Household Debt and the Financialization of Social Reproduction:

Theorizing the UK Housing and Hunger Crises

Published in Research in Political Economy 31 (2016): 135-64

By

Adrienne Roberts

Lecturer in International Politics, University of Manchester

Email: adrienne.roberts@manchester.ac.uk

ABSTRACT. The proliferation of homelessness and housing precariousness, along with a dramatic growth in food banks, are two signs that while parts of the UK economy may be recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and recession, the same cannot be said for the living conditions of much of the poor and working class population. Much of the media discussion has centred on the ways in which these social ills have been caused by government policy, particularly cuts to social and welfare services introduced under the banner of ‘austerity’. I argue in this paper, however, that a narrow focus on austerity risks obscuring some of the longer-term structural transformations that have taken place under neoliberal capitalism, namely: (1) financialization and (2) the privatization of social reproduction. Situating these two trends within a longer history of capitalism, I argue, allows us to understand the contemporary housing and food crises as specific (and highly gendered) manifestations of a more fundamental contradiction between capital accumulation and progressive and sustainable forms of social reproduction. Doing so further helps to locate the dramatic proliferation of household debt, which has been supported by both processes, as both cause and consequence of the crisis in social reproduction faced by many UK households.

KEYWORDS: Social reproduction, debt, financialization, risk, gender

Introduction

Several years after the outbreak of the 2008 the financial crisis, there are numerous signs suggesting that while parts of the UK economy may be recovering some of their strength, particularly in comparison to much of Europe, the living conditions of much of the poor and working class population have worsened. The media is replete, for instance, with stories about crises in housing and homelessness. While house prices have risen rapidly, particularly in London, pricing many people out of the possibility of either owning or renting a home in the city, homelessness has also risen, with some estimating a rise of 62 percent between 2010 and 2013 (Gentleman 2013). The social housing sector is under severe pressure, with the government’s own estimates suggesting that there are 1.8 million households (or 4.5 million people) on waiting lists for social housing, most of whom will never move out of the private rental market (HM Government 2011: viii-ix). The rise of foodbanks has also taken centre stage in the news, with the Trussel Trust (which organizes most of the country’s 1,200 food banks) estimating that it served 1,084,604 people in 2014-15. This compares with less then 26,000 in 2008-09.[footnoteRef:1] [1: http://www.trusselltrust.org/stats (accessed 5 November 2015)]

Much of the media discussion has centred on the ways in which these social ills have been caused by government policy, particularly cuts to social and welfare services introduced under the banner of ‘austerity’. I want to suggest in this paper, however, that the focus on austerity as a political project risks obscuring some of the longer-term structural transformations that have taken place under neoliberal capitalism, namely: (1) financialization and (2) the privatization of social reproduction. Situating these two trends within a longer history of capitalism, I argue, allows us to understand the contemporary housing and food crises as specific manifestations of a more fundamental contradiction between capital accumulation and progressive and sustainable forms of social reproduction. That is, while I am very much interested in contemporary forms of social and economic restructuring, I argue that there is much to gain – analytically and politically – from placing austerity within the broader context of neoliberal forms of production and accumulation (of which financialization is a part) and neoliberal forms of social reproduction. Doing so further helps to locate the dramatic proliferation of household debt, which has been supported by both processes, as both cause and consequence of the crisis in social reproduction faced by many UK households.

With regards to the neoliberal restructuring of production and accumulation, it has been well noted that the shift from an economy based primarily on manufacturing and industry towards one based on services, up to and including financial services, helped to set the stage for the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008. In the aftermath of the crisis, the risks of the financial sector that were socialized through bailout mechanisms have ultimately been offloaded onto those poor, working class and single-parent households that have been most negatively affected by the cuts to social spending deemed ‘necessary’ to reduce the deficit (Green and Lavery 2015). Feminist political economists have long argued that these sorts of processes constitute a specific form of ‘moral hazard’, whereby the household acts as a safety net of last resort by bailing out governments as they seek to reduce spending in the wake of financial crises (van Staveren 2001: 16).

Feminist analyses of previous crises have emphasized the ways in which the costs of this form of moral hazard have been disproportionately borne by women who take on additional paid work and increase the amount of unpaid labour done in the home. While it is also possible to document an increase in unpaid labour in the wake of the most recent financial crisis, I argue in this paper that personal debt has now become a key means used by households to temporally – and temporarily – offset the costs of social reproduction they are not able to meet. This debt includes mortgage debt as well as unsecured consumer credit that is being used to meet the cost of rent, particularly in the social housing sector where rents has have risen as they have become increasingly marketized. Various forms of unsecured consumer credit are also being used to buy food, while at the same time, debt has been identified as one of the primary reasons that families are referred to food banks.

Insofar as debt allows households to temporally offset the costs of social reproduction, which are stretched out over the time period of debt repayment, this is a precarious and crisis-prone solution, both from the perspective of capital and of social reproduction. In terms of the former, it has been well noted that household indebtedness can both fuel financial crises (as was the case with the most recent financial crisis) and can act as an impediment to economic recovery, leading to what the IMF describes as “significantly larger contractions in economic activity” (IMF 2012: 91; on the UK, see Bunn and Rostom 2014). Even more significantly, however, is the “massive looming personal debt crisis” that is being faced by household that have to borrow to fund the cost of living.[footnoteRef:2] As I will further argue below, the effects of a crisis in social reproduction – brought about by wage stagnation, the growing precariousness of working conditions, the scaling back of public support for social reproduction and growing indebtedness – are manifest on the bodies of those subjected to housing insecurity, homelessness and hunger, along with emotional stress and poor mental health. [2: Shadow consumer minister Stella Creasy, quoted in Hilary Osborne, “New Consumer Debt Reaches Seven-Year High in UK”, The Guardian, 3 January 2015 (retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/03/new-consumer-debt-reaches-7-year-high, 24 August 2015).]

The paper begins by developing a theoretical approach that draws on the historical materialist and feminist literatures on financialization and social reproduction respectively. It does so in order to develop an approach that is attuned to the ways in which these spheres of human activity are structurally related so that while transformations within households have helped to fuel financialization, financial risks threaten the social reproduction of households. More specifically, I argue that in conjunction with changes in social welfare provisioning, the ‘financialization of social reproduction’ has increased the risk faced by many families in Britain, particularly working class, poor and lone parent households.

The subsequent two sections will then explore in detail two manifestations of this risk. Section 2 looks at housing risk, elucidating some of the complex transformations taking place in the private and social housing markets that have helped to fuel housing-related debt, along with (and partly as the result of) housing shortages, forced dislocations and homelessness. Section 3 turns to the growing risk of hunger, which has been partly mitigated by a growth of food banks, though debt remains linked to the needs of food consumption as well as being a key reason that families are referred to foodbanks. Both trends have important implications for gender relations, not least because female-headed households are more likely to rely on housing benefits, along with other social welfare benefits, than male-headed households or two parent households. Women also face particular embodied risks of violence (in the context of housing insecurity) and hunger (as they sacrifice their needs to feed children and partners). The concluding section will point to some of the limits of the solutions offered by the UK government and civil society, which are often framed around the need to improve literacy in the areas of financial management and cooking, which work to further individualize risk and do little to challenge the dominance of the very same finance-led accumulation strategies that helped to create these risks.

Theorizing the Financialization of Social Reproduction

Academic debates about the cause and consequences of the global financial crisis and austerity measures imposed in the wake of the crisis abound. Much of the literature has focused on how something that began as a financial crisis, rooted in private credit relations, was subsequently transformed into a debt crisis and a fiscal crisis of the state (Blyth 2013b; Hay 2013; Schäfer and Streeck 2013; Jessop 2012). Some have emphasized the ways in which the projection of the crisis as a debt crisis – which, in the UK, has been perpetuated by the Coalition and Conservative governments who sought to blame public spending decisions made by the Labour Party for the fiscal deficit – obscures what is actually a crisis of growth in Anglo-American economies (Hay 2013; Gamble 2014; Crotty 2012). Other accounts emphasize the ideological dimensions of austerity, which some have described as “pure ideological politics” (Blyth 2013a: 739). It has been argued that austerity has been justified and legitimized through appeals to ethics and morality historically (Konzelmann 2014; Blyth 2013b) as well as in the contemporary UK context (Stanley 2014; 2016; Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage 2016).

These accounts are important in helping to disturb the narrative promulgated by the current UK government and others (including the European troika) that posits austerity measures as necessary to post-crisis recovery. However, the aim of this paper is to look beyond ‘austerity’ – conceived as a response to a crisis in growth or as a political, ideological and/or moral project – in order to draw attention to two longer-term structural transformations taking place under neoliberal capitalism: financialization and the privatization of social reproduction. This is important for three central reasons. First, insofar as austerity is rendering the lives of much of the poor and working class population increasingly insecure, this trend pre-dates post-crisis austerity measures. This has immediate political implications as it means that reversing the class and gender inequalities that are being deepened (but not created) by austerity requires more than an anti-austerity politics.

Second, insofar as much of the literature has focused on the ways in which the move from a financial to a debt crisis, which ‘must’ be resolved via austerity, presents challenges to economic recovery, it almost entirely overlooks the contradictions this poses for the ability of the population to reproduce itself, biologically and socially. Much of the feminist literature on austerity, in contrast, addresses this issue directly (Lethbridge 2012; Symposium 2012; Women's Budget Group 2015a; Karamessini and Rubery 2014; Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage 2016). Nonetheless, this literature tends to focus on the effects of austerity on men and women with relatively little attention paid to the ways in which financial and debt crises affect the structural relationship between social reproduction and the accumulation of capital. A theoretical perspective that centralizes this relationship is important in showing the limits to radical challenges that focus only on the need to improve growth strategies without simultaneously improving conditions of social reproduction, and vice versa. I elaborate these points further below, as I develop my theoretical analysis, which draws on the Marxist and feminist literatures on financialization and social reproduction respectively.

Debating Financialization

The term ‘financialization’ has been used by critical scholars as a means of describing a series of changes that have taken place over the past three to four decades. These changes have, on the one hand, rendered the accumulation of profit from financial channels more pronounced than accumulation via manufacturing and other activities that are traditionally associated with production under capitalism (Epstein 2005; Krippner 2011; Lapavitsas 2013). On the other hand, they involve various regulatory and cultural transformations that have helped to support the expansion and deepening of financial relations into more and more spaces of everyday life (Harmes 2001; Martin 2002; Langley 2008).

The precise meaning of financialization is subject to debate. From an historical materialist perspective, it is important to stress that it is not meant to imply a complete separation between industry and finance, not least because the growth of financial enterprises has been accompanied by a shift within nonfinancial enterprises, which have themselves become increasingly involved in financial operations (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Lapavitsas 2011; Dos Santos 2009). Further, as Susanne Soederberg has stressed, analyses of financialization that focus solely on the realm of exchange, with no consideration of underlying relations of production, are deeply problematic as they conceal the class character of social relations under capitalism (Soederberg 2014: 15-26).

In line with historical materialist accounts, I understand financialization to be an expression of shifts that have taken place within the relations of production globally, which have made it increasingly profitable for many firms to accumulate via financial channels. Finance – which did not emerge naturally and inevitably but was rather supported by the capitalist state – is also imbued with power relations. Of particular interest for the purpose of this paper are the power relationships involved in the ‘financial expropriation’ of households (Bryan, Martin and Rafferty 2009).

As Bryan, Martin and Rafferty (2009) explain, as firms have reduced their reliance on banks, banks (along with non-bank lenders and other firms) have sought to draw more and more households into financial relations both as investors (in financial markets, private pensions funds, etc.) and as debtors (with much debt being securitized and sold on secondary markets) (see also Soederberg 2012; 2013). As lenders were searching for new markets, a demand for credit was being fuelled by wage stagnation, the growing precariousness of working conditions (see Figure 1) and, as will be detailed shortly, the commodification, individualization and privatization of social reproduction. Thus, for Bryan et al., one of the key implications stemming from contemporary processes of financialisation is that households have come to rely on credit as a means of obtaining the commodities necessary for their reproduction (food, housing, clothes, etc.) (see also Montgomerie 2013). As more and more of workers’ earnings are dedicated to paying interest on debt, households are experiencing an intensification of financial expropriation (2009; see also Lapavitsas 2014).

This form of financial expropriation is clearly evidenced in the UK, where an All-Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger found that “the escalation of personal and household debt is both a cause and a symptom of household’s declining surplus income” (Forsey 2014: 40). One of the groups providing evidence to the inquiry, the StepChange Debt Charity, reported that they were contacted by a record number of people in 2013 (507,863), over half of whom were in work. The charity also reported that the number of people with debts and arrears on household bills had grown dramatically, with the number of clients with arrears on water bills, for example, rising by 13% between 2009 and 2013 alone (Forsey 2014: 40).

According to Bryan et al., then, the reproduction of labour has itself become a source of surplus value, in the form of interest payments (2009: 465). It is argued that this draws attention to the “monetization and appropriation of the surplus produced by unpaid labour, though the connection here is not direct” (2009: 465). Framing the issue in this way seems to suggest that there is something new about the (indirect) appropriation of the surplus produced by unpaid labour. Yet, feminist political economists have long argued that the work of social reproduction, much of which takes place in the household, has always been structurally linked to capitalist forms of production and accumulation. Unlike the great majority of work on financialization, feminist analyses also draw attention to the ways in which this is both underpinned by and helps to reproduce gendered forms of inequality and difference. These inequalities themselves are constitutive of capitalist forms of accumulation. Thus, insofar as the critical literature on financialization offers a useful starting point for thinking about the link between capitalist structures of accumulation and the reproduction of the working population, the feminist literature is necessary both for placing this relationship within a longer historical context and for documenting and analysing the gendered power relations that this produces (see also Adkins 2015).

Feminist Political Economy and the Restructuring of Social Reproduction

Some of the earliest work seeking to analytically link domestic labour to capitalist forms of production was done by socialist feminists in the 1970s and 80s who argued that while domestic labour took on the appearance of standing outside of the sphere of capitalist production, it actually produced both use-values for direct consumption and subsidized the cost of the reproduction of the labour force. Unpaid housework, it was argued, allowed capitalists to indirectly extract surplus-value from women through their reliance on the male breadwinners and ultimately, their reliance on the wage (Dalla Costa 1972; see also Dalla Costa and James 1972; Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and von Werlhof 1988). This gave rise to what Sylvia Federici called the ‘patriarchy of the wage’ (Federici 2004: 97ff).

While much of this early work was critiqued for assuming that all work done in the home was exploitative and driven by capitalist imperatives, more recent social reproduction perspectives maintain that the ways in which people organize productive and reproductive activities form the basis of all human societies. These feminist political economists argue for the need to develop a more totalizing view of the ways in which diverse productive and reproductive activities contribute to the reproduction of daily existence (Bakker and Gill 2003: 23). While eschewing the tendency for earlier scholars to reduce all forms of domestic labour to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, social reproduction feminists nonetheless insist on the need to identify and analyze the structural relationship between the reproduction of capital and the household, where much of the labour of social reproduction takes place (LeBaron 2010).

Yet, social reproduction does not simply take place at the household or community level, as it may also be supported by the state and/or capital. In many industrialized countries, for instance, under Fordist models of production the state took on some of the costs of social reproduction through the provisioning of welfare and social services, as did capital through the provisioning of the family wage and other means. However, this support has been undermined by neoliberal restructuring which, according to Isabella Bakker, has entailed the commodification of social reproduction, along with its individualization and/or privatization within families (Bakker 2003; Bezanson and Luxton 2006; Bakker and Silvey 2008; LeBaron and Roberts 2010).

In the UK and elsewhere, these processes of commodification, individualization and privatization were intensified in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, as austerity measures were imposed in the name of reducing the public deficit. As the Bank of England, for instance, injected upwards of £375 billion into the economy through the quantitative easing (QE) programme and otherwise sought to increase liquidity in financial markets, its balance sheet rose sharply, almost quadrupling between 2008 and 2014. Yet, while the risks of the financial sector were socialized, families, particularly those on low incomes, have been made individually responsible for the risks associated with welfare spending retrenchment, including in the areas of housing benefit, childcare benefit, disability allowances, pensioner benefits and job seekers allowance. The government’s announcement in 2015 that it planned to introduce a new ‘national living wage’, which will be higher than the minimum wage but nonetheless result in lower incomes for those simultaneously facing benefit cuts, is another example of the move toward the commodification and privatization of social reproduction – i.e. as the wage system is presumed to be able to stand in for government benefits.

As feminists have argued, the politics of austerity are deeply gendered. According to an analysis by the House of Commons Library, the British government’s decision to reduce the deficit primarily via cuts to spending rather than through tax raises has cost women four times as much as men. That is, tax and benefit changes between 2010 and 2014 raised a net of £3.047 billion (21 percent) from men and £11.628 (79 percent) from women. This occurs, for example, through reductions in tax credits for childcare and the three-year freeze in child benefit, which cost men £47 million £26 million respectively, and women £343 million and £1.26 billion.[footnoteRef:3] In contrast, raises in the personal tax allowance benefit those who pay income tax, 57 percent of whom are men, while failing to help those with incomes below the current income tax threshold or lower earners, whose gains will be clawed back, in part, by lower means-tested benefits and tax credits (Women's Budget Group 2014: 2). Cuts to the top rate of tax, i.e. on incomes above £150,000, from 50 to 45 percent also disproportionately benefitted men, who reaped 85 percent of the gains.[footnoteRef:4] [3: Andrew Grice, “George Osborne’s Tax and Benefits Changes Hit Women Almost Four Times Harder Than Men”, The Independent, 8 March 2014 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-george-osbornes-tax-and-benefits-changes-hit-women-almost-four-times-harder-than-men-9177533.html, accessed 13 November 2015). Similar findings have been noted by the Women’s Budget Group, which found that in the Coalition government’s plan to reduce the budget deficit, women would pay for 80% of all of the increases to come from tax revenue as the result of changes to personal income tax and cuts to social security benefits (Women's Budget Group 2014).] [4: Ibid.]

It is in these ways that households, and particularly poor, working class and lone-parent households, have acted safety nets of last resort, absorbing the costs (and the risks) of tax and benefit restructuring post-2008. To be sure, this phenomenon is not isolated to the UK or the industrialized ‘West’, nor is it historically unique. Rather, as feminist political economists have documented, this form of ‘moral hazard’ has operated in the wake of earlier financial crises, including the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s (Sen and Grown 1987; Elson 1994), the East Asian crisis of the 1990s (Truong 1999; Young 2003) and the Argentinean crisis of 2001 (Young 2003; Hardy 2016). This earlier work emphasized the ways in which financial crises led to increases in the amount of unpaid labour done by families and communities, and especially by women (for an overview, see Elson 2013). While it is also possible to document an increase in unpaid labour done by women in the wake of the most recent financial crisis, it is particularly striking to note the ways in which debt has emerged as a key means through which households have sought to meet the costs of social reproduction being offloaded by the state (through welfare retrenchment) and capital (through low wages and precarious working conditions).[footnoteRef:5] This trend, which I refer to as the ‘financialization of social reproduction’ (Roberts 2013; 2016; see also Federici 2014), emerges from a tension that lies at the heard of capitalism between capital accumulation and sustainable forms of social reproduction (Katz 2001; Bakker and Gill 2003). [5: The lack of updated time use surveys in the UK, the last of which was done in 2005, makes it difficult to document recent changes in the gendered distribution of unpaid labour. However, studies done in other European countries (including Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Turkey) suggest that the crisis has eroded progress that was being made toward the redistribution of unpaid work towards men (Bettio et al. 2013; Bettio and Verashchagina 2014). ]

Documenting the Financialization of Social Reproduction

The growing importance of debt as a means of supporting the reproduction of individuals and families is well documented in many industrialized capitalist economies, including the UK. The deepening of household debt is intricately linked to the undermining of labour rights, wage stagnation and a shift toward increasingly precarious forms of labour that accompanied the shift away from an economy based on manufacturing toward one based on services. As Figure 1 shows, in recent years, where job growth has occurred, it has primarily been in the form of self-employed, temporary and part-time employment.

Figure 1: The Growth of Precarious Employment (2005-2015), UK

Source: Office for National Statistics

Wages have also fallen for many workers in the UK. The median hourly wage was £11.57 in 2015, which is 68.6 percent higher (in nominal terms) than it was in 1997. However, the earnings have also been compressed at the lower end of the scale (Wales et al. 2015: 16). According to some critical observers, the current period of post-crisis ‘recovery’ is the longest period of declining real wages since the late nineteenth century (Green and Lavery 2015: 909).

These changes in the labour market, combined with the restructuring of social reproduction (which will be detailed shortly) and low interest rates for certain types of borrowing – namely mortgage borrowing – have created incentives for families to rely on both unsecured and secured forms of credit. It has been estimated that in September 2015, the average total debt per household was £54,358. Per adult, this amounts to £28,742, which is about 112.7% of average earnings (The Money Charity 2015: 5). While most of this is mortgage (i.e. secured) debt, unsecured debt is growing at a much faster rate, with consumer credit growing at a rate of 8.2% a year, compared with 2.2% growth in secured lending (Bank of England 2015: 6). Within the unsecured consumer credit market, an estimated 32 percent – or £51 billion – of lending is provided by companies such as home credit stores, payday lenders and pawnbrokers, which charge some of the highest fees and interest (Forsey 2014: 41).

In addition to earning interest and fees from lending, debt – including mortgage, credit card and student debt – operates as a profitable source of financial accumulation via securitization. In simple terms, this means that individual loans are bundled with other loans, divided into different ‘tranches’ of risk, assigned a rating based on the ‘riskiness’ of the loans and sold to investors globally. Indeed, despite the key role that mortgage-backed securities played in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis, several years on, this market has seen a resounding resurgence in the UK. The Financial Times reported that by October of 2015, €3.4 billion (approximately £2.4 billion) of nonconforming (i.e. higher risk) mortgage-backed securities had been issued in the UK. This is nearly double the total amount issued in 2014 (€1.8 billion) and up dramatically from a mere €321m in 2011. As the author explains, “[t]hese type of home loans, which do not meet strict high street lending criteria, are now a major driver of the UK’s overall securitization market, representing around a quarter of total issuance of UK residential MBS so far this year. Last year, the proportion was 12 per cent”.[footnoteRef:6] [6: Thomas Hale, “Bundling of Risky UK Mortgages Booms”, Financial Times, 8 October 2015 (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88bc8cfa-6ce4-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a.html#axzz3oe59TJnH, accessed 15 October). See also Thomas Hale, “Pensions Return to Asset-Backed Securities”, Financial Times, 1 October 2015 (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0c44a02-6827-11e5-a57f-21b88f7d973f.html#axzz3nma7515g, accessed 15 October 2015) and “Lloyds Taps Overseas Appetite for British ABS, Financial Times, 14 October 2015 (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19d699e4-726f-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc.html#axzz3oe59TJnH, accessed 15 October).]

Securitization of debt is an important aspect of contemporary forms of financial accumulation. Of particular interest is the way that the financialization of social reproduction – by which I mean the linking of reproductive work and capacities of households to global finance through debt securitization – subjects households to the risks associated with global financial markets (up to and including financial crises) that their interest payments are helping to put in motion (Bryan, Martin and Rafferty 2009; Adkins 2015). It also subjects them to the risks of over-indebtedness, which become particularly problematic as interest rates rise. In this process, the ‘patriarchy of the wage’ has been supplanted, at least in part, by the ‘tyranny of debt’, which brings with it a reorganization of relationships of gender and class. The financialization of social reproduction also works to de-politicize struggles over social reproduction, as the creditor-debtor relation displaces the social struggles that formerly took place in the workplace (i.e. regarding the need for a ‘social wage’) and in relation to the state (i.e. over social provisioning) (Soederberg 2014: 34; Roberts and Soederberg 2014).

The key point to take forward from the analytical framework developed in this section is that while the growing indebtedness of households in the UK is well known, as are the housing and food crises, these are not simply manifestations of austerity politics, but rather reflect longer processes associated with capitalist forms of production and social reproduction, specifically, financialized forms of accumulation and the commodification, privatization and financialization of social reproduction. In the following two sections, I will further elucidate the ways in which these two interrelated trends have perpetuated housing insecurity and hunger, of which debt is both a cause and a consequence. I will further argue that insofar as debt may help to temporally offset the costs of social reproduction, the unsustainability of this ‘solution’ is evident in the bodily and emotional harms generated by housing insecurity, homelessness and hunger.[footnoteRef:7] [7: While it is beyond the scope of this paper to develop a criteria for evaluating the exact moment when existing forms of social reproduction become unsustainable, the ‘depletion’ framework developed by Shirin Rai, Catherine Hoskyns, and Dania Thomas (2013) draws upon literature in the environmental sciences in order to develop a more precise way of measuring the gap between outflows of domestic, affective and reproductive labour, and the inflows necessary to sustain the health and well-being of those people, households and communities engaged in this work. For the purposes of this work, it will be assumed that the undermining of housing security, women’s vulnerability to violence, the sacrifice of one’s subsistence needs in order to feed other family members and debt-related emotional stress all suggest that the health and wellbeing of people, households and communities is being undermined in ways that will ultimately prevent their ability to reproduce themselves. ]

Housing-Related Risk and Debt

The Financialization and Securitization of Housing

In the UK and elsewhere, one manifestation of the broader financialization of social reproduction involves the linking of housing to global financial markets through the securitization of mortgages (Brassett, Rethel and Watson 2012; Aalbers 2012; Schwartz and Seabrooke 2009). The door to residential mortgage securitization was opened in 1986, with the passage of the Financial Services Act, which dismantled the monopoly that building societies had on issuing mortgages in the UK. As banks and other lenders entered the mortgage market, they loosened lending standards and passed off the risk through securitization instruments. The demutualization of building societies via the 1986 Building Societies Act enabled them to enter the market as well, and securitization allowed them to increase lending in ways that generated large profits for their new shareholders (Erturk and Solari 2007). Despite experiencing a fall immediately after the financial crisis, as noted above, this trend has returned to the UK with renewed vigor.

Far from being driven by abstract and technical developments taking place in finance, the securitization of housing – which renders households dependent on financial markets for their long-term well-being and vice versa (Aalbers 2012) – has taken place in the context of a broader shift away from social (or socialized) housing toward the private, market-based provisioning of housing for the working class and poor populations (Roberts forthcoming; 2013). Taken together, these shifts have helped to fuel housing precariousness, up to and including homelessness, and to an increase in household debt.

More specifically, while securitization helps to support the private housing market (i.e. by allowing originators to remove loans from balance sheets in order to reduce risk and raise additional capital), so too does the on-going privatization of social housing provided by councils and local housing associations (Ginsburg 2005; Hodkinson, Watt and Mooney 2013). This latter trend has its roots in the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which allowed tenants to purchase their council flats at discounts of up to 50 percent. The scheme, which cost the government an estimated £40 billion in its first 25 years, was arguably Britain’s biggest privatization (Meek 2014). It also had important implications for the availability of social housing as councils were prevented from spending the money earned from the sale of properties (at below market rates) while central government funding for housing was simultaneoulsy slashed.

While the scheme was based on the assumption that the withdrawal of government ‘intervention’ in the housing market would lead to an automatic realignment of supply and demand, with the private sector upping the construction and availability of new homes, this was not the result. Rather, the construction of new homes between the 1990s and the onset of the crisis in 2008 hovered around 150,000 a year, fuelling a housing bubble and a tremendous increase in rent in places like London, where rents tripled (Meek 2014).

The Privatization and Marketization of Housing

Meanwhile, the poorest and most in need of housing support were concentrated in the least desirable stock of council housing (Centre for Social Justice 2008: 14-15). They also ended up in the private rental market, some of whom rented houses that had been bought by council tenants, sold to private landlords and then rented to people who could not get council housing at two or three times the cost. Many council and private tenants were then supported by the state through a welfare benefit called ‘housing benefit’. While this benefit still exists, it was recently restructured in a more ‘market-friendly’ way, as the benefit is not distributed in cash but rather than paid directly to landlords. This has allowed tenants to use the benefit for a much wider range of private housing, regardless of the rent being charged. Combined with rising house prices that have priced many people out of the owner occupation market, this has resulted in a major boon for private landlords, whose receipt of housing benefit tripled between 2003 and 2013. In 2013-14, the amount of housing benefit paid to private landlords totaled £9.3billion a year.[footnoteRef:8] [8: Kate Allen, “Evictions Soar in England and Wales as Benefit Cuts Bite”, Financial Times, 13 August 2015. Retrieved from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8e64a976-41ba-11e5-9abe-5b335da3a90e.html#axzz3pxWzSrrQ (30 October 2015).]

Signaling a further commitment to the privatization and marketization of housing, which is an important aspect of social reproduction, in the 2015 Queen's Speech, the government reiterated its plan to compel councils to sell their low rent homes in the most high value areas, partly in order to pay for the extension of a new Right to Buy scheme for housing association tenants.[footnoteRef:9] It also suggested that all social housing tenants “with household incomes of £40,000 and above in London, and £30,000 and above in the rest of England, will be required to “Pay to Stay”, by paying a market or near market rent for their accommodation”. “This”, it is argued, “will ensure they pay a fair level of rent, or make way for those whose need is greater” (HM Treasury 2015). [9: Housing associations are somewhere in between council housing and the private rental market: they are private non-profit organizations with mandates of providing low-rent homes for the less well off.]

Thus, on the one hand, the housing bubble that has been fuelled by processes of financialization (i.e. securitization), marketization and privatization has benefitted investors, landlords and many of those individuals and families who have been able to purchase their homes and benefit from asset appreciation – a state-supported strategy for security in old age trend that has been described as a new form of asset-based welfare (Watson 2009; Montgomerie and Young 2010). On the other hand, state supports that formerly shielded some of the least well-off sectors of the population from market-based rent prices, which have been rising dramatically in many parts of the country (most notably in London) have been eroded. This has taken place as part of a broader shift from a welfare toward a workfare state, which, as will be further elaborated below, entails the restructuring of welfare in ways that links entitlements to participation in the paid labour force, regardless of the pay or conditions involved. A clear example of this is the proposal outlined in the 2015 Budget to withdraw housing support for young people (between 18 and 21 years old) who are not in work or pursuing further education. As with other forms of welfare restructuring, these trends disproportionately impact single women, who make up 53 percent of all benefit claimants.[footnoteRef:10] [10: False Economy, “The Wrong Cure: How Cuts Will Make Britain more Unfair” (retrieved from http://falseeconomy.org.uk/cure/how-cuts-will-make-britain-more-unfair, 27 March 2014).]

Housing Insecurity, Homelessness and Debt

Together, these processes have rendered housing increasingly precariousness, and have fuelled both homelessness and (non-mortgage) housing-related debt. According to government statistics, for instance, between 2010 and 2015, problems with the distribution of housing benefit have led to a significant increase in the number of people at risk of becoming homeless. A short-term solution used by many households to avoid eviction is to turn to payday loan companies, which may then drive people into significant debt in the longer term. Otherwise, households may borrow money from family or friends via informal lending (Garvey and Pearlman 2015: 1-3). In other instances, households may seek to find the money by cutting back on other expenses, which include essentials such as food, gas and electricity (2015: 3).

For those in council housing, an increase in debt has been fuelled by the introduction of the ‘bedroom tax’. This tax is designed to penalize tenants considered to be ‘under-occupying’ their homes by maintaining a spare bedroom.[footnoteRef:11] According to the government’s own assessment, up to 35 percent of those affected “would be quite or very likely to fall into arrears if their housing benefit were to be reduced” (quoted in Ramesh 2013) and homeless charities have been highly vocal in their critique that given the absence of one-bedroom homes, tens of thousands of people will face debt, arrears and possibly homelessness. As one homeless charity reports, a survey undertaken for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) found that after five months of the bedroom tax “[a]lmost three fifths of the impacted tenants were either reducing spending on household essentials, or running up debts, while one in four had borrowed money, mainly from family or friends, to help manage the shortfall” (Fitzpatrick et al. 2015: 27). [11: According to the new criteria, each person or couple is allowed to have one bedroom while two children under 10 (regardless of gender) have to share a room and two children under 16 of the same gender have to share. Exceptions are also made for disabled tenants, foster carers and tenants with adult children in the Armed Forces. ]

Housing-related debt, then, extends beyond mortgage debt, which is not available to many poor and working class households. It is also the result of a housing benefit system that, in contrast to council housing, leaves renters vulnerable to eviction in the wake of benefit mishaps. A rise in unsecured borrowing has further been linked to increases in rental prices as private tenants turn to credit to support their standard of living.[footnoteRef:12] [12: Mark Odell, ‘Rents Rise at Fastest Rate in Almost 3 Years’, Financial Times, 29 October 2015. Retrieved from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eb50e000-7e64-11e5-a1fe-567b37f80b64.html#axzz3q3E8xwwU (29 October 2015).]

Other social service providers have expressed concerns that the harsh conditions placed on those seeking housing support will pose particular risks to women experiencing domestic violence. For instance, requirements that those applying for certain social tenancies have to have lived in the area for up to five years, and must be available for work, volunteering or education fail to account for those who have fled abusive situations and who dedicate a considerable amount of time and effort (including emotional effort) keeping themselves and their children safe. Attempts to force women to vacate valuable properties in prime locations also has the effect of removing women in vulnerable situations from their communities, families and friends (Fitzpatrick et al. 2015: 15; 38).

Hunger and Welfare Reform

The Rise of Workfare and ‘Austerity’

As noted above, broader transformations in the labour market over the past several decades, which have led to the deterioration of wages and working conditions, combined with the reduction and restructuring of benefits have made it increasingly difficult for those with lower incomes, along with lone-parent families, disabled peoples and others, to meet their social reproductive needs. Despite much attention given to austerity politics post-2008, these trends have a much longer historical trajectory. Contemporary changes to benefits, for instance, have their roots in distinctions institutionalized in the nineteenth century Poor Laws between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’ (Roberts forthcoming). The ‘less eligibility’ criteria established in the 1834 Poor Law, which mandated that the conditions of those receiving indoor relief be worse than those of the worst-off labourers outside the poorhouses, was re-affirmed with the replacement of ‘welfare’ with ‘workfare’ states in the 1980s and 90s (Peck 2001). This was, and continues to be, a key means of individualizing the costs of social reproduction and linking them to market-based work.

To briefly explain, the welfare state was historically based on the recognition that states had some role to play in redistributing resources in order to promote the well-being of the population. ‘Workfare’, in contrast, compels growing numbers of families, and especially female-headed families, to meet their needs through low-paid wage work, rather than relying on the state. Workfare is also much more limited and targeted at the neediest sectors of the population. Further, under workfare, benefits are also more stigmatized and punitive in form.

From a policy perspective, workfare was introduced by Conservative government’s Restart initiative in 1986, which intensified the monitoring of the unemployed through various means, including through the introduction of a mandatory job-related interview, an increase in staff focused on fraud prevention and an extension of the maximum period from which people could be disqualified from receiving benefits from 6 to 13 weeks. In 1988 this was increased to 26 weeks. The 1989 Social Security Act further increased eligibility requirements and prohibited claimants from refusing ‘unsuitable’ jobs that pay less than the going rate.

Continuing with this trajectory, in 1996, the Job Seekers Agreement introduced the Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA), which compelled those seeking benefits to visit a Job Centre once every two weeks, introduced random checks and forced the unemployed to look for work in other occupations after 3 months of benefits. In 1997, the Labour Party manifesto included a programme designed to compel people – especially young people, the long-term unemployed and lone parents (the vast majority of whom are women) – to take up paid or unpaid employment after a certain period of time (Jarvis 1997: 6-12).

The decision of the Coalition government in 2011 to dramatically expand workfare was thus not simply an ‘austere’ response to the post-crisis economic recession, but part of a much longer trend within capitalism. Specifically, as part of this plan, the government introduced the Work Programme, which outsourced workfare to a range of public and private service providers, increased the length of time that benefits can be withheld from those leaving job placements (to a max of 3 years) and mandated placements for up to 30 hours a week for as long as 6 months.[footnoteRef:13] [13: Press release retrieved from t https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-unveils-new-plans-to-massively-expand-work-experience-opportunities-for-the-young-unemployed (12 May 2015).]

This trajectory has continued under the Conservative government elected in 2015. In its 2015 Budget, for instance, the government outlined plans to cut £12 billion from the deficit (by 2019-20) via welfare reform. These reforms include “freezing working-age benefits and Local Housing Allowances for 4 years, reducing the benefit cap, and reforming tax credits and Universal Credit with support focussed on those with lower incomes” (HM Treasury 2015). The reform to the Universal Credit, which brings 6 separate benefits into one single benefit payment and was itself only recently introduced, aims to ensure “a system where work will always pay more than a life on benefits” (ibid.). It does so in part through a lowering of the cap on benefits from £26,000 to £20,000 per household (or £23,000 in London).

As with the trends noted earlier, this restructuring will have disproportionate affects on women, lone parents, the disabled and certain ethnic minorities. While the budget increased the entitlement of parents of 3 and 4 year olds who are in work (from 15 to 30 hours a week), it simultaneously tightened conditions placed on parents who do not work, stating that they should be actively searching for work if claiming Universal Credit. The cut to the Child Tax Credit, which will no longer provide support to more than two children, will disproportionately affect ethnic minority families, who are more likely to have large families (Women's Budget Group 2015a: 8).

As workfare has become more pronounced in the UK, it has also become more punitive. According to one account, unemployed people seeking benefits in the UK were sanctioned for “misconduct” 242,973 times during 2012.[footnoteRef:14] In Scotland, the number of women, disabled people and lone parents who have had their benefits docked rose from 16,000 in 2009 to more than 30,000 in 2014. Out of all of these groups, lone parents, the majority of whom are women, have been the hardest hit, having faced an increase of 563% since 2009.[footnoteRef:15] [14: Kevin Rawlinson, ‘Work Programme Creates Just 48,000 Long-Term Jobs in Three Years’, The Guardian, 21 March 2014.] [15: Lucy Adams, Benefits Sanctions Double Against Women, Disabled and Lone Parents, BBC News, 17 July 2014. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-28331544 (30 October 2015).]

Welfare Restructuring, Hunger and Debt

The policy changes noted above can be understood as moves aimed at individualizing and privatizing the costs of social reproduction. Yet, as feminists have argued, these moves have implications for the ability of households to meet their social reproductive needs. Rather than simply being ‘absorbed’ by households, or, for that matter, being solved through waged work, the risks that states offload through such processes have been temporally (and temporarily) offset through debt. They are also borne out on the bodies of women, which is manifest most obviously in women’s decisions to sacrifice their nutrition needs in favour of those of their children.

The pervasiveness of hunger in the UK was brought into the public spotlight in the wake of an exponential growth of food banks. In 2014, a committee was formed to look into the causes and consequences of hunger in the UK, and to articulate solutions to this “most basic and fundamental political challenge”. This All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger in the United Kingdom interviewed dozens of people and organizations involved in supporting families struggling to meet their basic needs, and published a thorough review of the primary evidence that was gathered in interviews (Forsey 2014). The data available in this report informs much of the discussion below, as it clearly demonstrates the effect that welfare restructuring is having on hunger, on indebtedness and the gendered distribution of risk, though other studies also substantiate these findings.

For the purposes of this paper, one of the key trends illustrated in the report is the extent to which households have come to rely on debt as a means of addressing their reproductive needs. This observation has been further supported by evidence collected by the Department for Work and Pensions (which is responsible for welfare and pension policy), which interviewed a series of benefit claimants in order to assess a cap imposed in 2013 and found that all of the interviewees had ‘tight budgets’ and most had ‘some debts’. The budgeting strategies that were used by claimants to address the benefit cap included “choices such as spending less on telephones or buying non-branded goods” and the “less sustainable” options of “not paying bills or borrowing from lenders” (DWP 2014: 23).

In one of the only academic studies that investigates the link between debt and food, Jackie Goode (2012) finds that it is only in the most desperate situations that people will use credit to pay for food. As one of her interviewees noted, “At one time, I was desperate, I’ll admit it. I was buying food on credit cards because with my wages along, with all the direct debits going out…I couldn’t afford to [buy it in any other way]...” (2012: 15). At the same time, she finds that this is justified by those who are forced to have to do so, with another interviewee noting that they use their credit card for food and “bare essential stuff”, but never use it in ways that are “stupid”. She further found that some families had to rely on credit to purchase food when benefits were delayed, which is a theme to which I will return below (2012: 15).

A second insight that can be drawn from the findings published in the Inquiry report is that debt itself if a key reason that families are referred to foodbanks in the first place. According to the Milton Keynes Food Bank, personal debt (including arrears from high fuel costs) is the second most common reason for referral, accounting for 18 percent of all referrals in 2014. In 2004, this constituted 9 percent (Forsey 2014: 38). A group in Nottingham told the Inquiry about a woman named Marsha, who was referred to a food bank after struggling for several months to pay for a television and washing machine that she had purchased from a high street home credit retailer. This particular retailer (which remained unnamed) is one that uses weekly repayment schemes and is frequently used by people on low incomes (2014: 41). Indeed, according to the Stockport Food Partnership, home credit retailers that rent appliances to families, often in times of emergency when their existing appliances break down, are among those creditors most likely to drive people into such unsustainable levels of debt that they are forced to rely on food banks to supplement their subsistence (2014: 41). As the Inquiry notes, the insecurity faced by households stands in stark contrast to the well-being of the industry. One home credit retailer reported that its profits had more than doubled between 2007-08 and 2014, to £52.6 million (2014: 41). In addition to home credit retailers, as Citizens Advice Scotland explains, a growing number of people have turned to food banks as the result of ‘poor practice’ from payday lenders (2014: 41).

This is important because it suggests that for many families, debt has already reached a point where it can no longer be repaid while maintaining the necessary level of social provisioning to ensure the reproduction of the working population. This reveals, then, the contradiction posed by capital accumulation within the context of the neoliberal organization of individualized, privatized and financialized social reproduction.

Again, this point is substantiated in some of the broader academic literature, though this literature does not analyse the relationship between debt and foodbank usage in any depth. For instance, in a review of food aid in the UK, Hannah Lambie-Mumford et al. find that the key drivers leading people to seek food aid include immediate problems (the loss of a job, delay in benefit payments) and more longer-term problems that include perpetual low incomes and indebtedness (Lambie-Mumford et al. 2014: viii). Yet, hunger and food insecurity tend to be approached as problems of social policy. In some cases, debt is overlooked as a cause of food ‘insecurity’, which, in the Introduction to a special section of Social Policy & Society on ‘Hunger, Food and Social Policy in Austerity’, is linked to falling wage levels and the erosion of social security structures and entitlements, along with physical access to stores that sell affordable food (Dowler and Lambie-Mumford 2015). Where debt is recognized as a cause, it is not theorized or linked to processes of financialization that have increased the supply of credit to lower-class households, but rather assumed to be part of broader conditions of poverty (Lambie-Mumford et al. 2014).[footnoteRef:16] [16: Another example of a study that does excellent empirical work documenting the link between food insecurity and debt, in this case energy debt, but fails to critically analyze this relationship is Lambie-Mumford and Snell (2015). ]

Third, the gendered nature of this contradiction – which has its roots in the gendered nature of capitalism more broadly – is evidenced by the fact that households, and women in particular, are cutting back on food consumption in order to pay debt. As documented by the Inquiry, Marsha from Nottingham claimed that it was “extremely difficult to maintain the weekly repayments, feed herself and her three children, and keep up with her usual household expenses. She therefore went without meals herself in order to feed her children and was diagnosed with chronic depression” (2014: 41). The Children’s Society estimated that 45 percent of families with ‘problem debt’ are cutting back on food for their children at least once every three months in order to meet debt repayments (Forsey 2014: 40). Again, this is not necessarily new, as a review of qualitative studies of how low-income mothers manage poverty study published in 2005 found this form of “maternal sacrifice” to be widespread (Attree 2005).

The link between debt and hunger is further evident in the growing operation of debt advice services – and sometimes credit union services – in food banks. This was noted, for instance, in food banks operating in Merseyside (Liverpool), while the Trussell Trust explained that it allowed debt advice services and others to operate in its food banks, making them a more holistic “one stop shop” (Forsey 2014: 78). St. Peter’s Church in Rock Ferry has explained that it has a five-year plan to bring benefit advice, debt advice and housing advice together, in order to “actually try and address the underlying reasons why people are coming to food banks”. They go on to note that “[i]f we can educate them how to manage their finances, and get advisors in every food bank in the UK [...] in front of the client to get them the support they need, we could address this issue” (Forsey 2014: 76). Another example is the Lambeth Borough Council, which has created a local advice network to “provide debt, housing and benefit advice surgeries in each local food bank so that, when they are open, those attending could access on the spot advice to deal with any issues that might have driven them to seek help” (Forsey 2014: 79). While there were numerous other examples offered, this should suffice to highlight the interconnections between debt, the privatization of social reproduction via welfare (or benefit) restructuring and hunger.

Concluding Reflections

Insofar as debt advice has been increasingly offered alongside food bank services, so too has debt advice become an increasingly important aspect of homelessness prevention. Given the link established in section two between homelessness and debt, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the major ‘growth activities’ for homelessness prevention involves financial assistance and debt advice. While these services accounted for an estimated 16,000 homelessness prevention instances in 2009/10, they accounted for some 50,000 such instances in 2013/14 (Fitzpatrick et al. 2015: 52).

While such services are surely important for the growing number of people without access to adequate shelter and food, the absence of which has severe implications for people, households and communities to socially reproduce themselves. However, on their own, such initiatives do not go far enough in challenging the longer-term structural causes of housing precarity and hunger, which include broader and longer-standing processes of financialization, up to and including the financialization of social reproduction (alongside its individualization, privatization and marketization). State regulatory initiatives, which include the promotion of access to ‘fair’ credit and financial literacy initiatives, also work to further individualize risk and to ‘responsibilize borrowers’, while failing to address the reasons that a growing number of households have had to rely on debt as a means of securing the costs of social reproduction that are being offloaded by capital and the state.

The analysis developed in this paper serves to further support the argument advanced by feminist scholars that the offloading of these costs of social reproduction onto households – and, I would add, linking them to financial markets via (securitized) debt – reproduces gender-based forms of inequality and difference. Not only do women tend to take on the additional work of unpaid labour, but they are also more likely to face physical risks related to housing insecurity and hunger. Gender differences in access to income and assets also make them more likely to be over-indebted, and to rely on the highest cost forms of ‘sup-prime’ credit (Montgomerie and Young 2010; Roberts 2013). In failing to account for these gendered differences, debt advice services – alongside other initiatives that seek to enhance the ‘resilience’ of households looking to cope with life on a low inome by offering shopping and cooking advice – risk naturalizing and reproducing the gendered nature of poverty and indebtedness.

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to develop an argument for an alterantive means of organizing production and social reproduction that would better distribute resources, I would point to alternative budgets developed by the Women’s Budget Group as one such alternative. While failing to adequately address the issue of financialization and indebtedness per se, their ‘Plan F’ is a useful starting point for thinking about the ways that the economy can be re-organzied in order to support more progressive and sustainable forms of production and social reproduction (Women's Budget Group 2015b). However, given the fundamental tension that resides between capitalist forms of production and its drive for accumulation, and social reproduction, it is also necessary to look beyond Plan F and other anti-austerity positions toward a post-capitalist future.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Emma Dowling, Susanne Soederberg and two anonymous reviewers for providing very useful comments on this paper. This paper was presented at the Department of Geography’s Cities, Space & Development Seminar at the London School of Economics and the Global Political Economy Research Cluster Seminar at the University of Bristol. I would like to thank all of those who attended and contributed to two very productive discussions. All remaining shortcomings are my own.

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Self employed2005 Q12005 Q22005 Q32005 Q42006 Q12006 Q22006 Q32006 Q42007 Q12007 Q22007 Q32007 Q42008 Q12008 Q22008 Q32008 Q42009 Q12009 Q22009 Q32009 Q42010 Q12010 Q22010 Q32010 Q42011 Q12011 Q22011 Q32011 Q42012 Q12012 Q22012 Q32012 Q42013 Q12013 Q22013 Q32013 Q42014 Q12014 Q22014 Q32014 Q42015 Q12015 Q22015 Q3100.0100.2281496483298101.6012141903565102.0729563249485103.2007466591297102.8330699699631104.5087618087931105.0095993929255105.9023314689652105.3851672127188106.1863859404531106.2561634212012107.4582799105366106.9348452816494105.8017292118472106.0741478789715106.5213243126433106.4921090065552107.5633104401517108.4215354732315109.583903596761109.4451851673017112.1165724882899111.087612765678110.3853090041831111.0786749595831114.2202194473406114.0190845090695115.9927864443827117.0750964828246117.2980308119148117.8123095557409115.9036396165471116.4184801808588117.5339882949253122.285173261265126.6990825223557127.6946395728841125.2685618185981124.732487319969124.8295581579619125.0494845765289126.1115101700755Temporary employees2005 Q12005 Q22005 Q32005 Q42006 Q12006 Q22006 Q32006 Q42007 Q12007 Q22007 Q32007 Q42008 Q12008 Q22008 Q32008 Q42009 Q12009 Q22009 Q32009 Q42010 Q12010 Q22010 Q32010 Q42011 Q12011 Q22011 Q32011 Q42012 Q12012 Q22012 Q32012 Q42013 Q12013 Q22013 Q32013 Q42014 Q12014 Q22014 Q32014 Q42015 Q12015 Q22015 Q3100.098.9149543584207101.0104671609294.81410089555465101.362089469410499.73328613338484100.0000730932373103.1324733928157104.6359475801544102.7802478815408101.2883302678142101.96447553953997.5313903720205495.204004708078894.8140701013480796.247095559915597.420451945110197.5354524998120698.9204436728534598.56478535305669101.0527050080712107.6381294474711108.2872749938695105.43758319225108.806159366264110.2312749328795103.9906361297651105.4128219692664107.0839582635895110.0280026279677111.0110909935328112.8782743156289110.1231927901527106.9189381679922109.5773138718465110.5901256758378112.9024488400601112.6180971490814116.0516289595201116.225258645674115.1452155198116112.1675041774486113.2633839425557Part time employees2005 Q12005 Q22005 Q32005 Q42006 Q12006 Q22006 Q32006 Q42007 Q12007 Q22007 Q32007 Q42008 Q12008 Q22008 Q32008 Q42009 Q12009 Q22009 Q32009 Q42010 Q12010 Q22010 Q32010 Q42011 Q12011 Q22011 Q32011 Q42012 Q12012 Q22012 Q32012 Q42013 Q12013 Q22013 Q32013 Q42014 Q12014 Q22014 Q32014 Q42015 Q12015 Q22015 Q3100.0101.1679025331998100.40784677434699.38000743199808100.7902835756132100.9542606295558101.1852383937929101.7702960309128101.072074769181100.884407695422100.5595086759226101.5567075502205102.2168459905675102.3080804352695102.3717393822498102.8507396782767103.500854244381102.7099101067715103.9415771619235104.5432077629896104.4095625729436106.0873973152313107.8009150728217106.9942785493686106.4755330024171106.3468352860046104.1839881566764106.0038617220507106.4686866230424107.222416845276107.6147159436551107.2855876465541107.3109180698976107.179499230246107.5443315115614106.8880876389627107.4309858025438107.1185965161093107.9946543004656108.3000884348415109.1588314358421108.1203588382399109.9122911294307Full time employees 2005 Q12005 Q22005 Q32005 Q42006 Q12006 Q22006 Q32006 Q42007 Q12007 Q22007 Q32007 Q42008 Q12008 Q22008 Q32008 Q42009 Q12009 Q22009 Q32009 Q42010 Q12010 Q22010 Q32010 Q42011 Q12011 Q22011 Q32011 Q42012 Q12012 Q22012 Q32012 Q42013 Q12013 Q22013 Q32013 Q42014 Q12014 Q22014 Q32014 Q42015 Q12015 Q22015 Q3100.099.73840181434961100.4926263961106100.478007883842100.7728348343691101.0800256429272101.0030993547253100.8418306938039100.8182645333403101.6367050892745102.1242742004622102.546086470167102.6462762056812102.9335365847201102.5097093655984102.026701152348100.883244191392699.5868447303630898.9475365735559898.6675482463631497.943201440728298.3123872957682598.1984113016758898.427699995853899.3388620874780899.4480369280039598.6784369311406298.3381474948515498.3448185459881798.792133666945699.0252649366045399.8432311761849100.002042075622100.2775752252933100.7888332961387101.3034519742264101.5917533052083102.3203878581448103.0748119145287103.7976406794711104.5210195344155104.5845285804376104.7592096702441Employment2005 Q12005 Q22005 Q32005 Q42006 Q12006 Q22006 Q32006 Q42007 Q12007 Q22007 Q32007 Q42008 Q12008 Q22008 Q32008 Q42009 Q12009 Q22009 Q32009 Q42010 Q12010 Q22010 Q32010 Q42011 Q12011 Q22011 Q32011 Q42012 Q12012 Q22012 Q32012 Q42013 Q12013 Q22013 Q32013 Q42014 Q12014 Q22014 Q32014 Q42015 Q12015 Q22015 Q3100.0100.0472722383013100.4853410379667100.3174367899975100.901679395823101.1014135833654101.3717602424355101.4786615911542101.4082604124918101.8534505994322102.1920412331216102.7347496010625103.1088735493829103.241342544809102.7497507807428102.5696575055878102.0058550884122101.0383313251438100.9747835976902101.0875594475484100.7780721244658101.4011163616894102.0729101341906101.8613265406699102.2665760785406102.2856337873007101.6982343181901101.9143373288513102.3314284278726103.0390640774954103.3515147021826103.8939385692545103.6888326573022103.9836773923711104.5494711244232105.2077044930075106.0627979765733106.5715004411368106.9608955142066107.3202079114165108.0209110599931107.8020461096387108.4154648812803

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