Unemployed people’s attitudes regarding labour market choices and welfare conditionality

Abstract

Britain’s unemployed benefit claimants can now be ‘sanctioned’ for not applying for a job specified by their ‘Work Coach’, and the new ‘Way to Work’ scheme compels them to broaden their job search less than a month after their claim starts. Some advocates of such toughened conditionality, including Conservative Ministers, have suggested that a significant proportion of unemployed people lack sufficient employment commitment. When opposing this suggestion, academics have tended not to present quantitative evidence, and (perhaps for ideological reasons) they have paid little attention to the extent that unemployed benefit claimants are unwilling to undertake the less attractive jobs. This article uses British Social Attitudes and NCDS58 / BCS70 survey data and finds that unemployed people are significantly less likely than employed people to favour work-related conditionality. Favouring being jobless over taking / keeping a job with a negative characteristic associates significantly with being unemployed, even when models control for other relevant variables. People’s political views are linked to whether they believe such evidence provides a justification for the increased conditionality, and there is arguably a need for more of the writers on welfare conditionality to differentiate between their evidential and ideological objections to current policies.