Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- one New Labour, ‘modernisation’ and welfare worker resistance
- two Strenuous welfarism: restructuring the welfare labour process
- three A ‘Third Way’? Industrial relations under New Labour
- four Acts of distrust? Support workers’ experiences in PFI hospital schemes
- five Control and resistance at the ward-face: contesting the nursing labour process
- six ‘I didn’t come into teaching for this!’: the impact of the market on teacher professionalism
- seven Ambiguities and resistance: academic labour and the commodification of higher education
- eight The paradox of ‘professionalisation’ and ‘degradation’ in welfare work: the case of nursery nurses
- nine Social work today: a profession worth fighting for?
- ten Working ‘for’ welfare in the grip of the ‘iron’ Chancellor: modernisation and resistance in the Department for Work and Pensions
- eleven Working in the non-profit welfare sector: contract culture, partnership, Compacts and the ‘shadow state’
- twelve Beyond New Labour: work and resistance in the ‘new’ welfare state
- Index
one - New Labour, ‘modernisation’ and welfare worker resistance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- one New Labour, ‘modernisation’ and welfare worker resistance
- two Strenuous welfarism: restructuring the welfare labour process
- three A ‘Third Way’? Industrial relations under New Labour
- four Acts of distrust? Support workers’ experiences in PFI hospital schemes
- five Control and resistance at the ward-face: contesting the nursing labour process
- six ‘I didn’t come into teaching for this!’: the impact of the market on teacher professionalism
- seven Ambiguities and resistance: academic labour and the commodification of higher education
- eight The paradox of ‘professionalisation’ and ‘degradation’ in welfare work: the case of nursery nurses
- nine Social work today: a profession worth fighting for?
- ten Working ‘for’ welfare in the grip of the ‘iron’ Chancellor: modernisation and resistance in the Department for Work and Pensions
- eleven Working in the non-profit welfare sector: contract culture, partnership, Compacts and the ‘shadow state’
- twelve Beyond New Labour: work and resistance in the ‘new’ welfare state
- Index
Summary
Introduction
My work was not only relatively lower paid than thirty years ago, it was also entirely insecure, day-to-day agency employment. Back then at least I had the security of joining the staff of the NHS from day one: it was a safe job for life if I wanted it, but everything is shifting sands for the low paid. It is called ‘flexibility’, and in the name of flexibility the hospital had shed or ‘outsourced’ all its ancillary workers. I was about to learn the full meaning of contracting out. (Toynbee, 2003, pp 56-7)
Polly Toynbee's comments here will be familiar to the many who work in the lower reaches of public services work in the UK today. As a high-profile and well-respected journalist, Toynbee had the luxury of knowing that her involvement in this particular work, here as a hospital porter employed by a large private firm, was not a permanent feature of her day-to-day life but allowed her the opportunity to explore for a short period of time some of the experiences of the most poorly paid and vulnerable workers in New Labour's Britain. In Hard work: Life in low-pay Britain (2003), she embarked on a similar journey to A working life (Toynbee, 1971), allowing for an informed comparison to be made between key aspects of working lives in the public sector in the 1970s and now. Clearly both studies are located in very different economic, political, social and cultural contexts. In short, and of importance for us in this particular collection, the world of public sector work has been transformed in crucial ways. Toynbee continues:
It so happened that on the day I left Tony Blair was making an important speech about public services. It was another of his ambivalent muddled messages. He praised public-service workers but then called for more ‘reform’ and ‘flexibility’, which from the ground floor felt like a threat. The government always speaks with several agendas. And they are often contradictory. The low-paid public workers consist of the working poor, the deserving poor, many of them women and mothers, the very people the Working Families’ Tax Credits are designed to help. These are the very families whose poverty the government has pledged to abolish. But that springs from the part of the government's brain labelled ‘poverty targets’.
- Type
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- Information
- New Labour/Hard Labour?Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2007