The Sociology of Unemployment: A choice between hard labour or destitution?

 The ‘back to work’ mantra is used to force people, despite their skills and training, into precarious work, offering the choice between hard labour and destitution, say Tom Boland and Ray Griffin 

Since 2012, social welfare in Ireland has been radically reformed in ways that are not widely known or understood.

The Government’s Pathways to Work policy has been consistently linked to the Action Plan for Jobs. Yet the relationship between welfare and the economy, and the consequences of welfare reform for individual lives, has been subject to very little scrutiny.