Between 2010–2015, the Coalition’s pursuit of a radical austerity programme saw Britain’s Jobcentre Plus experience some of the most punitive reforms and budget cuts in its history. Focusing on the outcomes of these reforms, a growing body of research has found that claiming processes became a more ‘institutionally violent’ and injurious experience for out-of-work benefit claimants. The present article draws upon ideas, developed by Bauman (1989), which focus on the processes that facilitate ‘institutional violence’. We use this framework to analyse ten interviews with front-line workers and managers in public/contractor employment services. In doing so, we expose an array of policy tools and hidden managerial methods used during the Coalition administration which encouraged front-line staff to deliver services in ways that led to a range of harmful outcomes for benefit claimants.

Since the mid-1980s, out-of-work benefit receipt in the UK has been increasingly governed by a ‘workfarist’ mesh of conditionality and activation policies. A wealth of research has found that conditionality and activation policies trigger a range of harmful outcomes for benefit claimants. However, this research largely ignores how claimants may struggle against these policies to eschew harmful outcomes. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with 15 young men, this article demonstrates how claimants can subvert policy implementation to prioritise their own needs and interests. It is concluded that claimant struggles against policy implementation most accurately reflect survival strategies and are predominantly rooted in the ‘material nexus’ of class-based inequalities in capitalist societies.

The benefit sanction is a dominant activation policy in Britain’s ‘welfare-to-work’ regime. While policymakers believe in their necessity to correct behaviour, research shows benefit sanctions cause additional harm to Britain’s marginalised groups. Drawing upon a small-scale qualitative study, this article first navigates new territory, mapping the ways stigma emerges from the state – channelled through the benefit sanction – and manifests in the lives of sanctioned claimants. Acknowledging wider evidence, the sanction is then argued to have failed as a correctional device. Rather, taking into account Britain’s current politico-economic climate, the sanction appears as a weapon used to incite negative emotion in an attempt to police the boundaries of the labour market, while frequently abandoning some of the UK’s most vulnerable citizens.

Since the mid-1980s, UK welfare reform has seen policymakers incrementally re-design the framing, structure and delivery of the UK’s social security system. Britain’s network of benefit administration and employment service offices have experienced a range of expenditure cuts and are increasingly governed by a new ‘workfarist’ mesh of behavioural conditionality and labour market activation policy. The overarching purpose of this, or at least according to a number of key politicians, has been to ensure labour market discipline among the UK’s out-of-work claiming population by transforming the social security system into a device for altering behaviour. In recent decades, a number of critical interpretations of welfare reform have emerged; two of which have been dominant above all others. One interpretation—heavily influenced by Marxist regulation theory—suggests that welfare reform has emerged as a logical social policy compliment to wider processes of labour market restructuring and a rise in low-paying, contingent ‘jobs that nobody wants’. This interpretation suggests that the services tasked with delivering welfare reform are experienced as sites of discipline and deterrence; ensuring that out-of-work claimants engage with unattractive jobs. A second interpretation—evolving partially out of regulation theory but significantly developed and heavily influenced by Wacquant—suggests that welfare reform has emerged as one part of a dual regulatory response to manage a surge in social unrest and urban marginality. This interpretation suggests that the services tasked with delivering welfare reform are experienced as sites of criminalisation and suffering in order to correct behavioural dysfunction and bend out-of-work claimants towards dependency on low-wage, precarious work. The present thesis offers an alternative interpretation. It is suggested here that UK welfare reform has emerged in response to an accumulation of working class struggles. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with 15 young male claimants and 11 interviews with frontline benefit administration/employment service workers, it is also suggested here that the services tasked with delivering welfare reform are experienced as sites of class struggle. On one side of the desk, frontline workers operate in pressured conditions to probe for claimant resistance, ensure work-related compliance and, in some instances, antagonise claimants in efforts to secure their resignation from benefit receipt. Whilst, on the other side of the desk, claimants use a range of methods to struggle against and subvert frontline service delivery in favour of prioritising their own individual needs and interests.

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