Unemployment and mental health: Evidence of effect heterogeneity by social class in the UK.

The causal effect of unemployment on mental health is well-documented, yet a given job loss episode likely does not harm everyone uniformly. Who is hurt, and how deeply, is contingent on an individual's position in the stratification structure, a dimension that has received little attention compared to gender and age. Drawing on Fundamental Cause Theory, we argue that social class shapes both exposure and vulnerability to unemployment and hypothesise a social gradient whereby the salariat is buffered against the mental health penalties of job loss relative to intermediate and working-class positions. We test this using UKHLS data (2009-2019) employing two mental health outcomes (MCS-12 and GHQ-12) and the ESEC social class scheme. Using a fixed effects individual slopes (FEIS) estimator, we retain all forms of unemployment rather than only exogenous forms to capture heterogeneity across the class structure. A consistent gradient emerged: (semi) routine workers and small employers & own account workers faced the strongest mental health penalties, whilst the salariat reported the lowest. This persisted after controlling for household income, pointing to non-monetary, psychosocial mechanisms. Job loss, as a critical life-course event, cannot be meaningfully abstracted from the unequal resources individuals are endowed with. In doing so, we bring a social class-analytic lens to a common causal question.