Leroy* is shouting down at me from his third floor flat. The front door has a buzzer, but gives no indication of which floor his flat is on, so I opt for the stairs and begin searching from the first floor.

It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m spending a day with Leroy to better understand what it’s like to be looking for work in Birmingham. His flat is tidy and sparsely furnished with bright red carpets, which he bought using an interest-free Community Crisis Loan from Jobcentre Plus. Repayments are now being deducted from his Jobseekers Allowance of £65.45 a week. His TV is on and tuned to BBC news. From his window you look out onto empty playing fields.

Leroy is 43 and has been living in this flat for two months. He’s a refugee from Sierra Leone who arrived in 2002; his application for asylum was granted and he has leave to remain. “They give me a house, they give me food, status. The problem now is a job. Everyday I’m looking for a job. Everyday I’m leaving the house at half past nine.” Apart from today where I’m holding him up by arriving at 10.

We take the bus to the Job Centre in Handsworth. It’s about an hour from his home and requires a change of bus in the central city, but it’s the Job Centre where he signed on and is familiar with. It is also close to an agency where he has to drop off an application for a care job. In Sierra Leone Leroy worked for the Ministry of Development and Economic Planning. The care jobs he looks at in the Job Centre pay about £6 an hour.

Leroy’s desire to work in the care industry is driven by practicality: he believes 70 per cent of the jobs available in Birmingham are in care. Later today he has a job interview with another agency. He’s pleased with how the interview goes. They would like him to pay a £40 deposit so they can do a CRB check. He doesn’t want to give them the money now as it means he won’t be able to buy food, but plans to come back and give them the money next week.

When Leroy gets a job he hopes he’ll be able to bring over his two sons, aged 9 and 12, who are still in Sierra Leone. Leroy is alone here. He knows no-one in his neighbourhood and few people in Birmingham. His friends – also refugees from West Africa – live in Coventry, Manchester, Leeds, Stoke-on-Trent, or London and he catches buses to go and see them when he can. He likes Coventry the most because it’s quiet; it’s where he stayed when he first came to England.

This social isolation is what Leroy shares with many of the other men who have been involved in this project. Many are living in hostels, bedsits, or single bedroom council flats. They don’t have wives or girlfriends and have few friends. Some have family living in the city, but often not close by. As the project continues one of the things I’ll be looking for is how this social isolation (or on the flip side strong social capital) impacts on peoples lives, prospects and experiences of worklessness.

The ethnographies for our project are now well underway. We’ll be spending the rest of the summer finishing the ethnographies and doing one-to-one interviews with people to test our findings. You can follow our work in progress on Twitter or look out for another blog in July.



*Names have been changed.