‘Poverty doesn’t rest’

During her PhD, Professor Eva Selenko was 'very poor, very precarious'. On 8 Euros a week for food, money was 'a huge issue' in her life. 'It's the little calculations you are constantly doing… can I go for a coffee? There's very little you can do for free.' Selenko's personal experience framed her research on how poverty and precarious work dominates your thinking, becoming so prevalent in daily experience.

Yet when Selenko first came to look for studies on unemployment and the meaning of work, she found them in clinical, developmental, and economic psychology, and in sociology and medicine, but very little in the actual work psychology literature. 'It's amazing how things have changed,' she said: 'I'm here, delivering a keynote. Society has finally woken up to the importance of poverty and health in our lives.'

But how do we even define precarity? Selenko pointed to objective and subjective indicators, including perceived financial inadequacy to meet one's needs, persistent concern about personal financial welfare, perceived financial burden, and affective and cognitive elements. It's perhaps those less tangible aspects, around what money represents, which came to the fore here. Selenko emphasised that money is a resource which affords us other resources. 'Poverty doesn't rest': Linda Tirado has said 'Rest is a luxury for the rich'. Having less money will affect multiple areas in life – which in turn will affect other areas.

This means that any loss of money will require adaptation in multiple, connected areas in life, and as psychologists we need to look at a person's trajectory over time. Loss will be more dramatic for people low on resources. Stevan Hobfoll has talked of money as an energy resource, which allows the acquisition of other resources. Lack of financial resources can easily create loss spirals. It also becomes harder to live economically: see Terry Pratchett's 'Vime's Boots Theory'.

Selenko presented a 19 -ear panel study which demonstrated that it's the loss that makes the difference. The effects of changes in low labour income were more robust than accumulated differences between people – getting poorer was 'worse' than being poor. Having a 'sense of control' partly mediated the impact on mental wellbeing.

Quoting from Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari, that 'In terms of poverty, stress is one of the biggest variables in the equation', Selenko argued that we need to understand precarity as 'a contextual restriction that informs people's thinking, emotions and restricts behaviour and our understanding of who we are, which orientates toward future action in the context of stress.' What helps? A study of clients from a debt-counselling agency in Austria highlighted the importance of self-efficacy, and feeling they made a contribution to a wider collective. Research with Jamie Oliver's restaurant apprentices (Petriglieri et al., 2019) echoed the importance of identity: workers can define themselves as opposite to the mainstream, and develop new understandings of themselves.

What can researchers do? Selenko ended with unanswered questions worthy of research attention, that could also teach us about general human behaviour. What careers get people out of poverty? Which types of identity are fostered by experience of poverty? How do people cope with uncertainty, and how does that impact work behaviour and citizenship? How do we prevent discrimination against people in poverty?