Abstract
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.
In this first UK study of a phenomenon figuratively known as ‘Workers using foodbanks’, we explore workers’ own accounts of their need for food support. Our data are generated from qualitative research in foodbanks and food pantries in Liverpool, 65 per cent of our research participants, including 76 per cent of those of working age, identified poor-quality employment as the key reason for their need to draw on food support. Many participants were often moving in and out of work because paid work was unsustainable. These ‘in-and-out-of-work[ers]’ were food insecure. Our analysis suggests that new interactions between welfare law and employment law are stripping available jobs of the qualities that are essential for meeting workers’ basic needs.
Post-pandemic welfare reforms have decentred the image of the subject of welfare as a claimant who is required to work and have supplanted it with an image of the welfare subject as a worker who is reliant on access to benefits. Consequently, our analysis shows that at the point where welfare laws connect with employment laws, workers are not recognised as needing the essentials of paid work: neither wages sufficient to meet their needs, nor active participation in upholding their employment rights, nor as having parental responsibilities. Rather, at the nexus of employment and welfare law, workers are expected to endure unwanted insecurity of terms and conditions, and their increased engagement with poor-quality work is a condition of access to welfare benefits. ‘Workers using foodbanks’ is an aphorism that captures a contemporary reality in which the risk of food insecurity is embedded in contractual agreements to work. Future scholarship and debate about the rise of food insecurity in the UK should engage with job-quality deficits of insecure work, low wages, and exposure to excessive mental stress.
The Welfare Reform Act 2012 compels out-of-work welfare claimants to ‘take all reasonable actions for the purpose of obtaining paid work’, and ‘to take up paid work immediately’ (s96–97). These statutory provisions inform the work search and work availability requirements that are conditions of welfare benefit entitlement (Puttick, 2019; Dwyer et al, 2022). Should claimants fail to adhere to conditions without ‘good reason’ (Welfare Reform Act 2012 s26–27) they face the harsh sanction of benefit withdrawal (Adler, 2018). This system of conditionality is driven by a ‘governance rationale’ in which poverty is thought to arise from a lack of personal motivation for work, which is best addressed by disciplinary controls (Fletcher and Flint, 2018: 771–2). Yet, following the Covid-19 pandemic, that governance rationale has evolved in response to contemporary exigencies of labour shortages, rising living costs and economic stagnation (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, 2023). The post-pandemic welfare system has been explicitly deployed to supply labour into low-wage work.
Since September 2022, the range of claimants to whom work search and work availability conditions apply has been markedly expanded, together with the roll-out of a new policy of ‘in-work-progression’ that is groundbreaking and globally unprecedented. Consequently, between September 2022 and May 2024, an additional 1 million low-waged workers were mandated to increase their hours, their pay, or to take an additional job in order to retain their access to welfare benefits (Department of Work and Pensions, 2022c: 11; 2024). A Parliamentary Select Committee review acknowledged ‘in-work progression’ could become ‘the most significant welfare reform since 1948’ (Work and Pensions Committee, 2016: 16). The novelty of the policy is to take controls designed to discipline claimants who are unwilling to work and apply them to discipline those who already have a job. Low-income workers who need to supplement their earnings with welfare payments must now meet the condition of taking all reasonable actions to increase their hours, their pay, or to take on an additional job (Jones and Carson, 2024). Failure to comply without good reason triggers a sanction in the form of welfare benefit withdrawal. In most cases, these conditions remain in place until workers are earning the equivalent of 35-hours a week at National Living Wage.
As is evident in our title, this article explores a phenomenon figuratively described in everyday discourse as ‘Workers using foodbanks’. Food insecurity among the employed population has grown to record levels (Beatty et al, 2021; Goodwin, 2022; Bull et al, 2023), yet little is known about ‘biographical pathways into food poverty and the underlying causal mechanisms that lead to the use of food aid’ (Drew, 2022: 84). Our study is the first to focus on workers’ use of emergency and community food support, as well as being the first to capture initial impacts of the extension of conditionality into employment relations. In the context of a lack of prior research with workers in foodbanks, our method was a pilot of the viability of working with food-support spaces to engage workers in research. Our data revealed the circumstances in which people needed access to free or very low-cost food. We built on the valuable insights of Garthwaite’s ethnographic study in a foodbank in the North-East of England about this under-explored, yet frequently experienced, form of economic hardship (Garthwaite, 2016a; Garthwaite, 2016b).
Our analysis suggests that increases in food insecurity are a consequence of the growing volume of jobs in which essential qualities are lacking. In our study, workers identified that job-quality deficits were broader than matters of pay and included experiences of insecure and irregular hours, harmful levels of stress, incompatibility with effective parenting and dismissal due to ill health. By the absence of essential job qualities, many of our research participants were subjected to the harms and injustice of food insecurity.
The inability of workers to secure an adequate standard of living from their employment is widely understood to be a consequence of deregulated labour markets (Ratti and Garcia-Muñoz, 2022). We regard it as more helpful to speak of re-regulated labour markets because, as highlighted by Mustchin and Martínez-Lucio (2020: 735), the UK state has taken an ‘increasingly interventionist’ role in contemporary labour markets. Their analysis focused on the role of enforcement and inspection agencies, yet our interest lies in employment law. Workers in low-wage sectors of the labour market are especially impacted by the design and enforcement of minimum labour standards set out in employment laws. However, the increasing influence of welfare law on the circumstances and conditions in which workers take up low-wage jobs means that welfare rights are functioning as an adjunct to employment law in shaping job qualities.
In our discussion of findings, we demonstrate that post-Covid welfare reforms are recasting the legal subjectivity of workers struggling with low income. As bearers of legal rights and duties, individuals in everyday life are contextualised as the subjects of law and policy through an ‘image of [their] legal subjectivity’ (Broekman, 1985: 85). The established image of the subject of welfare law is that of a claimant who is required to work. However, the novel reach of conditionality into employment relations means that welfare laws are eliding with employment laws in ways that compel workers to rely on access to welfare benefits. The effect is to radically recraft the subject of welfare in the image of a worker who is reliant on access to benefits.
We begin with an overview of the problem of food insecurity in the UK. We then explain our methods and present our findings. In discussion, we evidence that welfare reforms and individual employment rights are together scaffolding a low-wage labour market in which welfare claimants are employed in jobs that are increasingly devoid of qualities that are essential for workers to sustain themselves and their families. In conclusion, we identify the significance of our findings for initiatives to tackle food insecurity and for future research.
Food insecurity and the phenomenon of ‘Workers using foodbanks’
The right to food is guaranteed at Article 11 of the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). However, the UK neither acknowledges nor fulfils its obligations (Dowler and O’Connor, 2012). The term ‘food poverty’ is commonly used across Europe to identify a non-monetary dimension of deprivation which constitutes ‘the very essence of poverty’ (McIntosh, 1996: 133). When people experience income pressure at a household level, food is often the first necessity that they cut back on (Pettifer and Patel, 2022). This form of poverty is termed ‘food insecurity’ in North America and Australia (Alkire, 2007). In the UK, the terms ‘food poverty’ and ‘food insecurity’ are used interchangeably (Drew, 2022). A widely used definition is that food insecurity arises ‘whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or the ability to acquire acceptable food in socially acceptable ways is limited or uncertain’ (Anderson, 1990: 1576; All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in the United Kingdom, 2014).
In this article, we use the term ‘food insecurity’ to denote the multifaceted nature of difficulties in accessing food, to highlight the psycho-social as well as the structural and material dimensions of hunger, and to leave open the possibility of wide-ranging remedies. Relevant too is our recognition that people living in poverty do not associate their lives with the term ‘poverty’ and will reject it as an identity label (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013). Nevertheless, we recognise that food insecurity is generally a strong indicator of poverty and of wider violations of socioeconomic rights (James, 2023). We have previously discussed food insecurity as an ‘injustice’ which leaves ‘people worrying about how to feed their family or household, reducing the quality or quantity of their food, skipping meals or experiencing hunger’ (Hayes and Maynard, 2024: 10). Research has consistently linked UK welfare reforms since 2010 to increased food insecurity (Jenkins et al, 2021). Food insecurity has been mapped onto the contours of welfare conditionality as a social expression of the harms of policies including benefit sanctions, the two-child limit, and the bedroom tax (Garthwaite, 2016a; Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford, 2021; Mantouvalou, 2023). There is a nascent body of work that is mapping how welfare policies are impacting people who are pushed from welfare into work (Mantouvalou, 2022; Calvert-Jump et al, 2023; Hayes and Maynard, 2024). Such scholarship is deepening our understanding of the legal architecture and political choices that have produced welfare conditionality and implemented austerity (Paz-Fuchs and Wynn, 2019; Mantouvalou, 2020; McQuail and DeSchutter, 2023). Elsewhere, scholarship has gathered evidence of food insecurity as a human rights violation and is testing legal arguments through which the most egregious aspects of welfare reform and austerity policy might be challenged (Dowler and O’Connor, 2012; Mantouvalou, 2022; James, 2023).
Food insecurity is currently experienced by an all-time high of 17 per cent of UK households, including 9 per cent of in-work families (Food Foundation Tracker based on YouGov Survey, 2023; Francis-Devine, 2024). At an individual level, it is estimated that 11.3 million people (14 per cent of all UK adults) experience food insecurity, the overwhelming majority being of working age. Data gathered by YouGov found that 3 million adults (5.9 per cent of households) had not eaten for a whole day because they could not afford, nor access, food (Food Foundation Tracker based on YouGov Survey, 2023). It is estimated that between a quarter and a third of people experiencing food insecurity receive emergency food support from a charitable foodbank (Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford, 2023). Foodbanks are designed for people at a point of acute food crisis (Perry et al, 2014). Access typically requires a professional referral via the issuing of a voucher; the items provided are an emergency supply typically designed to last only three days (see Garthwaite et al, 2015; Garthwaite, 2016a). The Trussell Trust is the UK’s largest network of foodbanks and, during 2022, 1 in 5 of its emergency food parcels were distributed to in-work households, a considerably higher proportion than prior to the pandemic (Trussell Trust, 2019; Bull et al, 2023).
There is a strong body of research concerned with the institutionalisation of foodbanks and the sustained rise in foodbank usage (Lambie-Mumford and Green, 2017; Lambie-Mumford, 2018; Loopstra et al, 2015; Reeves and Loopstra, 2021). It has been argued that the existence of foodbanks depoliticises the injustice of hunger because foodbanks draw on images of ‘deserving individuals’ to induce public donations (Bennett et al, 2023: 263). Many foodbanks regard the alleviation of hunger as a valid expression of Christian values and charitable service (Lambie-Mumford and Jarvis, 2012; May et al, 2019). Wells and Caraher (2014) have identified a dearth of critical analysis in the print media about the rise of foodbanks and linked it to a limited public understanding of underlying causes. More recent research on public motivation to donate food or cash to foodbanks has found donors believe the government had failed in its responsibility to take care of people (Bennett et al, 2023). Academic literature on the drivers of foodbank use has largely focused on the impacts of welfare reform (Garthwaite, 2016a; Drew, 2022; Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford, 2023). Rising foodbank use has also been correlated with austerity in a broader sense, to include public sector spending cuts, the closure of community-based support services, the withdrawal of legal aid and lack of free legal advice (Jenkins et al, 2021; Bull et al, 2023; Hayes and Maynard, 2024).
Foodbanks are an established part of the voluntary sector, accepted as legitimate by the general public (Wells and Caraher, 2014), and they are commonly invoked in political discourse. The phrase ‘foodbank’ was used in UK parliamentary debate over 200 times between September 2022 and May 2024.1 Yet the foodbank is not the only form of food support available to people experiencing food insecurity. Community food spaces such as food pantries, food clubs, mobile food buses and social supermarkets are typically organised with a membership club ethos. People pay a small amount of cash in exchange for low-cost access to food and essential items. The focus is on providing an affordable source of healthy and fresh food: members choose what they want from the limited selection available, people self-refer and regular attendance is encouraged.
Mainstream political discourse, in which claimants are characterised as ‘scroungers’ and workers as ‘strivers’, leads to working people being ‘easily overlooked in mainstream debates about poverty’ (Garthwaite, 2016a: 98). The poverty which drives foodbank usage is seemingly more likely to be attributed to the issue of welfare failure than to the failure of paid work to provide an adequate income. Perhaps in consequence, civil society organisations concerned about the entrenched character of low-waged insecure work, including but not limited to trade unions, have invoked the spectre of workers using foodbanks to rhetorically express outrage about low pay (Booth, 2022; Living Wage Foundation, 2023; NHS Charities Together, 2023; Postans, 2023). Low-waged workers are much more likely to draw on a community-based form of food support, like a food pantry, than they are to attend a foodbank (Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford, 2023), yet the Living Wage Foundation (2023) claims that 60 per cent of all low-waged workers used a ‘foodbank’ in 2023. It seems that the phrase ‘Workers using foodbanks’ is an aphorism that seeks to politicise the problem of low wages. The outrage expressed is not at the existence of foodbanks per se, but rather an outrage that working people are degraded by low income to the extent that they end up in a place where wage-earners supposedly should not be, namely in a foodbank. The foodbank is thus politicised by being rhetorically positioned as a place where only those who do not work ought to be.
Where lines of research inquiry concern workers using foodbanks, the legal subjectivity of low-wage workers is surely pertinent. Legal subjectivity is a response at the level of sociological theory to empirical research that has addressed individual experience (Archer, 2003) and explored the ‘law of the dominated’ (Collier, 1998; Guibentif, 2020: 180). It reflects interest in the ways that citizens are structurally included in the political functioning of the state, a notion of citizenship that requires, in turn, a notion of subjectivity that, to a certain extent, is a legal subjectivity (Thornhill, 2011). Legal subjectivity is a form of communication about the subject of law, which has a psychical and societal component. As Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford have recently concluded, ‘issues of rights and entitlements are critical’ to attempts to understand why people are drawing on charitable support to meet their fundamental needs (2021: 210). Rights and duties play an important role in the psychic perception that people have of their own position in society (Guibentif, 2020). At a societal level, subjects of laws are imagined, in order for them to be constituted as holders of rights and duties. Legal subjectivity is a ‘priority research domain’ that enables research to anticipate, evaluate and qualify individual experience (Guibentif, 2020: 177).
Methodology
An expert review in 2023 of research evidence about household food insecurity in the UK, was commissioned by the Food Standards Agency. It found that less than 10 per cent of the 209 existing studies in academic and grey literature explored food insecurity via the experiences of specific population groups (Lambie-Mumford et al, 2023). There was no existing study based on the experiences of ‘workers’ as a group. One pre-pandemic article focused on low-income women in work by combining analysis of Labour Force Survey Data with interview data gathered from 20 managers and staff at foodbanks, referral agencies or community centres (Beatty et al, 2021). An earlier study drew on interviews with 25 foodbank users to identify a complex network of reasons for foodbank uptake, which implicated benefit penalties and precarious employment among them (Wainwright et al, 2018). In the context of a lack of prior research about workers using foodbanks, our method was a pilot of working with food-support spaces to engage workers in research about food insecurity.
The study emerged from a collaboration between Liverpool Law School and Feeding Liverpool, a network of emergency and community food spaces. Working together, we organised the delivery of pop-up free legal advice by final-year law students as part of an optional ‘Public Interest Lawyering’ module that students had chosen as part of their undergraduate degree. A random group of 14 students were trained and supported to offer awareness-raising, signposting, and advice about national minimum wage rights, statutory paid holiday leave, sick pay and welfare benefit entitlements. They were also trained in interview skills, research ethics, data protection and confidentiality. We provided 32 food pantry leaders with a briefing about welfare reforms. We then liaised with pantry leaders to organise student placements at food-support spaces. Two specialist legal advice services agreed to serve as referral points should students identify people in need of expert or ongoing support. Between February and May 2023, 14 students were placed to work in pairs for one day a week in foodbanks and food pantries in Everton, Kensington, Vauxhall, Knotty Ash, and Bootle in the city of Liverpool. These are among the most economically deprived communities in England (Liverpool City Council, 2019). Students provided advice and signposting to approximately 120 recipients of food support. Pantry leaders were keen for the student placements to inform the future possibility of longer-term free legal advice provision for people drawing on their support. It is in this context that the research data upon which we draw was co-produced between students and recipients of food support.
Ethical considerations
We developed methods through consultation with food pantry leaders and volunteers. They expressed ethical concerns at the prospective use of quantitative survey instruments. These were perceived to risk objectifying the people they supported, to offer little personal agency over information shared and be redolent of methods deployed by government agencies. Pantry leaders and volunteers highlighted that people experiencing food insecurity are often weary or suspicious of being asked to explain themselves in order to access help. As a consequence, food-support spaces were attuned to the need to protect people from forms of support that are unnecessarily conditional or expose personal lives to external scrutiny. It was essential that our data collection methods should fit within this ethos.
In the recruitment of research participants, we did not broach the subject of potential participation until after food had been accessed and free advice and signposting had been given, if wanted. Data was gathered between 15 March and 5 May 2023, a point in time at which low-income families were enduring considerable cost-of-living pressures following seven months of double-digit inflation. To avoid invoking social stigma about poverty, people were advised that the research was broadly about access to justice, and work and welfare rights, during the cost-of-living crisis. To reduce potential perceptions of the research as prying, participants were not required to provide demographic information about themselves or their families, and we sought a method of data collection that would respect participants’ agency in choosing the information they wanted to share. Our method was for participants and students to co-create vignettes of lived experience (Edminston, 2018) via an in-person discussion, occurring in situ at the food-support space. Each vignette was a short case study (200–250 words) through which participants could set out the circumstances in which their need for food support had arisen. Participants were asked to assign an imaginary name to their vignette, written up in the third person, to depersonalise that which they were sharing. Participants gave written confirmation of their knowledge of what had been written, confirmed that personal identifying information had been removed, and gave written consent for the vignette to be used for research purposes, including publications.
For some students, the placement was the first time they had interviewed members of the public, either for the purposes of providing legal advice or for research. In recognition of their inexperience, we set the frame of potential participants to include staff or volunteers at food pantries. This reduced the risk of students feeling pressure to secure participation from recipients of food support and it also recognised the importance of insights from staff and volunteers with whom students had established working relationships throughout their placement. There was no requirement for individual food-support space users, volunteers, or staff to participate in the research. Participants were not paid for their time, and they engaged with students in the context of accessing food support and the offer of voluntary provision of free legal advice and signposting, which might, or might not, have been taken up.
Findings
There were 26 participants, 14 identified as women, 11 as men and 1 as non-binary (see Table 2, appendix, for details). They co-authored ‘vignettes of lived experience’ about their own circumstances and the research produced 20 vignettes about food-support recipients and six vignettes about staff or food-pantry volunteers. Nine of the 20 recipients of food support had dependent children.
A large majority (65 per cent) of the 20 research participants who were users of food support identified poor-quality work as the underlying cause of their food insecurity (see Figure 1, appendix). This included 76 per cent of those of working age. Details shared about employment included experiences of insecure and irregular hours; too few or too many hours; low pay; harmful levels of stress; incompatibility with effective parenting; and dismissal due to ill health. Indeed, every participant who was in work, and all bar one of the participants who were seeking work or would like to be working, provided an account that identified poor-quality work as the key reason for their situation of food insecurity.
Four participants were working full time (35–40+ hours a week), three of them were men and one woman. They said that pay was insufficient to meet their needs, working hours were incompatible with effective parenting, and that job insecurity led to high stress levels and mental health pressures. There was one female participant who cared for her four young children while her husband worked full time. She blamed the family’s food insecurity on the poor quality of her husband’s employment. There were three participants working part time (10–23 hours a week), all of them women. Three of the participants in paid work said that their job was creating mental health difficulties for them and one said she struggled to protect her physical health because of income pressures. Another man and one woman explained that stress arising from previous bad experiences in employment had led them to develop severe mental health problems and, as a result, they were not currently well enough for paid work. A non-binary worker had been dismissed from their job because of illness and was not yet well enough to look for work afresh. Among the participants from non-working households, one person was unemployed and actively seeking work, three had lost their jobs or discontinued work because of ill health, two participants had long-term disabilities, one had been sanctioned and was also a carer for an adult relative, and three were pensioners.
unsure whether he is paid minimum wage as he does not receive payslips, but he is too scared to raise the issue in case his hours get cut even more. […] He is trying hard to find another job but it’s very difficult to find one that aligns with school drop-off and pick-up times.
For Louis, it was insecurity of employment that created his situation of food insecurity. His legal right to information about his pay and deductions was not being respected, he had no voice at work and could not speak up for fear of putting himself and his children in an even worse position. Louis’ situation of food insecurity was entrenched by a lack of alternative work on offer to give him the security of hours he needed.
Elsa has a job and works around 10 hours a week. She wants to increase her hours but she is finding it hard to find somewhere due to her lack of skills and her caring responsibilities. Elsa looks after her granddaughter 5 days a week.
Jasmine finds it challenging to care for her growing children whilst affording her bills, especially in the winter months when it is extremely cold […] the agency gives permanent staff more hours, making her hours inconsistent, leaving her with low income. Inflation has had a huge impact on Jasmine’s wellbeing, leaving her feeling ‘everything is too much’.
even good jobs aren’t good enough anymore, people with bad jobs, like minimum wage, even our help isn’t helping them enough anymore. Everyone’s using places like foodbanks now, people who are working and people who can’t get a job.
Her employment is insecure and it doesn’t give her the wages she requires to cover her needs. She feels overworked and underpaid.
Peter has found it increasingly difficult to access food […] despite working a full-time job, even when working as many hours as possible. Peter says he ‘does not have enough money for the rent and food’ and ‘this has led to me and my family using food pantries and foodbanks wherever possible’. Peter recognised that since the recent cost-of-living crisis, this is becoming a more worrying issue.
Other concerns about inadequate pay being the underpinning reason for food insecurity were evident in the vignette of ‘William’, a full-time security guard with a wife and new baby. Work did not provide him with sufficient income to support his family and he said, ‘It saddens me when I receive my wage and in seven days, I do not have anything left and we have to wait for the benefits to come in.’
She also struggles to provide for her son, there is rarely enough left over to buy new clothes or the things he wants, saying ‘I have no other choice but to send my son to school with worn shoes, it is an unpleasant situation.’
Georgia had been hit hard by rapidly rising living costs, her wages had not kept up, and she was experiencing the acute anxiety of food insecurity. Food-pantry volunteer ‘Julia’ explained in her vignette that most of the single mothers who depended on the food pantry were in employment, bringing up their children, ‘but not earning enough to be able to afford basic food essentials’.
Arnold found the pressure to find work overwhelming and he took a few different zero-contract jobs. The jobs were not compatible with his role as a father, the money was not consistent enough to support [his family] properly. As a result, his mental health declined and he now claims disability benefits for his mental health.
Arnold’s account is of holding multiple zero-hours contract jobs and of intense pressure to find work. The conflict he experienced between fluctuating wages and the need to provide for his family had overwhelmed him psychologically. His situation of food insecurity initially arose when he was in paid work and it continued when he was out of work.
She is unable to be in part-time work to supplement [Universal Credit] because she suffers from severe mental health issues due to problems she had with her work.
Food insecurity meant that Sammie had been forced to re-home her cats, she could no longer afford to keep them, even through the companionship of her cats had provided her with a form of mental health support. Before accessing advice at the food pantry, Sammie was completely unaware that she had been put into the wrong Universal Credit work-related group and also that bedroom tax was being wrongly deducted for a room that was occupied by a friend.
financial strain while working, often having no money left over after covering essential expenses such as food and bills. However, due to health conditions, their income decreased when they fell ill, leading to losing their job and a build-up of bills.
The money he receives from his wage and benefits is not enough to last him and his family; ‘I can practically say that I have nothing left.’
Sarah and her partner had both needed to give up work due to health problems. When he was able to return to work, they still didn’t have enough money to even cover the bills, and since they were living in a 2-bedroom house, had to pay bedroom tax for the spare bedroom.
did not prevent him from needing foodbanks when he was employed, as zero-hour contracts do not provide enough stability for a family.
Limitations, validity, and generalisability
There were two categories framing our participant selection (see Table 1, appendix):
- (A)volunteers or staff at the placement space; and
- (B)recipients of food support who had already accessed food and may have received some form of assistance from students.
This framing enabled us to gain access and to gather information in a spirit of mutual support and trust. Our framing and resultant findings were not intended to be representative of all those who experience food insecurity in the UK. There is a wide discrepancy between the number of people experiencing food insecurity and the numbers using foodbanks (Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford, 2023). Our sample size was small but was in line with sample sizes in other peer-reviewed empirical research about foodbank usage. Most people in low-wage work do not draw on foodbanks or food pantries (Loopstra and Lambie-Mumford, 2021) and we are cognisant that our findings are drawn from the minority of low-wage workers who draw on food support. The focus of the article on the phenomenon of ‘Workers using foodbanks’ reflects the specificity of our sampling and methods.
Our data has gaps in demographic information because characteristics were only available if shared organically as part of the process of writing the vignette. In presenting our findings, we have inferred the sex of the participant from their chosen imaginary name and pronoun. We have identified information such as marital status, dependent children, and migration status based on details the participant chose to share. No data was collected about the ethnicity of participants nor about their age, beyond broad categories of working age or pensioner (over 65 years). No data was collected about participants’ place of work nor home address, but postcode areas are likely to correspond with the locations of the placement settings. Our sample reflects a diversity of perspectives (see Table 2, appendix), including those of part-time and full-time workers, parents and single parents, couples and people living alone, migrant workers, and is gender-balanced. A large majority (60 per cent) of the vignettes highlighted disability, mental or physical ill health as an important factor in participants’ lives. This high prevalence of disability and ill health is consistent with a wider data picture about people drawing on food support (Garthwaite, 2016b).
In the next section, we situate our findings in the context of what is known about the legal and regulatory environment in which our research participants were positioned.
Discussion
The large majority (65 per cent) of participants in our research and 76 per cent of those of working age, identified poor-quality work as the most prominent driver of their food insecurity. All those in work, and all bar one of the workers who were looking for work or would like a job, identified specific job characteristics that underpinned their need for food support. This speaks to their unmet expectations that paid work would enable them to fulfil their basic needs. We have summarised into three categories the job characteristics they identified: insecure work; low wages; and exposure to excessive mental stress. In this discussion section, we turn to examine the wider legislative and policy environment in which job characteristics are shaped. In so doing, we situate our findings within a socio-legal context. Our aim is to show that the job characteristics that drive the need for food support are shaped at the nexus of welfare laws and the employment laws that establish minimum labour standards. We suggest that where welfare laws and employment laws elide, they reveal an image of legal subjectivity of a worker to whom rights and duties normatively correspond. The image is of a worker who is reliant on access to benefits and for whom the risk of food insecurity is consequently embedded in the contractual agreement to work.
The UK emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic with chronic problems of widespread ill health and a depleted workforce (Hayes and Maynard, 2024). For the first time since records began, there were more job vacancies than there were unemployed people to fill them, including very high vacancy rates in low-paying occupations (Joyce et al, 2022). This was partly due to a ‘considerable’ rise in ill health and disability (Office of National Statistics, 2022a; Powell, 2023) and it triggered concern at the highest levels of government that a decline in economic activity might be permanent (Economic Affairs Committee, 2022: 2; Francis-Devine, 2022). By November 2022, the excess number of economically inactive people was approximately 600,000 higher than prior to the pandemic (Office of National Statistics, 2022b).
In response, a series of rapid and dramatic policy adjustments tightened welfare eligibility and expanded the reach of conditionality. Universal Credit was overtly deployed as a tool for managing the labour market and the priority was to respond to ‘large labour force vacancies and high levels of economic inactivity’ (Department of Work and Pensions, 2023a). Tolerance given to new claimants looking for a job in their chosen field (that for which they might hold qualifications, skills, or experience), was reduced to a period of just four weeks (Department of Work and Pensions, 2022a). Thereafter, they must take any available job, in any sector, under any terms and conditions. This has been characterised as the ‘ABC’ approach: an (unevidenced) assertion that by taking (A) any job; a person might then find (B) a better job; and eventually access (C) a career (Department of Work and Pensions, 2022b). It has effectively created a duty to work that ‘forces’ workers (Mantouvalou, 2022: para. 30) to take unsuitable work on the worst possible terms (Jones and Carson, 2024; Wilkes et al, 2023).
Having taken a job in which earnings cannot possibly cover essential living costs, low-waged workers are required to claim benefits, yet they must continue to satisfy conditions to retain ongoing entitlement. They must make all efforts and take all opportunities to increase their hours of work, accept overtime, take an extra job or find a higher-paying job (Department of Work and Pensions, 2022; 2023a; 2023b; 2023c). Failure to do so without good reason will result in the withdrawal of benefit due to sanctions. Those required to comply with ‘intense work search’ requirements faced a more than doubling of the minimum earnings threshold, with three separate increases between September 2022 and May 2024 raising the threshold from National Living Wage equivalent earnings of at least 8 hours a week up to 18 hours a week. The effect was to flood the low-wage labour market with an additional 424,000 workers, the majority of whom who must take whatever they are offered. From September 2023, low-wage workers earning more than those in the ‘intense work search’ group became subject to the mandatory ‘in-work-progression’ scheme, which impacts on most claimants up to the point at which they are earning the equivalent of 35 hours a week at National Living Wage (adjustments are possible to take account of health limitations or caring responsibilities (Jones, 2022)). Mandatory ‘in-work progression’ affects approximately 600,000 claimants. Together, reform of ‘intense work search’ and ‘in-work progression’ thrust over 1 million low-wage workers into intense competition for wages and opportunities of paid work (Department of Work and Pensions, 2022c: 11; 2024)
Wright and Dwyer have critiqued Universal Credit as establishing a ‘coerced worker-claimant model’ (2022: 20). Our research expands on the injustices of conditionality, showing that harms are wider than harms of coercion. We identify that the harm of food insecurity rolls out from the poor characteristics of the jobs into which people are forced. Job characteristics are impacted by the competitive dynamics of supply and demand. The deployment of the welfare system to increase competition for jobs is a labour market intervention that restrains wages (Layard, 1997) and crafts a labour force that is ‘cheap and compliant’ (Jones and Carson, 2024: 2). Research about the effects of welfare reform is vital for understanding why people need food support (Garthwaite, 2016a). Vital too is research that critiques the legal design of systems bringing disciplinary power to bear, harshly, on people in need of material assistance at times of considerable vulnerability (Garthwaite et al 2015; Eurofound, 2017: 97; Adler, 2018; James, 2023). Yet it is not only the inadequacy of welfare support that requires explication; we also need to understand the design and impacts of the job characteristics that shape food insecurity.
Legal regimes of welfare conditionality have developed over a period of time in which the impacts of restrictive trade union laws in the UK have impeded the ability of working people to advance their interests collectively (Puttick, 2019). The possibility and power of collective bargaining to drive up the quality of jobs was eclipsed by the creation of individual employment rights. Hence legislative suppression of mechanisms by which workers could actively advance job qualities to meet their needs, was followed by the expression of minimum labour standards imposed via top-down statutory law. The most notable example is the introduction of a statutory minimum wage. The National Minimum Wage Act 1998 was the flagship of a political project aiming to improve the quality of work by creating a safety net of baseline terms and conditions (Puttick, 2019). Yet the Act specified at section 7(5) that the minimum rate must be set on an assessment of the economy and its ‘competitiveness’. By legal design, it dismissed consideration of workers’ income needs and could not provide a wage floor sufficient to lift people out of poverty. As time has progressed, the minimum wage (including the National Living Wage rate post-2016) has become the going rate in many sectors (Low Pay Commission, 2024); it carries legitimacy in law yet has no formal correlation to workers’ expectations.
Our findings suggest that the phenomenon of ‘Workers using foodbanks’ arises from jobs in which essential qualities are lacking, not only for reasons of low pay, but also due to insecurity and indeterminacy of hours, incompatibility with notions of good parenting and exposure to harmful levels of stress. A dramatic growth in part-time and more flexible forms of working has occurred in concert with the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the roll-out of Universal Credit (Puttick, 2019). There is a strong interface, too, with the legal regulation of minimum labour standards via individual employment rights (Nugent, 2018). Contemporary minimum labour standards have enabled jobs to be packaged diversely as part-time, temporary, agency, and zero-hours. The legitimacy of creating individual rights for workers lay in a belief that achieving greater flexibility in employment required a new approach to employment legislation (Board of Trade, 1998). The Employment Rights Act 1996 consolidated the rights available to ‘employees’ at that time. ‘Employee’ denotes a legal status that is typically afforded to those who work under secure, longer-term contracts with predictable pay and hours. The National Minimum Wage Act 1998 exemplified a wider approach: it afforded wage protection to ‘employees’ as well as to those with ‘a workers’ contract’ (section 54). Hence minimum wage protection is available to working people with short-term or insecure contracts, unpredictable hours and pay. The right to minimum wage protection was presented as a form of ‘welfare policy’ designed ‘to move people from welfare into work’ (Brewer et al, 2002: 511). Other rights then flowed from this legitimation of worker status, including a narrow band of regulatory protection from ‘less favourable treatment’ for workers employed on part-time contracts (Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000). Worker status also afforded protection from discrimination in access to work and treatment at work on grounds of race, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, religion, disability, gender-reassignment, and age (Equality Act 2010). These signalled the imperative that the labour market open up, without discrimination, to accommodate a diverse range of workers.
Employment rights are difficult to enforce in the UK. Public awareness is low, entitlements are unclear and often hinge on a case-by-case assessment of contractual arrangements (Taylor, 2017). Unlike many other jurisdictions, the UK has no general labour inspectorate and individual claims are adjudicated by specialist employment tribunals (Busby and McDermont, 2017). The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 signalled a multi-pronged legislative campaign to narrow the utility of workers’ employment rights. On coming into effect, 99 per cent of legal aid funding for free advice and representation in employment matters was withdrawn and, overnight, £5 million of public funding diminished to ‘almost zero’ (Ministry of Justice, 2014; 2019: 382). Fees to lodge cases at employment tribunals were introduced from 2013 and continued until quashed by the Supreme Court for being an unlawful restriction on access to justice (UNISON v Lord Chancellor, 2017). Legislative amendments heavily reduced the maximum available compensation for a wide range of breaches and a new system of ‘early conciliation […] cut the costs of doing business … in particular from the lower cost involved in settling [employment] disputes’ (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2013a: 2).
There was a large raft of statutory rights and regulatory provisions introduced from the late 1990s that aimed to make the labour market more family friendly. However, family-friendly rights were designed to apply only to `employees’ and are not available to `workers’. These rights included an extension of maternity leave to 52 weeks, paid paternity leave and the right for parents of young and disabled children to request flexible working hours. Our research participants identified factors that led them to draw on food support as low pay, irregular hours/uncertain income, and harmful levels of stress, including incompatibility with parenting demands and dismissal due to illness. The overarching picture was of food insecurity arising from one or more dimensions of insecurity relating to employment. Extreme forms of job insecurity now impact a substantial number of workers who bear primary responsibility for dependents (Rabindrakumar, 2018). Indeed, between 2012 and 2022 there was an 86 per cent increase in the number of workers aged 35–49 engaged on zero-hour contracts (Office of National Statistics, 2023).The legal treatment of zero-hours contracts provides the ‘paradigm example’ of how insecure employment has become pervasive across low-wage sectors of the labour market (Atkinson, 2022: 353). Back in 1998, the government reviewed a proposal to ban zero-hours contracts yet decided to support zero-hour contracts because of the flexibility these contracts offered business (Board of Trade, 1998). In response to EU (European Union) requirements to give agency workers a right to equal treatment with permanently employed workers (Directive 2008/104EC), the UK took a light-touch approach. The Agency Workers Regulations 2010 had the indirect effect of encouraging businesses to replace their agency hires by making direct hires via zero-hours contracts (Gill and McNally, 2011). As the direct hire of zero-hour contract workers became more prevalent, a more generalised replacement of secure jobs with insecure jobs grew rapidly. Two-thirds of new jobs created since the financial crisis of 2008 have been jobs with insecure contracts (TUC, 2022).
The use of zero-hours contracts is currently at an all-time high (Labour Research Department, 2023; Office of National Statistics, 2023). Analysis of ONS (Office of National Statistics) data puts the number of UK workers in insecure jobs at 4.1 million; this includes those in agency, casual and seasonal work, and low-earning self-employed workers (TUC, 2024). It equates to 12.5 per cent of the entire UK workforce. By adding workers on fixed-term contracts and those who self-report volatile hours or volatile pay to the TUC’s (Trade Union Congress) definition of insecure work, the Living Wage Foundation has calculated that over 21 per cent of the UK workforce experience insecurity at work (Richardson, 2021).
A light-touch regulatory approach to zero-hours contracting (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2013b) has given legitimacy to terms and conditions that offer no security of hours or earnings. Zero-hours contracts have acquired formal recognition in legal provisions that have banned exclusivity clauses (Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act, 2015, s153), thus freeing workers to engage in more than one insecure job at any point in time. The most recent example of support for insecure contracting in the design of individual employment rights is the Workers (Predictable Terms and Conditions) Act 2023. This provides workers with the right to request a more stable employment contract after working for the employer at least once a month for the preceding six months. Employers must formally consider workers’ requests and respond within two months. They may decline requests only on legally permissible grounds set out in a list at section 4 of the Act. However, this list is so wide-ranging that it permits, and hence legitimises, the continuation of unwanted insecure work when it is economically favourable for the employer. The list permits the denial of requests on grounds of business competitiveness; customer needs; profitability; administrative burdens; alignment with peaks and troughs in demand; impact on recruitment of other staff; and fit with planned structural change. There is no objective test or validating information required beyond that of the employer’s own view. The right to request more predictable work patterns arguably legitimises the injustice of insecure working arrangements that are expressly unwanted by the worker.
The data gathered from our research participants showed very clearly that poor-quality jobs could have severe impacts on mental health, which resulted in them becoming unable to engage in paid work. Insecurity of hours and pay, together with insecurity that disrupted their ability to parent well, were the strongest causes of their need to turn to food support. There is a considerable body of evidence that poor-quality work impacts negatively on mental and physical health (Marmot et al, 2020). Mental stress is a significant predictor of vulnerability to life-limiting health conditions (Braveman and Gottleib, 2014) and insecurity of hours and earnings is increasingly recognised to have severe negative impacts on mental health (Frijters et al, 2014; Henseke, 2018; Bender and Theodossiou, 2018; Green, 2020; Jaydarifal et al, 2023).
The legal crafting of minimum labour standards projects an image of workers’ legal subjectivity. In the design of minimum wage law, we see an image projected of a worker who need not earn an income sufficient to meet their needs. In the narrowing of workers’ access to justice we see a worker imagined as a rights-holder who does not actively participate in upholding their rights. Further, the exclusion of workers from family-friendly rights reveals a legal subjectivity that does not acknowledge workers’ needs as parents. In the statutory and regulatory treatment of insecure contracting, the law projects an image of a worker who may hold multiple insecure jobs. The banning of exclusivity clauses and the lack of security inherent in any hiring, imagines the legal subject at the intersection of welfare and employment law as a highly flexible in-and-out-of-work(er). In the design of the right to request predictable terms and conditions, we see the image of a worker subjected to unwanted insecurity of terms and conditions by an employer who is not required to take the worker’s needs into account. The idea that job availability, volume, job characteristics, or access to jobs are determined by a free market is illusory (Dukes, 2014). Each of the factors influencing job quality are, to a greater or lesser extent, shaped as ‘state-mediated’ factors (Mantouvalou, 2023: 11).
To our knowledge, research has yet to examine the real-life affect of conditionality on the making of employment contracts, both at the point of crystallisation (when the seller of labour reaches agreement with the buyer), and in the day-to-day dynamic exercise of the contract. Conditionality transforms the contexts in which contracts for work are agreed and it inevitably changes capacity to contract. Our findings suggest that where job characteristics do not meet the needs of the worker to sustain themselves and their family, the risk of food insecurity is embedded in the contractual agreement for work. We are confident that our findings can shape future inquiry, contribute to academic debates, and inform campaigns for legal reform.
Conclusion
We co-created vignettes with people in food banks and food pantries about the reasons for their need of food support. The large majority (65 per cent) of participants, including 76 per cent of those who were of working age, identified that it was their experiences in jobs with characteristics of insecure work, low wages, and excessive mental stress that had led them into a situation of food insecurity. ‘Workers using foodbanks’ is an aphorism capturing a contemporary reality in which the risk of food insecurity is embedded in contractual agreements to work.
In a post-pandemic context, the welfare system is being deployed explicitly to supply labour into the low-wage jobs market. Pre-pandemic welfare reforms crafted the legal subjectivity of a welfare recipient in the image of a claimant required to work. Post-pandemic, this image is being supplanted by legal subjectivity in the image of a worker reliant on access to benefits. This important observation accounts for a considerable constraint on individual agency to extract oneself from conditions of food insecurity. It also accounts for the agency of law-makers, and thus identifies the potential for laws and policy to be unmade or remade in the interests of dismantling conditions of food insecurity.
Our findings suggest that food insecurity is increasingly situated at the nexus of welfare laws and employment laws. Workers are required to claim benefits because jobs available to them are frequently devoid of the qualities they need to sustain themselves and their families without welfare support. The risk of food insecurity is integral to agreements to work, because individual rights to minimum labour standards are inadequate. A primary problem of the deficient quality of jobs in low-wage sectors of the economy creates an environment in which a secondary problem of the inadequacy of the welfare system assumes enormous material significance for people in low-wage work.
Our partnership demonstrated that research about food insecurity is enhanced by collaboration with foodbanks and food pantries to engage with workers drawing on food support. Further research is needed to explore the gap between the qualities of the jobs that people need, and the qualities of the jobs in which people actually work. It then can proceed to question and challenge the variety of ways in which the risk of food insecurity is built into contractual agreements to work. Moreover, it can attend to the political dimensions of legal subjectivity through which workers experiencing food insecurity might find collective voice and agency to improve their lives. Campaigns for an ‘essentials guarantee’ for welfare claimants (see Trussell Trust, 2023; Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2024), might consider the future inclusion of demands for the essentials of employment to be guaranteed too. The essentials of employment should support health and wellbeing, including the ability to earn sufficiently to support oneself and one’s family, to have job security, to participate in decision-making through collective bargaining for the setting of terms and conditions, to have safe working conditions, and good work–life balance. If people in poverty are to continue to be coerced to take up paid work, then, at the very least, governments and employers should ensure the availability of jobs that meet workers’ basic needs and offer potential for their aspirations to be satisfied.
Note
Based on a search ‘foodbank*’ ‘foodbanks*’ ‘2022-09-01..2024-05-01’ using database at www.theyworkforyou.com.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to law students for gathering data. Isobel Ashbrook, Emily Birchall, Estella Comerford, Lily Harmon, Abigail Holmes, Anna-Louise Johnston, Moeen Khan, Shreya Marya, Olivia Mills, Alice Tonge, Olivia Torrance-Gail, Oliver Wiggins, Joseph Umerah.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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