I’m currently wrestling with questions of very different modes in which BNIM cases have been written up. The SOSTRIS working papers – now on CNR at the University of East London – are a wonderful store of experiments. Here are two short accounts (extracted from today’s update of the ‘Guide’) that respect the twin-track 2-column principle.

 

 

LUCAS

Lucas is a 54 year-old man born to a working class neighbourhood of Barcelona. He is the only child of a lone parenting home formed by her mother and grandmother. When he was a child his father abandoned them, and at the age of twelve Lucas left studies and started to work at home helping his mother. At the age of ninteen Lucas began to work in a small company as apprentice, and at the age of twenty one Lucas set up his own business as electrician. Ten years later he married and had two children. During their childhood Lucas actively participated in the school parents’ association and in the neighbourhood community. In 1992, the business started to suffer the impact of the economic crisis. That year Lucas received a working proposal from an Italian enterprise, and he decided to close his business and accept the new job. Lucas spent three months in Italy doing a special training course. But this company went bankrupt one year later, in 1993. From that moment on, Lucas became unemployed and left his committment with the school and neigbourhood associations. During the last years, Lucas has been working informally for other industrial companies in a very precarious situation. Many of them have gone bankrupt as well. For a short period of time Lucas received the unemployment subsidy, and some time later he got a social salary due to the precarious economic situation of his family. Nowadays his wife’s wage is the main economic support for the family. Two years ago Lucas started to work few hours as a volunteer in a NGO that works with disabled people. Today, he continues with this activity with a precarious contract for three hours a day.

 

The story of Lucas is, like in the previous two cases, a story of someone socialized according to the male productive role. During that time we were educated for working day and night. Following this structuring principle, Lucas' presentation recollects the most important events of his working life without giving specific details from his family of origin or his own family. Lucas presents his life as a standarized life course until 1993, when the Italian enterprise went bankrupt. From that moment on, Lucas starts to narrate his life as an excluded person. As he points out at the beginning of the interview: the first thing I must say is that I'm  absolutely excluded from the working world. This introductory self-definition two conflictive dimensions of his status as long term unemployed. First, he presents himself convinced about the end of his working career, and secondly his pattern of orientation is deeply based on the productive sphere. His strategy consists of investing his daily time working in the precarious black economy ¾e.g.when friends ask him for some domestic arrangement as electrician¾ or collaborating over three hours a day for the NGO. Lucas is filling up his time and his social space in order to avoid the sense of unusefulness.

The experience of long term unemployment has also had a big impact on his family relationships. In contrast to the other cases, Lucas' nuclear family develop a strong unity in order to face problems. Despite the fact that the costs of unemployment are lived as a private issue, Lucas refers to a general assumption according to which there are a lot of people in his same situation: I'm sure that my story will be similar to the other interviewed, all of us are alone because politicians don't know what to do with us, and with the end of work. Our last resource is  luck and personal networks to get temporary jobs. Lucas is therefore fighting against his own experience of exclusion trying to solve the dilemma of having lost his working role through maintaining alive the links with a productive activity. Social networks become the main resource within a context of informality.

 

MARTA

Marta was born in 1953 to a little village from Andalusia. Marta's family context is that of a rural extended family. Marta is the fifth of seven sisters, who were grown up by Marta's grandmother from mother's side and Marta's mother. Her father worked in the farming sector until Marta's tenth birthday, when he emigrated to Germany to profit from the better labour opportunities of the 1960s in central Europe. Marta was then sent to a Catholic boarding school in the city (Granada) until she was 18.  Marta, unlike most of her sisters, was offered the possibility to study in a bigger city like Barcelona, once her father returned from Germany with some savings. She was 18 when she started studying nursery, which she combined with a job in a electricity factory. Marta could soon get a job in a big State hospital of Barcelona, first as auxiliar and gradually as nurse. After 22 years of employment, only interrupted by the maternity leave during the birth of her two children, Marta was expelled from her job due to a 'staff restructuring', together with other 500 employees. The hospital where Marta has been working has now been privatised. Marta is now 45 and has been engaged in various occupational courses and other activities within the neighbourhood, during the two years she has been unemployed.

 

Marta starts her self-presentation by introducing  her long trajectory as employed person, and the lack of possibilities for her to find a new job: I know it's over, who wants a 45 year-old woman when so many young people are competing with us? The use of a 'we' perspective represented by those belonging to her age group (and sex?) against a more competitive 'they' represented by the younger generations synthetically summarises her present perspective regarding her relationship with the labour market, in the sense that she does not expect to get a job in the formal sector anymore. But Marta has seemed to find a 'third way', beyond her roles as worker and mother/wife within the family context. I never thought I would be one of the affected, I always expected to get my old age retirement in the hospital, but, unemployment maybe means for me the possibility to do things I would have otherwise never done. It's a matter of destiny. Marta's evaluation of her experience of unemployment as related to fate contrasts to her active social involvement in the community. Unemployment for Marta might have therefore represented a biographical rupture which leads her to re-define her relationship within  different spheres of social life. Marta is open and willing to take advantage from the few but actual opportunities offered by the Spanish Welfare State. Getting her unemployment benefit, accepting the training courses to get the 'tokens' for a better curriculum, making sport and social work within the neighbourhood are activities which make her feel active and citizen with specific rights. Marta feels entitled to receive a compensation for her long working trajectory in the labour market . Her relationship with the labour market affects her relationship with the family -domestic sphere as well. Marta feels legitimised to negotiate her position within the family after what she qualifies as a  'big upheaval', when getting the unexpected news of her dismissal. Since her family's expectations regarding Marta's work at home increased substantially, Marta had to find a balance between her presence and absence at home. They thought I would stay more at home; but I like to go out, I can't stay sewing at home, like most of my neighbours do.  In spite of combining both reproductive and productive tasks Marta is clearly ascribing herself to the visible role of the 'public space', where she can more easily find a social recognition of her work. However, one of her final statements regarding her future reflects Marta's labour-market oriented centrality, which does not seem to be opposed to her argumentation based on fate elements. I'd accept any job which would be offered to me. No matter under which conditions.  A deriving hypothesis from the comparison between the biographical data and some elements of the self-presentation presented so far could be summerised as follows: the event of unemployment in Marta's case has not only been experienced as very painful, but has not implied a real turning point in Marta's lived through life, in spite of  the many things which have changed in her life at an objective level (Tejero and Torrabadella 1998).