Work, wage and subsidy: Making a living between regulation and informalization

Abstract

The paper analyses the intersection of public policies, informal arrangements of income provisioning and the underlying moral economies in southern Europe. Focusing on the enforcement of public policies designed to tackle unemployment, the chapter highlights the interaction between institutional categorization and grassroots understandings of “work”, “wage” and “subsidy”, in order to show how the formal-informal dialectics are essential to understand people’s livelihoods and moral frameworks in relation to different scales of regulation and informalization. The paper highlights the role of state bureaucracy in creating ambiguities around “work”, hence favouring subordination and labour informalization. The analysis draws on materials collected in Brindisi, southern Italy, on unemployment benefits recipients “employed” in the municipal administration or in the outsourced public school cleaning services. The L.S.U. unemployment scheme (literally “socially useful jobs”) was implemented in the 1990s and targeted redundant workers and long-term unemployed.