These two complementary studies provide an excellent, thought-provoking account of the low-pay no-pay cycle, an important and growing aspect of the UK labour market, and its realities and myths today. The book, Poverty and Insecurity, is ‘about the lives of individuals and families living in or near poverty – despite (or, as this book will show, because of) their enduring commitment to work and repeated engagement with jobs’ (p. 1). In ten chapters, the authors draw on their qualitative, life-history research to deliver a detailed analysis of the experience of workers in Middlesborough that gives strong support to their ‘because of’ the pursuit of work.

Theories of the labour market theory and its present shape in Britain are discussed in the second chapter, followed by an account of the methods and of Middlesborough, which has undergone massive changes in recent generations. The views of staff in ten employers and thirteen ‘welfare-to-work’ agencies there are explored in chapter 4, revealing less concern with the formal abilities of jobseekers than their ‘flexibility and availability to receive low pay and poor conditions’ (p. 4). The team interviewed sixty people aged 30–60 in the low-pay no-pay cycle: half had been interviewed at least once in earlier studies, providing useful evidence of changes over time. Chapters 5 to 7 discuss their motivations to work, finding jobs (generally with very little support from any agencies), the nature of the work and the ‘inherent insecurity’ of the cycle, or perhaps better, the churning. The significant impact of ill-health and caring, locking people into the cycle, is considered in a separate chapter. Chapter 9 sets out well the ways that the benefit system failed those in and out of work, adding to social insecurity, not reducing it, so that they often avoided claiming.

The concluding chapter assesses the findings in the context of trends in the national labour market and government policies, both of which reinforce the risk of churning. The growing polarisation resulting from wider processes of labour market change leaves the most marginal paying particularly heavy costs of recurrent poverty, insecurity and exclusion. The interviewees did not need reminding of the value of work or chasing into it; they needed better and more secure jobs. We need to understand why people caught in the lower part of the labour market work, not why they don't.

The authors argue that even in the current unsupportive climate, changes in employer and union practices could help to make bad jobs better. They conclude by emphasising Dave Byrne's analysis of the processes that exclude: ‘Poor work is the big story’ (Byrne, Reference Byrne1999: 69, their emphasis). The price of the continuing neglect in official policies and statistics of the problems of poor work combined with repeated unemployment is brought out particularly well in the study: it is a painful consequence of the lack of attention to the impact of demand and broader structural aspects of the labour market.

The report, Are ‘Cultures of Worklessness’ Passed Down the Generations?, complements the book well. Also supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, its meticulous, at times deadpan, account of the search for what might be called the unholy grail of social security debate raises many wider questions about the politics of policy as well as the labour market. Myths about ‘them the poor’ as opposed to ‘us the taxpayers’ are always with us, but they gain extra momentum at certain times. One much enlisted recently has portrayed a culture that leads generations of families to ‘rest on’ or ‘languish on’ benefits, depending on whether you prefer the verb of a Conservative Minister of Employment or a Labour Prime Minister.

Shildrick and her colleagues painstakingly document how their searches to find families where no-one had worked for three generations failed. They chose two areas of long-term and high unemployment in Middlesborough and Glasgow where the chances of success might have been expected to be good. People working and living in the area knew all about such people, of course, but not well enough, it turned out, to be able to identify any of them. The research team asked, advertised, broadcast and interviewed, but to no avail. They relaxed their recruitment criteria from three to two generations where no one had ever worked, but, to obtain the twenty families they had set out to interview, they had to relax the criteria again, and again – eventually reducing the criteria to two generations where someone in the older generation had spent at least five years currently out of work and where at least one in the younger had never been employed, whether or not they were living in the same house (p. 18). Very often these were only a few years out of school and they had siblings in work.

Of particular value are their findings on commitment to work among their respondents on the margin of the labour market – as strongly established as among those with more work experience in their larger study. This is not so surprising when account is taken of others in the household or relatives elsewhere who were in work, although often caught in the low-pay no-pay trap examined in the book.

The authors note the strong belief of labour market practitioners in the three-generation workless family despite their inability to identify any – ‘an interesting finding in itself’ (p. 18). ‘Of course, myths have a purpose’, distracting, covering up and justifying, as they note in the final chapter of the book (p. 223). The use and abuse of myths in setting policy agenda deserve more analysis, especially, I would suggest, for the ways that they divert attention from demand and wider structural factors in the labour market. I would strongly recommend these studies to anyone who wants to find out what is actually happening in the UK labour market today.