The Ones Who Suffer

“Lazy.” “Uneducated.” “Apathetic.” “Your own fault.” As the child of long-term unemployed parents, Anna Mayr knows how wrong prejudices such as these are. But this didn’t protect her from the reality of living on Hartz IV, which was accompanied by constant money worries and the feeling of not belonging. She used to be ashamed that her parents didn’t have jobs. Today, she knows that our society needs people like them: as scarecrows of poverty, assuring everyone else that they are doing the right thing – namely by having jobs. In her fierce book, which puts forward a strong hypothesis, Mayr shows why we need to rethink the history of work: as a history of unemployment. What would a world look like in which we no longer need the poor to give meaning to our lives.