Unshackling the Future of Work from the Ideology of Full-Employment

This paper argues that by shackling the future of work to a vision of full-employment, alternative futures are closed-off. At present, employment creation is seen as the sole route out of poverty. Here, however, we reveal that a complementary additional pathway is to help people to help themselves and each other. To show this, evidence from a survey of 400 households in deprived neighborhoods of Southampton and Sheffield is reported. This reveals that besides creating job opportunities, measures that directly empower people to improve their circumstances could be a useful complementary initiative to combat social exclusion and open up new futures for work that are currently closed-off