Introduction: Varieties of Austerity

Industry-wide bargaining to be suspended, €50 billion to be raised through privatization, social security to be cut by more than €4 billion over four years, nominal public sector wages to be slashed by 20 per cent, and on it went. Such was the list, so named were the targets. It was 2011, the Eurozone was in chaos, the global economy was in tatters, and the stimulus era proved fleeting. Austerity was widely en vogue and it was being visited in dramatic fashion on Greece: the Troika bailout demanded it, capitalist interests needed it, and the government and its people were put on notice (BBC, 2011). Greece is an exceptional case, but it is far from an isolated one. The global financial crisis of 2008, the ensuing and prolonged economic crisis, and policies of austerity implemented from 2010 have imposed major costs on most Western societies. These include direct economic costs such as lower GDP, slower economic growth, higher unemployment and lost output, various forms of underemployment, much of it in precarious and poorly paid jobs, and increased household debt obligations that drag down disposable income. Other, perhaps less direct, effects can be categorized as social and human costs. Phenomena such as inequality (a legacy of the entire neoliberal period: see Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015) increased in the post-crisis years (Schneider et al, 2017), and higher unemployment and insecurity were exacerbated by austerity measures such as cuts in social and health care spending, and labour market restructuring. Inequality and unemployment are linked to various social problems involving mental health, drug use and addiction, lower life expectancy, increased obesity, low education achievement and aspirations, more violence and less social mobility (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009, chapters 4–12). The human and social costs are significant; and often compounded by divisions of gender, race, migration status and age (on the gendered effects of the global financial crisis, see Hozic and True, 2016, part I). For youth in Ireland and Spain, for example, the damage to their employment and economic prospects was so severe that talk of a ‘lost generation’ became commonplace.

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