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The moral economy of the Latvian post-socialist welfare state: ethnography of an unemployment
office
Liene Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald
This paper draws on ethnography of an unemployment office in Riga to explore how understandings
of welfare and social rights are articulated in mundane encounters between unemployed Latvians
and state agents. My fieldwork took place in the aftermath of the global economic crisis that had hit
Latvia particularly hard. The GDP had dropped by 25 per cent between 2008 and 2010, while
unemployment rose to 20.7 per cent at its peak in the 1st quarter of 2010. Some analysts estimate
the number of workplaces in the national economy shrunk from 920,000 to 710,000 as a result of
the crisis and the ensuing austerity politics. In October 2011, when I started my fieldwork,
unemployment stood at 16.2 per cent and there were 43 job seekers per vacancy. The research
draws upon a participant observation of an active labour market programme called
‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’ – the most widespread form of assistance to the unemployed in
terms of the number of people involved in 2011. The programme consists of one-to-four-day
seminars, run mostly by psychologists and business coaches on a variety of topics. This paper probes
the anxieties that surface in job seekers’ encounters with the trainers running the seminars. As
vignettes from the unemployment office will show, it is more than just the anxiety about precarious
economic conditions. What is at stake for the trainers, but as much for the people seeking the state’s
help is the ideals of being a proper European, democratic, modern person. The competitivenessraising seminars function as spaces for the disciplining of post-socialist subjectivities vis-à-vis the
imagined Western gaze and the anxiety of rectifying the ‘old’ (i.e. socialist) ‘mentality’, as the local
vernacular has it. By examining how ideals of a proper modern personhood and state-individual
relationships are being imagined, questioned, and denounced in state-sponsored narratives and in
everyday rhetoric, we can glean an insight into the moral economy of the kind of post-socialist
welfare state that has taken shape in contemporary Latvia.