When the Welfare State Disappears: Working-class Responses to Rapid Socioeconomic Change in Greece

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 09. Responding to Crisis

Abstract

How do people respond to mass unemployment and protracted downward mobility? Research from crisis-ridden interwar Europe pointed to instances of social disintegration. After the Second World War, a number of European governments developed comprehensive welfare systems to combat the Beveridgean evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Despite different institutional configurations across countries, European welfare states have been instrumental in ameliorating the social costs of economic cycle fluctuations and in assisting affected groups to maintain a livelihood. However, the current crises in a number of countries have resulted in staggering unemployment rates and large-scale welfare state reorganization. This backdrop provides a situation akin to a ‘natural experiment’ enabling new inquiries into the societal implications of such changes.
This article examines how newly unemployed working-class people have responded to the deep crisis in Greece, the country most adversely affected in Europe, by analysing micro-level processes. Drawing on findings from fieldwork in a community near Greece’s major port, I elaborate on the responses to deprivation by people who until the onset of the crisis were formally employed and enjoyed a range of welfare services. The empirical part of the article traces the reconfiguration of reliance on material, institutional, social and cultural resources working class people draw on in order to secure their livelihoods. In so doing, I set out the conditions and processes via which class forces are being reconstructed to protect the social tissue from becoming subordinated to the market logic (cf. Polanyi 2001).

Author

• Alexander Kentikelenis, University of Cambridge