Discovery of "the unemployed"

Paul Graham (From 'Beyond Caring')

Last summer the Whitechapel Art Gallery hosted an exhibition of works by the British photographer Paul Graham. While Graham’s career has been eclectic to say the least, what stood out for me were a series of pictures called ‘Beyond Caring’ taken in crowded British social security offices between 1984 and 1986. The subjects were pallid and desperate, gathered in hallways and waiting rooms designed for a much lower volume of traffic. Some of this remarkable collection can be seen here.

It was around the same time that, while doing research, I came across a funding request submitted to the Greater London Council from a community arts group that deliberately played-up the group’s commitment to equality of opportunity. Written in 1986, the year that Graham finished working on ‘Beyond Caring’, it contained the following quote:

“The workers aim… to encourage maximum use of their facilities by working-class people: white, black, Bengali, Somali, and Chinese and… to work with the most disadvantaged sections of the community, namely women and the unemployed.”

The inclusion of “the unemployed” in lists of different identity categories such as the above was something that came up a few times among the equality of opportunity stuff I found in the archives. There were a few occasions, for example, when the community arts groups I was studying would emphasize their commitment to hiring workers who were local, black, female or unemployed.

In 1986, the year I was born, unemployment was still well over three million and had been since 1983. The growth and persistence of structural unemployment from the 1970s put a lot of pressure on orthodox British leftwingers who were dismissive of “the unemployed”, arguing, even in the 1970s, that divorced from the means of production they had no potential for serious political subversion. There was certainly a strand of British cultural Marxism that in the 1970s and 80s made a stand for the political incorporation of unemployed men and women. In 1981 the sociologist Paul Gilroy was forced to argue that, “We must also reject the ancient heresy of economistic Marxism which states stipulates that the relations of commodity production alone determine class relations… [despite] Capitalism’s tendency to generate surplus population structurally excluded from productive employment by revolutions in the labour process.” Ideas that seem alien, or at least self-evident, to the left of today. Even sometimes within the institutions of the left, it seemed that the unemployed would face a forms discrimination and isolation that went beyond the mere experience of poverty.

My point is, that while the data I have to hand is extremely limited, I wonder if you could argue that for a brief period the experience of persistent and structural unemployment affecting usually geographically concentrated sections of the country in the 1980s produced among “the unemployed” a new identity category – something more, as it were, than the sum of its different experiences. No more, or less fluid and dynamic an identity category than racial, sexual or gendered categories I wonder, if this moment had lasted, whether “the unemployed” could have emerged as a distinct corporate group to make claims to access and resources. Its amazing, after all, how racially and sexually diverse the waiting rooms are in Graham’s pictures. Could being unemployed have been just as emotionally formative, and just as outside of one’s control, as being black, say, or being gay? With the ranks of the structurally unemployed grows and increasingly draws into its ranks young white middle class men and women with previously secure trajectories it will be interesting to see whether in the next few years of austerity unemployment is rediscovered as a category of identity.