Page 161 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Citizenship 147

carer at home. For many people, the nuclear family is no longer a pos-
sibility (though it remains the ideal for most), and there are high rates of
unemployment, particularly in areas where migrant workers were brought
in to do the most insecure and poorly paid jobs. In such circumstances,
it is unsurprising that single mothers and men in racialized minority
groups are over - represented in poverty statistics. To stigmatize women
for dependency on welfare in a context in which childcare facilities are
still too often inadequate or too expensive is unjust. Similarly, when
unemployment is high, even the jobs that white workers prefer not to do
may not be available to men and women from racialized minorities
(Morris, 1996 ).
Welfare - to - work schemes are premised on the assumption that well -
paid jobs exist that welfare recipients refuse to take. Predictions that new
technology would lead to massive unemployment as more jobs became
redundant have not been borne out. Nevertheless, the idea that anyone
can get a well - paid, secure job is also a dream. Neo - liberalization is, in
part, a response to what were perceived as the labor market rigidities of
Keynesian economic policy in the 1970s. As employers found it hard to
get rid of or to redeploy workers protected by strong trades unions and

strict employment law, it was difficult for firms to take a fl exible approach
to taking on new workers. This led to high rates of unemployment. Where
resistance to neo - liberalization has been strong, while those in paid
employment have good wages and social insurance packages, the long -
term unemployed have little chance of joining them. Neo - liberal marketi-
zation is directed at the labor market, to introduce fl exibility of labor
contracts and low - wages to stimulate economic growth which should lead
to low rates of static unemployment. A relatively high level of cyclical
unemployment is considered necessary, however, in this type of system:

firms make use of the available pool of workers, hiring and fi ring as

necessary, and people go in and out of the labor market (Potu ž á kov á ,
2007 ). Neo - liberalization leads to the creation of what are sometimes
called “ Mc - jobs ” : low paid, insecure, and with little expectation of job
satisfaction or commitment. Paid work for everyone is not a solution to
social exclusion, either in states that have subjected labor markets to neo -
liberalization, or in those where it has been resisted; low wages and
intermittent employment is a route to poverty as surely as long - term
unemployment.
John Scott has proposed an imaginative strategy of social integration
around differences in wealth. He argues that if poverty is seen in
Townsend ’ s terms as relative deprivation, it is, by definition, related to

privilege. If people can be deprived by being excluded from public life,