Are the social groups most likely to be unemployed also those most likely to prefer being employed? Evidence from the 2000 British Cohort Study and 2000/2008 National Child Development Study

This paper first argues for a new approach to researching the issue of unemployment and work attitudes, and then presents findings from an analysis of 2000 British Cohort Study and 2000/2008 National Child Development Study data. Existing social policy literature has shown that a large majority of unemployed people want jobs and actively seek them, but it has not examined choices between less enjoyable jobs and unemployment. Indeed, literature on whether or not unemployed people want employment has not discussed work attitude measurement at all, and has often used measures that do not offer respondents a choice between employment and unemployment and do not hold job quality constant. Furthermore, while the unemployed and employed are found to generally share the same values including a strong work ethic, there is little or no discussion of differences in values and preferences among groups that cut across the two categories. Nor is there recognition that the unemployed category contains disproportionately high numbers from certain social groups and hence inevitably exhibits these groups‟ cultural characteristics and preferences. We suggest that people generally, whether currently unemployed or not, are willing to undertake some kinds of work but not others, and that there is considerable diversity in attitudes towards various jobs and towards being unemployed. Therefore, our research focused on how all respondents answered the agree/disagree statement „Having almost any job is better than being unemployed‟. Of the groups most at risk of unemployment, single people were found to be significantly anti-employment, and those with low academic attainment significantly pro-employment, but there was little or no significance in men, the young, or working class people. Of the numerous living circumstances, lifestyle choice, attitude, and demographic variables included in the study, the following were not only found to have strong associations with agreeing with the statement in all three datasets, but also emerged as significant each time in the logistic regression analysis: those with authoritarian, politically right wing and traditional moral attitudes, the employed not unemployed, and people living in multiple occupancy households and mortgaged (not rented) accommodation. The employed/unemployed finding indicates that survey items offering a choice between employment (including unattractive jobs) and unemployment show unemployed people to be less pro-employment than measures that do not. This is important because how people exercise that choice is important to the debate about whether or not attaching more conditions to the receipt of unemployment benefits is justified