The roads to disaffiliation: Insecure work and vulnerable relationships

This article attempts to deal with various forms of poverty. What do the lo ng-term unemployed, young people looking for work and on training schemes, single adults eligible for the RMI (guaranteed minimum income benefit), lon e mothers, young couples crippled by the impossibility of paying bills and rent, all have in common? The author puts forward the hypothesis that they express a particular mode of dissociation from the social bond: disaffiliat ion. This is a different condition of misery from that of poverty in the st rict sense. The latter can perhaps be read as a state, whose forms can be l isted in terms of lack (lack of earnings, of housing, of medical care, of e ducation, lack of power or of respect). By contrast, situations of destitut ion constitute an effect at the place where two vectors meet: one, the axis of integration/non-integration through work; the other, an axis of integra tion/non-integration into a social and family network. A model of four 'zon es' of social life - integration, vulnerability, assistance and disaffiliat ion constructed from pre-industrial societies, may serve as a reference gri d against which we can interpret contemporary social circumstances and the rise of social vulnerability. Present-day insecurity largely results from t he growing fragility of protective regulations which were implemented from the nineteenth century onwards in order to create a stable situation for wo rkers: the right to work, extended social protection, coverage of social ri sks set up by the welfare state. We can describe the specific nature of pre sent-day insecurity as relating to the structure of wage society, its crisi s or its disintegration since the mid-1970s.