ABSTRACT
The major material experiences of unemployment are humiliation, poverty, isolation, and a feeling of uselessness. The leisure activities of unemployed people will inevitably be affected and not by the progressive elements of ‘choice’. Poverty is a major qualitative part of the material experience of unemployment. This is inevitably so, an inevitability which has been constructed in great detail by social security policy since 1834. This construction of poverty, this linking of poverty with the nature of unemployment is made all the more real, and indeed is exacerbated by, the fact that unemployed people exist within the culture of a society which is continually bombarding them with consumption-based values. Unemployment then is irrevocably linked with poverty. Not only has social security policy been dedicated to ensuring that unemployment equals poverty for people, but it also plays an important role constructing the experience of humiliation for the unemployed.
