Collection: Journal of Poverty and Social Justice Editors’ Choice
Enjoy free access to our journal Editors’ top articles from recent issues. Access these articles for free until 31 January 2025.
Editors' Choice Collection Journal of Poverty and Social Justice
You are looking at 1 - 3 of 3 items
In this first UK study of ‘Workers using foodbanks’, 65 per cent of research participants, including 76 per cent of those of working age, identified poor-quality employment as the root cause of their food insecurity. This primary problem of the deficient quality of jobs was characterised by insecure work, low wages, and excessive mental stress. Data revealed an environment in which workers are required to claim benefits because available employment cannot sustain their needs. A contemporary generation of ‘in-and-out-of-work[ers]’ are food insecure because of a secondary problem of inadequate welfare support. Post-pandemic welfare laws are interacting with ineffective employment rights protection to scaffold a low-wage labour market in which jobs are stripped of qualities that meet workers’ basic needs. There is an urgent need to respond to the UKs record high incidence of food insecurity by improving the quality of available employment so that all jobs deliver adequate income, security of working arrangements, and support for good mental and physical health. ‘Workers using foodbanks’ is an aphorism that captures a contemporary reality in which the risk of food insecurity is embedded in contractual arrangements for work that are forged at the nexus of welfare and employment laws.
Media coverage plays an important role in generating knowledge about and shaping understandings of homelessness. Although families make up about 35% of all those without housing in the United States, they remain relatively invisible in the media. We examine the amount of coverage and content of representations of homeless families in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in 2017 and 2022. Families receive little media coverage in comparison to single, homeless adults, especially men. When newspapers do address unhoused families, they mainly do so without reference to the race, gender, or sexuality of homeless families. As a result of limited and trivial coverage, it is difficult to find articles that provide extended discussion of family homelessness or explain the multi-layered structural factors that cause families to lose housing.
The current design of UK public policy and mainstream political and social discourse has consistently equated paid work with good citizenship and desirable parenting. The article presents findings from a recent qualitative study that explores how lone mothers with different moral rationalities judge themselves before and after making a transition from welfare (and being full-time carers) to paid work. The findings suggest that the design of public policy and related discourses worked well with the moral rationalities of some lone mothers who believed that paid work made them better mothers. However, it left others with moral values on direct care behind, as they suffered from physical and emotional exhaustion and feelings of guilt in paid work. The article highlights how dominant ideologies reinforce the pre-existing hierarchy of paid work and care, with the latter being viewed as deserving of less acknowledgement.
