Having looked at how being a welfare recipient can mean occupying a marginal and socially liminal space, I now explore some of the factors that permeate experiences in this space. In this respect, this chapter looks at the role that work and the work ethic have in shaping the experiences of welfare recipients by drawing on evidential data. While, again, focusing here on a distinct set of empirical materials, I nevertheless continue to suggest that the ‘shared typical’ (McIntosh and Wright, 2019; Wright and Patrick, 2019) nature of the data means that the experiences confronted here may have much in common with experiences in other jurisdictions, particularly where similar (liberal) welfare regimes persist. Before presenting the empirical materials, I first ‘set out my stall’ by describing what I mean by the work ethic, my conception thereof being somewhat novel, albeit extrapolated in previous work (Whelan, 2020b). Effectively, when I talk about the work ethic, I mean a social phenomenon that is created by the continuous linking of paid formal employment to feelings, experiences and inherent ideas of self-value and self-worth. This type of thinking also includes and incorporates a tendency towards the ‘valorisation’ of work, and overwork, alongside the ‘cult’ of work that seems to dominate popular and political discourses surrounding what it means to be of value and to be valued, in modern Western societies at least (Frayne, 2015, 2019; Sage, 2019; Whelan, 2020b; Boland and Griffin, 2021). Conversely, being in receipt of social welfare, of various types, is considered almost as the antithesis of being in work and is therefore seen as a deeply shameful social position. I have referred to this elsewhere (Whelan, 2020b: 4) in the following terms: