Learning to Identify with Labour: Constructions of Work Identities for Conditional Welfare and Precarious Labour Markets

As a result of welfare state restructuring, precarization of labour markets and the centrality of labour in notions of individual success and belonging, recipients and providers of welfare benefits in western European countries face new challenges. At the risk of losing benefits, welfare recipients have to continuously demonstrate their efforts at finding paid employment in increasingly precarious labour markets, while upholding notions of self-respect in a perceived meritocratic society in which having paid employment is seen to be a crucial merit.

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 3 activating welfare programs in the Netherlands, this paper explores the ways street-level bureaucrats construct meanings of labour in interactions with welfare recipients in order to steer them towards precarious labour markets. By means of workshops, welfare recipients are taught to understand work as economic resource, civic duty and – most importantly – as part of their individual identity. Consequently, in order to find paid employment, it is believed that they should construct a (new) relation between self and work. This entails redefining who they are, what they want and what they are capable of in light of current and future labour market opportunities.

This paper shows how citizens’ identities are actively constructed around meanings of labour. Moreover, it illustrates the importance of labour for being – both in the sense of being recognized as a member of society as well as being able to maintain oneself in times of welfare state restructuring and precarization of labour markets.