Introduction
This is a chapter about working-class young men looking for work in Swindon in the UK - a town hit hard by the economic downturn after 2008 and where unemployment rates among young people are high.
Early in January 2013, Honda, a key source of employment in Swindon, announced that it would be cutting a quarter of its permanent workforce, in addition to the 325 temporary workers who had been let go from the company shortly before the announcement was made (Wearden 2013). It is shown that this proposal had an impact on young men in precarious employment or searching for work in a wider context of the growing problems facing working-class and often unskilled young men in the labor market.The concepts of structural and symbolic violence are used in this analysis of the situation of working-class young men in precarious work situations. In doing so, this chapter confounds commonly held assumptions about the geographies of conflict and violence as a characteristic of life in sites such as derelict neighborhoods in large metropolitan centers or in poverty-stricken areas in the Global South. Instead, this research explores 1 year in the lives of three young men cycling in and out of employment, living in Southern England, a relatively affluent part of the UK. Swindon, a town of 209,156, is located 130 km west of London.
These three men were part of a broader study focusing on the construction of masculinities and the experience of worklessness in the context of fiscal austerity. The research was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 38 un(der) employed young men between the ages of 18 and 25 of different ethnicities and with varying migration histories living in Swindon. A smaller subset of participants, including the three discussed here, were reinterviewed once or twice over the course of a year (between August 2012 and August 2013). In addition, key informant interviews were carried out with employers and youth service providers.
At the time fieldwork was initiated in August 2012, Swindon was identified as having a youth unemployment “hotspot,” that is to say, it contained a neighborhood within it where the proportion of youth claiming unemployment benefit is twice that of the national average (ACEVO 2012). Data for February 2012 for Swindon revealed that 9.4% of the resident population aged 18-24 were Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants, above the regional average for the South West of 6.5% and the overall proportion for Great Britain of 8.4% (ONS 2014). (It should be noted that the claimant count underestimates true underemployment rates due to the fact that many job seekers do not or cannot claim JSA because they do not qualify for benefits. Furthermore, access to benefits has been increasingly restrictive in recent years, and plans for further restrictions for young people have been announced by the coalition government (Wintour 2014).) The situation of un(der)employed young people in Swindon has not been helped by the demoralizing effects of cuts to public spending, including drastic reductions to support youth services that were implemented as part of the austerity measures of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. The three men discussed in this chapter were selected as clear examples of young men actively seeking work and affected by the Honda downsizing. Two of the men were White and the third a man of Indian origin from the state of Goa who had moved to Swindon at the age of 11.2