive at least one health-related benefit, an increase of 7.9% in 2019. Since November 2022, there were 51,000 new claims for incapacity benefits and 43,000 new claims for disability benefits each month. Ye‌t on the other hand, the Confederation of Business Industry claim that labour and skills shortages could see the British economy lose around £30bn-39bn annually. The British working class is sicker and more depressed than it has ever been in my lifetime, yet the British capitalist class could not be more desperate to coerce the population into work and get the gears of the economy grinding again.

When in power, Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Secretary Mel Stride set out the case for shrinking benefits and tightening the punitive logic which underlies the state’s benefit sanctions regime. For these class warriors, the more people competing in the labour market under injurious and precarious conditions, the less likely workers feel empowered to strike, bargain or find other forms of employment. However, after 13 years of decimating the living conditions and infrastructure of the country, even Hunt’s Conservatives were cautious about splashing too much of their diminishing political capital on sanctions. Instead, they agreed to increase benefit payments by 6.7% whilst raising the spectre of mandatory work experience for those who do not find employment within 18 months, erecting tougher conditionalities for claimants, and forcing those with mental health problems and mobility issues to work from home.

But how will Labour’s DWP differ? Despite positive noises from department chief Liz Kendall and social security and disability minister Stephen Timms, the Pathways to Work Commission Report, introduced by arch-Blairite privatiser Alan Milburn, provides a sobering insight into the future of welfarism. Milburn is adamant that the long-term sick should be forced to search for work so that welfare cuts can be implemented and the British labour market’s reliance on immigration reduced. Taking his cue from department chief Liz Kendall’s insistence that “the DWP will shift from being a department for welfare to being a department for work”, Milburn vows to rationalise the DWP into a state apparatus that is no longer “outmoded”. The former New Labour Minister rightly claims that under the Tories, the DWP has become counter-intuitive, organising a sanctions regime which only swells its bill by imposing stresses on its claimants. Despite this, Milburn contends that Britain’s welfare state must become explicitly oriented towards workfare: setting national targets, merging JobCentre Plus with Careers Advice, and creating new classifications amongst the economically inactive in order to drive the national employment rate closer to 80%. Whilst the euphemistically entitled ‘health advisor’ waxes lyrical about a holistic approach to the nation’s labour regime, accounting for “barriers to work” such as childcare, social care, health and the character of contemporary work, ultimately the methods remain coercive. For Milburn, integrating health, employment and welfare by no means rules out private sector involvement. In favour of introducing NHS-accredited apps and online talking therapy to cope with the problems of a sick proletariat, in an interview on The Rest Is Money podcast, Milburn protested that we “don’t medicalise these issues… there’s a risk that it becomes an excuse culture… You don’t need a psychiatrist, maybe a talking therapy or group therapy will help.” In this sense, privatised forms of therapy will complement coercive means-testing. Ultimately, driven as they suggest “by the liberating potential of good work for individuals”, Kendall’s team are overwhelmingly concerned with recreating pliant, productive and growth-oriented subjects.

II

Times are hard. I have a relatively well-paid job for the West Midlands, a sincerely happy marriage, and we are fortunate enough to be paying a cheap loan on a cheap house. Yet, when the end of the month looms, that last week before payday is a tumultuous struggle. Last week we were so skint that my wife spent hours traipsing around the house looking for a tenner that she swore she’d put aside for a rainy day. If she didn’t have the wits to remember that we had twenty quid worth of vouchers on a Tesco Clubcard (a trade-off for our prized data nonetheless!), the tenner we never found could have been the difference between dinner or no dinner. How many more people in society live like this?

One concern for the ruling class is that many people really do. 38% of Universal Credit claimants and 6 out of 10 of those affected by the two-child benefit cap are in work that does not pay enough. In this context, the emergence of a distinctively new ‘moral economy’ amongst a minority of the popular classes appears to be materialising. In EP Thompson’s essay The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century, he documented the clash between trade liberalisation and price rises, and the consequential explosion of popular revulsion, food riots and theft. Today, whilst the crime rate in general has remained broadly static, according to the Office for National Statistics, street theft has risen by 40% and shoplifting increased by 30% over the past year. On top of this, the establishment’s capacity to portray benefit claimants as parasites feeding upon the system at large confronts a softening of attitudes towards benefit fraud. The Independent recently reported that the proportion of people who felt it was either “not wrong” or only “a bit wrong” for someone claiming unemployed benefits not to report a cash income from a casual job had risen from 16% to 27%, between 2016 and 2022. On the same note, a study from the University of Portsmouth found that the proportion of people who thought falsely claiming benefits was never justified had fallen from 85% in 2011 to 67% in 2023. It was only last year that there were fears of an “epidemic” in collective theft from high street stores - or “organised looting” according to the Co-op’s Director of Public Affairs. As well as this, in response to energy regulator Ofgem threatening to lift the energy price cap in 2022, 200,000 people committed to a campaign of non-payment with pollsters estimating 3 million would refuse payment of energy bills had Liz Truss not reduced the cap. These dynamics represent a fork in the road.

We live in uncertain times. The instruments and institutions of economic management are undergoing a process of politicisation not seen since Thatcher’s neoliberal counterrevolution. Faced with climate change, geopolitical competition and war, states have seemingly returned as agents over the sphere of life we refer to as the economy. Shocks to supply chains caused by war and climate change are met by elites with price rises. Central banks and governments respond to inflation by raising interest rates, diagnosing the increased cost-of-living by reference to postwar economic orthodoxies rather than identifying the real causes. In this melting pot, human subjectivity is thrown up in the air. If you go to Lidl to buy olive oil, alternatively known as “liquid gold”, you could easily find yourself spending more than a tenner. In the winter, you may end up spending a fortune on energy bills in a poorly insulated house you are now paying higher interest on. It is no wonder then that sections of society’s struggling mass are shifting their own moral norms out of kilter with the establishment.

III

This is the backdrop to Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’ announcement on Monday. Refusing to raise taxes on the wealthiest, the Leeds West and Pudsey MP is determined that only economic growth will make room for spending increases. Reeves has been loud about the need to plug the £22bn ‘black hole’ in the government’s finances, compelling Keir Starmer’s government to embrace further spending cuts and scrap infrastructural projects. The Chancellor, taking a leaf straight out of James Callaghan’s book, promised pay rises to public sector workers such as Junior Doctors, whilst she turned the screw on pensioners by scrapping the winter fuel allowance for millions. A state requires technologies to move the wheels of economic growth. By creating winners and losers, provoking binaries between public and private, or deserving and undeserving, a government begins to remake populations in its image. The rising obsession with ‘benefit fraudsters’ is but just one ‘folk devil’ amongst many, elevated to justify an almighty operation geared towards the refusal of intrusions into bourgeois class power and the maximisation of the productivity of the subordinate classes. If the Bank of England commences with its plan to increase the pace of bond sales, crystallising “losses on bond sales more quickly than currently forecast” and therefore mounting greater strain on the Treasury, Reeves will be under increased pressure to squeeze growth out of the popular classes and money from the state.

Labour’s programme, increasingly resembling a kind of makeshift rentier ordoliberalism, partnering asset managers with the state and further opening up public institutions to market competition, may not work as a growth project. As Matteo Tiratelli notes, we have seen little evidence throughout the past 14 years that the austerian impulse induces growth. It’s out of this conundrum, that we must return to Marx and Foucault, as two thinkers of the ecology of powers compelled towards reproducing human subjectivity in the image of the wage form and private property. Chapter 10 of Marx’s Capital, ‘The Working Day’, was an attempt to think about the imprint of struggle between and within classes on the human body and the fabric of social reproduction. Just as Foucault’s Discipline and Punish traces the disciplinary, punitive and regulatory state institutions which emerge to police the proletariat throughout the spread of the wage form throughout society. There is an onus upon us - this piece being one attempt - to think about the shifting terrain of subject-making norms today.

But to this contemporary process, what should be the socialist’s response? We must observe whilst we resist, but we should also ponder over what a socialist strategy looks like in an age of proletarian blues. As someone whose horizon has always been one of rupture with capitalism, I urge us to think in three specific but interrelated ways about this challenge. Firstly, reformist reforms which do not challenge the system but do elevate the power of workers are necessary. To struggle against this government and force it to implement a single employment status with a charter of rights, would be of benefit to the dockworker, the admin assistant and the benefit claimant. Secondly, we cannot reproduce the workerism of the mid-20th Century left. To some extent, this would be congruent with the productivist inclinations of Starmerism. But we must broach demands which, in the words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, allow us freedom and leisure, ‘nationalising’ time and reducing the amount we labour without detriment to our wage packet. The popular proposal for a 4-day working week is an essential pathway towards reducing capital’s power over labour. And finally, we need to think, against Kendall and Milburn, about the kinds of practices, cultures and strategies we utilise that can contribute towards repairing the proletariat as both a body politic and a social force. Marx told us that the emancipation of the proletariat is the act of the proletariat. We have to consider that whilst we also ponder the repair of a proletariat whose lifeworlds have been devastated by neoliberalism and austerity.