The Marett Memorial Lecture 2024

What is ‘distributive labour’? Debt, work, and welfare
Professor Deborah James (LSE)

This lecture - mounting a challenge to suggestions by Ferguson (2015) that wage work has virtually disappeared, forcing people instead into ‘distributive labour’ - explores the interaction between debt, work and welfare. It sees debt as part of a complex matrix, rather than as a single-stranded phenomenon that, as an outcome of financialization, has turned welfare into debtfare and welfare beneficiaries into repayers. Instead, they need to be understood in relation to other, broader factors that make their search for a viable livelihood possible and that enable their life in society: borrowing money and accessing loans in addition to the conventional routes of state benefits and wage labour. The lecture draws attention to interactions among a nexus of relationships through which people seek out such a living: from the private or state institutions (or individuals) from whom they borrow money and to which (or whom) they owe it; those in market or state settings who employ them and pay their remuneration; and the government bureaucracies, non-governmental organisations or charitable institutions through which they seek, and sometimes find, social protection. Often the three are almost indistinguishably interwoven, and advisers and activist-intermediaries are relied upon to help draw boundaries between them.

All welcome!

Photograph © Maurice Weiss