Lewis, Bryce (2025) ‘All in this together?’ Precarity, uncertainty and abandonment: A Foucauldian analysis of young people’s experiences of long-term unemployment and living in Melbourne’s west during COVID-19 lockdowns. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Unemployed young people face considerable barriers to employment and must navigate a precarious labour market. For young people living in disadvantaged regions of western metropolitan Melbourne, these challenges are more pronounced due to unique geographical and sociocultural influences. Despite these obstacles, young people in particular are problematised for their long-term unemployment by neoliberal ideology and policies which attribute joblessness to an individual’s psychological and moral deficits. In order to receive income support, they are subjected to neoliberal state practices colloquially referred to as Workfare, which are intended to discipline, punish and control welfare recipients and reorient them to think and act in accordance with labour market rationalities. Tellingly, the disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Australian Government’s unprecedented economic response to protect millions of people exposed to joblessness, allowed for the neoliberalist characterisation of unemployment as an individual failing to be contested. This response was spearheaded by the narrative that the crisis brought all Australians together and assurances from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison that ‘there is not more support for some than there is for others’. It was within this context that this research aimed to critically analyse young people’s experiences of long-term unemployment and precarity during Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns. In applying a conceptual framework of Foucauldian governmentality, overlain with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and Lerner’s belief in just-world (BJW) theory, the research analysed ways eight young people from Melbourne’s west, who had undertaken Work for the Dole (WfD) activity, described their experiences of longterm unemployment during the city’s COVID-19 lockdowns. These experiences were captured by semi-structured interviews and analysed through a Foucauldian lens using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA). Findings revealed that the pandemic crisis, and the Australian Government’s pumppriming of the economy in response, did not shift the neoliberal narrative that blamed young people for their life circumstances caused by factors beyond their control. During COVID-19 lockdowns, the young people in this study continued to internalise individual responsibility for their unemployment, and their subjectivities and citizenship identities went largely unchanged. Yet by exhibiting proximal acts of resistance to the discursive practices of neoliberalism and Workfare, the young people signalled a pathway to potentially challenge these oppressive systems. The research is bookended by contemplating the capacity of the climate movement – in having positioned the ecological and economic crises as inextricably linked – to propose alternatives to remedy long-term youth unemployment underpinned by an ecological social justice perspective.

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