Among those we interviewed, people who moved into jobs occasionally used phrases such as ‘It felt like fate’ or ‘I guess it was just meant to be’ when narrating their success. The elation of securing a job tended to obscure the difficulties of previous weeks, months or even years of unemployment, as if everything was ‘leading to this moment’. Perhaps these are just clichés which people resort to as shortcuts in storytelling, yet they are still used because an underlying conception of providential fortune animates our culture. Either way, the balance of anxiety and hope which attends jobseeking cannot be ignored; faith in the labour market persists and helps people persist, yet the words of Ecclesiastes might be wiser: ‘All is vanity’.

Words and terminology do not correspond neutrally with the objects and things they seek to describe. For instance, people who used to be described as ‘unemployed’ are now termed ‘jobseekers’, particularly within social policy documents and in the internal processes of welfare offices. Newspaper reports and popular parlance still prefer the term unemployed, particularly when talking about a group; ‘the unemployed’ are imagined as a shadowy collection of the jobless, pitiable yet worrisome. The term ‘jobseeker’ is resolutely focused on the individual and deserves close scrutiny as a ‘sign of our times’: this change is not a mere name change but reflects a shift in contemporary ideas about work, individuality and unemployment.

Over history, those in need of welfare, whether in the form of parish charity or state subsistence, have been assigned different names; the term ‘unemployed’ emerges late in the nineteenth century as a new way of thinking about ‘the poor’ – who were not always treated sympathetically but often conceived of as vagabonds or idlers (Walters, 2000). Folk wisdom suggests that ‘the poor will always be with us’, and imagines individuals in their families and communities in terms of poverty. By contrast, ‘the unemployed’ means a fluctuating number, a group of individuals dispersed over a state, temporarily surplus to the requirements of industry. While somewhat cold and statistical, the term ‘unemployed’ reflected the emerging welfare state imperative for society to support workers who were made redundant.