There are now several books and journal articles published where there is a focus on austerity and its impacts. Richard Seymour's (2014), Mary O’Hara's (2015) and Vicki Cooper and David Whyte's (2017) (just to name a few) are magnificent accounts on the negative impacts of austerity and the growing resistance to it. This book is an updated contribution to this debate except I take a different approach and perspective. At the time of writing (March 2020), two incidents have received significant press coverage. First is the death of Errol Graham who died of starvation in June 2018 when his benefits were cut off. Errol is one of thousands who have died as a result of austerity as the government moves towards downgrading or possibly phasing out benefits as a safety net (Butler, 2020). The second relates to the fact that there have been 440 health and safety incidents reported in the Amazon Company (UK) warehouses since 2015. The GMB union has reported that workers operate under a ‘culture of fear’. Tim Roache, the GMB general secretary, accused Amazon of treating workers like robots not human beings and said the official figures gave a ‘horrifying insight’ into the company's warehouses (Sainato, 2020). In their study of Amazon in Wales, Bricken and Taylor (2018) argue that many workers are coming from the welfare system as the employment services (the Department for Work and Pensions) funnel claimants into low-paid and precarious work – or ‘compulsion into precarity’. Driving down wages and benefits are ‘two sides to the same coin’ in the pursuit of austerity. Increasing conditionality and compulsion in welfare and reducing employment rights and bargaining as I argue in this book, are interrelated.

The implications of this approach are that central to austerity is a ‘class strategy’ aimed at redistributing income and power away from the working class. The introduction of Universal Credit (UC) and the imposition of conditions for workers to claim benefits blurs the welfare work relationship. For the first time, people in work claiming UC can be subject to conditions and requirements on their claims which can mean that they could be subject to penalties and sanctions.