Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes

Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect. Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted. This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit. The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics. This paper describes the coercive and punitive nature of many psycho-policy interventions and considers the implications of psycho-policy for the disadvantaged and excluded populations who are its primary targets. We draw on personal testimonies of people experiencing workfare, policy analysis and social media records of campaigns opposed to workfare in order to explore the extent of psycho-compulsion in workfare. This is an area that has received little attention in the academic literature but that raises issues of ethics and professional accountability and challenges the field of medical humanities to reflect more critically on its relationship to psychology

Increasing the employability of young persons : is the Portuguese Professional Traineeship Programme transferable to Malta?

During the past year, as in other EU countries, the Maltese economy slowed down as an effect of the global economic situation. According to preliminary estimates for the second quarter of 2009, the GDP contracted by 3.3 % on annual basis1. Lower tourist arrivals together with a downturn in exports are major causes of the decline in the economic activity. The manufacturing enterprises in the automotive sector were affected the most. However, rather than dismissing employees, several companies adopted a wait-and-see strategy, reducing the working week in agreement with trade unions. Indeed, the employment in the manufacturing sector increased by 7.5 % between the second quarters of 2008 and 2009. Similarly, the number of workers in the tourism industry increased marginally over the same period (by 1.9 %)2. However, recent data on tourist departures indicates that inbound tourists in August 2009 have dropped by 3.5 % compared to the corresponding month in 2008. This was accompanied by a 5.5 % decrease in the total nights spent in Malta over the same period3. Such figures can lead to a decrease in employment in the tourism sector when figures for the summer 2009 are published. Despite the global recession, overall, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for Q2 2009 indicates that employment in Malta increased by 0.8 % when compared to the same quarter of the previous year (NSO, 2009b). This translated to a marginal decrease in the employment rate of 0.5 percentage points (from 55.4 % to 54.9 %). Construction, financial intermediation, education, and health and social work were among the sectors that registered a decrease in the number of workers. Considering the difficult period, the unemployment rate increased only marginally by 1 percentage points between Q2 2008 and Q2 2009 (from 6 % to 7 %). This turned to an additional 1 848 unemployed. [Excerpt]peer-reviewe