Work, welfare and debt in precarious times

The conditions the state places on those receiving welfare are often too rigid to reflect the malleable circumstances of recipients’ work and private lives. Deborah James describes how people can end up in enormous amounts of debt to the state when it – many times wrongly – decides welfare beneficiaries violated some of those rigid conditions. “Clawing back” what is rightfully theirs can be an agonising process battling the state and other debt collectors.