Affects of austerity in the third sector

While political claims suggest the era of cuts has ended, austerity continues to shape the emotional and material realities of third-sector workers in Scotland. Within shifting state-market relations, the third sector relies on competitive funding structures which produce chronic precarity, administrative overload, and pressures to demonstrate short-term outcomes; truncating capacity for meaningful long-term work which seeks to mitigate the socioeconomic damage caused by decades of neglect. Third-sector workers are professionally vulnerable to the affects of austerity due to these market conditions of insecurity and temporary contracts, and can also be personally vulnerable due to their embeddedness in the same communities they support. These lived experiences have produced feelings of guilt, failure and burnout, and anxieties around anticipatory illness. Austerity operates not only through material deprivation but also through emotional governance, narrowing workers’ sense of futurity and possibility.