Negotiating and Surviving the 21st Century Welfare System and Labour Market—Thoughts on 2 Ken Loach Films
Since I watched I, Daniel Blake in a class related to the social welfare system I took the past semester, I’ve been absolutely stunned by the brutal honesty of the story as well as how the director/playwright discussed the issue with clarity and warmth through words and lens. I have thus been yearning to watch more films by the British director Ken Loach and learn how he approaches other social issues with his film language. A few weeks earlier, I watched one of his later works, Sorry We Missed You after getting through my finals, and felt like I have (hopefully) put together organized ideas to elaborate on my afterthoughts.
I, Daniel Blake
I, Daniel Blake, awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and a BAFTA for Outstanding British Film in 2017, centers on a middle-aged joiner, Daniel Blake, who struggles in the British social welfare system owing to the inflexible eligibility criteria of certain allowances. Suffering from a heart disease and having had a heart attack at work, he is deemed incapable of working by his doctor and thus cannot return to his workplace and earn an income. However, according to the standards of the Work Capability Assessment, he is considered fit for work and consequently denied the Employment and Support Allowance. He wills to apply for an appeal, but finds it fairly difficult as he is not “computer literate” and all the applications can solely be done online. While waiting for the result of the appeal, he attempts to apply for the Jobseeker Allowance, as it’s allegedly the only aid a man of working capability is entitled. He has to attend job-seeking workshops, completes resumes his previous career has never required, and when a job opportunity is actually offered, turn it down apologetically because he has never been capable of taking the job since the very beginning.
Humans as Working Units
Through the hardships Blake is faced with and his interactions with people when trying to seek help, the absurdity of the social welfare system and how it constantly fails to truly help those in urgent needs are made abundantly clear. It’s cruelly evident that the system does not believe in, or even shows minimum respect to those it’s supposed to be serving. Since he loses his income, Blake spends the majority of his time trying to “prove that he is worthy of help”. That is, going through assessments and trying to express that he really isn’t capable of working, in order to be qualified for the Employment and Support Allowance; and when that fails, it becomes trying to gather evidence that he is “diligently searching for a job” so that he could apply for the Jobseeker’s Allowance. From the norms of the allowances, the core concept behind the welfare system can be very easily perceived––all men are expected to work, to contribute to the economy, unless he/she has not the capability to do so. If one is unable to work, he/she must go through assessments to verify that; if one is deemed capable of working by the standards, the only option left to receive an aid is to prove that he/she has been trying hard to seek a job. One has to provide plentiful evidence that he/she is without an income because of reasons out of his/her hands; otherwise, asking for money from the welfare system, and equivalently from the tax payers, is almost implicitly seen as an act of theft or robbery, and thus is discriminated against and viewed with doubt.
Throughout the film, the director ceaselessly emphasizes that Daniel Blake could be defined by neither “a man incapable of work” nor “an unsuccessful jobseeker”. He is a benevolent and generous man. He does not hesitate to help when anyone in his community is in need. He paid taxes dutifully until he became unable to. With a welfare system designed largely based on the aforementioned concept, we could so easily miss––lose––people like him, because men could be in need of help owing to a variety of reasons other than being unable to work or find a job. Even if not having a job is the sole reason a man could/should be in need of allowances, the design of the assessments and the eligibility criteria are ridiculously inflexible. Blake is asked questions such as, could you walk 50 meters without the help of others? Could you raise your hands, as to put things into your top pocket? While having a potentially fatal heart disease, he is deemed fit for work because his answers to the questions are yes. Not grasping the full picture of the people it’s supposed to serve, the entire welfare system becomes an incredibly fragile and broken safety net through which anyone faced with slight misfortunes can lightly fall.
Endless Waiting Lines
Blake encounters a single mother of two children, Katie, on occasion one time at the welfare bureau. Allocated housing in Newcastle after waiting in a shelter in London for two full years, Katie and her children move 300 miles to a place in which they have no relatives and where job opportunities are significantly more scarce. On their first day in Newcastle, Katie is late for an appointment with the welfare bureau after catching a bus going the opposite direction. Despite her effort to explain her reasons, her appointment is cancelled, her benefits are frozen, and she would have to survive with 12 bucks until she receives a letter from the decision maker for another appointment. Blake helps Katie with fixing the pipes, setting lighting and heating without electricity, and secretly leaves money for the family to pay the electricity bill. Through their common hardships and struggles, Blake befriends and connects with the family in no time.
As a supporting character of the film, Katie brings out problems in the welfare system aside from the biased concept and definitions of working capability. As a single mother, she seemingly meets the qualifications of subsidies and aids more easily, but that by no means leads to less crises and distress. Constantly waiting for help can sometimes be just as harmful as not getting help at all. Katie first gets kicked out by her former landlord in London after complaining about the leak coming through the ceiling, making her son sick. In a populated city in desperate need of more housing, the landlord could easily find tenants who won’t complain and might even pay higher rent. Unable to find another flat with affordable rent, Katie and her children have to live in a cramped room in a shelter until she is assigned a housing. They wait for two years, and while the waiting time might not even be put into consideration and the mission is completed whatsoever in the eyes of the welfare bureau, the two years have had impact on the family. Katie’s son has already developed concentrating problems in the inadequate living environment. Her daughter has befriended classmates in school she does not want to leave. The waiting time has left traces in their lives, the children’s growth, and their education.
Through Katie’s struggles in everyday life as a mother of two, the audience can observe that the waiting time not only leaves underlying impact on people, but also leads to actual emergencies and financial crises. While waiting to receive her benefits again, the weighty burden of raising two children continues to fall on Katie’s shoulders. Not able to seek a job instantly, she has to starve herself to feed her kids. The perhaps most silently powerful scene of the film is thereby created––after waiting in line to enter a food bank, Katie gets overwhelmed with hunger, grabs a can and starts gulping food down mindlessly, and when a personnel of the food bank spots her, she mentally collapses under accumulating, unbearable pressure. The scene serves as an incredibly provoking wake-up call. It showcases how rigid bureaucracy is not just a concept or phenomenon; it has such potential to ignore people’s needs, leave them with no options of survival, and eventually dehumanize them.
In the end of the film, upon seeing the lawyer, judge, and doctor who are about to determine his fate, Blake suffers from a heart attack and dies. He and Katie are merely among the many people that are waiting for a hand, giving it all to survive another day, and trying to navigate the chaos of the welfare system. Daniel Blake couldn’t wait. There are simply too many humans alike that cannot wait.
Sorry We Missed You
Ken Loach’s latter work in 2019, Sorry We Missed You, focuses on an economically challenged family following the Great Recession. Tired of renting and moving, the father, Ricky, decides to run a franchise as a delivery driver hoping for a higher income. The mother, Abbie, works as a home care nurse, and continually battles her demanding schedule for time to spend with her young daughter, Liza. Despite their collective effort on improving the family’s financial status, the parents’ struggles spiral upwards as their elder son, Seb, frequently gets into trouble with graffiti and skips school. Having been on their beam-ends since Ricky lost his position at a construction business following the financial crisis, the family’s everyday life is a series of bargains and compromises––for instance, selling their car for a delivery truck in hopes of making more money. As the plot moves on and the family continues to fail on bypassing their unrest, they start to realize the concessions they make are too great to bear, too absurd to be ever accepted, and never seem to reach an end.
Unjustified Regulations on Punctuality
In addition to money, time is another resource of scarcity that the family is constantly trying to seize throughout the film. Without valid profession training, the parents are utterly unable to seek jobs with reasonable working hours. During Ricky’s job interview with his supervisor-to-be, Maloney, the employer delivered an entirely bizarre speech explaining the working regulations. The company replaces employment contracts with delivery standards so that the employee’s rights and benefits are not included; uses the term “fees” to evade their obligations to pay minimum wages; surrounds the entire workplace with hypocritical phrases such as working “with” instead of “for” us, “performing services” instead of the more straightforward “driving for us”, etc., in an attempt to cover up their exploitative behaviors. These unreasonable regulations not only take advantage of the delivery drivers, but also leave them with no means to make accusations. They wouldn’t be able to claim paid sick leaves, as it’s stated clearly in the delivery standards that the drivers take the responsibility for finding a substitute driver. They couldn’t resist their low income, as they are paid per delivery instead of per hour, and therefore minimum hourly wages don’t apply. As the breadwinner of his family, Ricky has no choice but to invest more of his time into his work, find faster routes, drive & run as quickly as possible, and even sacrifice his time to use the washroom. The penalty of a delayed delivery is simply unaffordable.
Working as a home care nurse, Abbie is on a zero-hour contract and is also constantly dealing with the scarcity of time. After Ricky sells their car to purchase a delivery truck, Abbie has to use public transportation to visit her patients, which upsets her as the time she could spend on each patient decreases. The public transportation fees are not included in her wages, but she is nevertheless obligated to be on time. Her patients are mostly with disabilities and illnesses, ranging from dementia to immobility. They live alone, and lack the capability to complete daily tasks without the help of a carer. As much as seeing her patient weak and lonely puts her in dismay, her demanding schedule leaves her with no other options. As a mother, Abbie’s inability to highly participate in her children’s lives also greatly disappoints her. Liza loses sleep when her mother works until midnight; Seb becomes more withdrawn day by day as he could not see a steady future to which he could aspire. Naturally loving and soft-hearted, Abbie suffers even more with insufficient time to spend with her patients and children. Though she’s not required to, Abbie couldn’t turn her patient down when one of them calls because she couldn’t move herself to the toilet, and decides to leave her family dinner. Similar struggles repeat on a frequent basis.
If I, Daniel Blake intends to tell a story about difficulties in seeking a job and how those who are incapable of working struggle in the welfare system, Sorry We Missed You focuses on what actually happens in the workplaces of those so called “unskilled jobs”. Apparently, Ricky and Abbie are not seen and respected as humans in their respective workplaces. Ricky’s entire value and work performance depends on a barcode scanner that records the time it takes for him to deliver a package; Abbie is required to help her “clients” in each aspect of everyday living, but simultaneously not expected to have sincere emotions towards those she takes care of. They are required to be perpetually punctual by a system that strictly monitor their work performances, but deliberately neglect their humanly needs.
What Would You Like Us to Do?
“Sorry we missed you” is the heading of the note a delivery driver leaves for the recipient whenever the delivery is missed. I had no idea these notes existed beforehand, so I searched it up on Google and discovered that the idea might come from the transport company, FedEx. However, it was the following question on those door tags that caught my attention. It reads “what would you like us to do?”, and gives a few options the recipient can track his/her package and receive it. It seems to me that the question ironically embodies the multiple options customers can choose from, and inversely the lack of alternatives workers serving the payers have. As the buyer, the recipients of those packages are served by a system that always prioritize the users’ experience, and issues resulting from their irresponsibility would always be efficiently resolved––at the cost of numerous delivery drivers, working day and night to feed their family, and rushing to deliver packages on time in fear of unaffordable penalties. In other words, the utmost convenience customers enjoy is largely based on the life of endless labour that people like Ricky and Abbie suffer from.
Notwithstanding Ricky’s dedication to meet the delivery standards and save money, it appears that whenever the family overcomes a major obstacle, they fall even deeper into another pitfall. On a regular workday, Ricky gets robbed and brutally attacked by a group of gangsters. While waiting impatiently at the hospital for his x-ray results, Ricky receives a phone call from Maloney, asking him to compensate for the barcode scanner. Furious and triggered, Abbie grabs the phone and swears to the manager who has shamelessly exploited her husband in every way possible, and could be senseless enough to ask for a compensation when his coworker’s just had his ribs broken. She then bursts into tears, murmuring “I’m a carer, I don’t swear”–––which to me is such a powerful parallel scene with the food bank scene in I, Daniel Blake, as they both narrate in a concise and affecting manner how flawed systems dehumanize and overwhelm people clinging on them to survive.
“What would you like us to do?” seems to also be the question the entire family constantly asks and never receive an answer. How could Ricky sustain the lifestyle of overworking? How could Abbie squeeze time for her children, and not be too attached to her patients? How could Seb finds motivation to pursue higher education, when peers from similar backgrounds simply live a life of endlessly paying student loans? How could Liza enjoy the family time and parental care she deserves as a child? As the film indicates, the list of insoluble problems can go on and on.
Afterwords
Ken Loach’s way of approaching and telling a story moves me like no other because though films discussing social issues are not rare, his films not only convey searing reality, but also show the audience how close we are to that reality, and how we all have a hand in weaving the collective future of our society. He portrays the diligent, selfless, loving, and caring traits his characters have in detail, and shows how any citizen in a rigid welfare system or a rigorous labour market could be failed if faced with a few misfortunes. We don’t exactly empathize with Daniel Blake, Katie, or Ricky’s family; we see thoroughly how we can all easily become one of them.
Another feature I also adore in Ken Loach’s films is how he keeps his films complete stories while revealing highly research-based truths. One might think I have already included the entire plot of the films in this lengthy article, but there’s genuinely so much more to see and discuss, and I feel like every critic I read focuses on different aspects of the story. During the past few months, I have become more interested in books compared to films because I felt that 2 hours of screen time might just not be enough for an insightful and inspiring message. These two films proved me absolutely wrong. The naturalism in the actors’ performance draws us closer to these issues happening at the moment, and urges us to ponder over probable solutions and what our positions are in those urgent matters. I would recommend the two films 10/10; informative yet artistic works like these are not to be missed.
