Rethinking Recovery IV: Britain’s recovery industry - profiting from austerity? 

 Emma Dowling - Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Middlesex University, London

These initiatives sit alongside calls to ‘spin out’ and privatise employment services and job-centres in order to harness the supposed benefits of competition.  They also complement the expansion of welfare-to-work schemes.  It is here that we find the dark underbelly of recovery: namely, the coercion of people into work, despite having a disability or being otherwise unable to perform the labour that is newly being required of them.  In addition, welfare-to-work schemes have been reported to be imposing unpaid labour as a condition for receiving benefits.  This regime also has a psychological dimension, with recent research pointing to the way it calls on people to display a positive attitude to work – even when that work is degrading – while at the same time producing feelings of shame or inadequacy at not ‘being’ the right kind of person for recovery.

Private companies are heavily involved in providing different aspects of these services, for example in conducting evaluations of people’s mental and physical conditions and fitness for work.  Critics and campaigners have questioned both the ethics and effectiveness of their practices, but less attention has been focused on the dynamics of profit that surround them.  In effect, companies are profiting from the anxieties and psychological hardships generated by austerity.

These are just some of the ways in which we can identify what increasingly appears to be a ‘recovery industry’ in Britain.  It enlists private companies in the manufacturing the conditions for economic recovery.  It is focused on identifying and implementing ‘cost’ and ‘efficiency’ savings in the public sector, as well as enhancing productivity and creating new opportunities for financial investment.  In so doing, it renders the restructuring of society productive.  Private companies profit from a deepening of poverty and inequality.  Overall, we are witnessing the further embedding of classic capitalist disciplinary logics, such as productivity, profit and competition, into the fabric of society.

As has been widely documented, including on SPERI Comment, the austerity measures that have been implemented post-crisis offload more of the cost of care from the state on to individuals, households and communities.  This has an effect on how people think of themselves and of others and how they seek to act on the world. Along with existing demands for ever-more entrepreneurial acumen in all aspects of people’s lives, austerity measures serve to convince individuals that the only person they can really rely on is themselves, supported at best by their family or local community.  What’s more, recovery is always routed through markets, commodities and business models: the lack of public funds resulting from austerity itself creates the void that is then filled by companies and financial investors.

At what cost to society is this happening?  The introductory post in this series questioned the extent to which we are witnessing economic recovery, even on its own terms.  Elsewhere too, it has been pointed out that quantitative measures of recovery in the British labour market vastly underplay just how many jobs are in fact extremely precarious and very low-paid.  A closer look at Britain’s ‘recovery industry’ suggests as well that the ways in which people are being put to work to generate the conditions for a recovery will serve them less well than the minority who benefit from the status quo.

All of these observations call into question what is meant by recovery, for whom it has meaning and on what terms.  They also trouble the notions of progress and equity that are always implied in dominant narratives of recovery, making evident the need – not for recovery per se – but for real economic and social change.