Unemployment and social class stigmas

ABSTRACT

Western economies have seen a shift away from a model of job security to a model of work precarity. Cycles of unemployment are a defining feature of the new precarious economy. Given these cycles of unemployment, it becomes imperative to explore the barriers to reemployment. The present study uses stigma communication to explore the intersection of two barriers to reemployment: the stigmatization of unemployment and social class position. Analysis of 40 interviews revealed that the meaning of unemployment changed depending on the perceived social class of an unemployed person. Participants described typical unemployed people as pathologically lazy and unmotivated. Upper class unemployed people were stigmatized as a product of privilege. Middle class unemployed people were relatively unstigmatized. The typical unemployed person merged with the typical unemployed lower class person, suggesting that the dominant meaning of unemployment assumes that unemployment is a lower class phenomenon that is preventable if the lower class person would work harder.

KEYWORDS:

• Unemployment
• social class
• stigma
• stigma communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although we did not specifically ask participants to identify their social class, most of the participants self-identified as middle class. None of the participants spontaneously identified as either lower or upper class, despite the rather large variance in indicators of social class such as income and education. This tendency to self-identify as middle class has been noted by other researchers (Dougherty, 2011; Kingston, 2000).