Unemployment Experiences During Covid-19: A Little Less Blame?

The previous chapters have explored various aspects of the emotional debt that unemployed people find themselves in as they receive money from the welfare state. During the Covid-19 pandemic the active labor market policies were temporarily suspended and this chapter explores what happened when the activation policies are put on hold. This ‘natural experiment’ constitutes an unprecedented window of opportunity to explore the regular workings of ALMPs effects through their very absence. In Chap. 4 , I argued that the activation policies are linked to the responsibilization of the unemployed person, often resulting in self-blaming tendencies. The hypothesis is that when these policies are dormant during the Covid-19, the unemployed people will not to the same degree point the arrow inward compared to pre-corona material. This chapter explores this question and it becomes clear that unemployed people experience feeling more dignified and worthy as unemployed during the crisis. Participants express that it feels more legitimate to be unemployed during the crisis because there has been an increased awareness of the impact of structural and external factors triggering unemployment which alleviate some of the blame that so uniformly pointed the arrow inward and enabled feeling emotionally indebted. This constitutes a valuable insight into the regular workings of politics and psychology. This analysis is based on the third wave of gathering data in Denmark consisting of rich qualitative data composed of in-depth interviews with 44 unemployed people and follow-up (video) diaries with 13 of these. (The data collection was part of the research project “Unemployed in a time of crisis” co-led with my colleague, Magnus Paulsen Hansen. An earlier version of the chapter is Pultz et al. (Planning for a job: The trying experience of unemployment during the Covid-19 crisis in Denmark. International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, 10(4), 228–242. https://doi.org/10.1027/2157-3891/a000028 , 2021).