Activating The Unemployed

The last decade has witnessed a conspicuous alteration in policies protecting unemployed people in modern welfare states. Social policies are increasingly designed to encourage economic independence. Policy makers have introduced a wide range of reforms linking disability, unemployment, and welfare programs cash benefits to work-oriented measures.Welfare policies are being framed by a new emphasis on recipients' obligations, emphasizing that the receipt of benefits creates a responsibility to take action towards becoming self-reliant. The objective is to minimize the duration of dependence or improve the well-being of family or community. Activating the Unemployed addresses this growing interest in work-oriented measures. This represents a shift in the dominant discourse on social welfare from focus on the citizen's rights to social benefits to emphasis on their responsibilities to work and lead an active life. In this volume, a distinguished array of international contributors provide cross-cultural perspectives to analyze recent diverse policy initiatives to activate the unemployed in nine countries-Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each provides a systematic account of the background, design, implementation, and results of employment-oriented measures. Collectively they permit comparison of organized responses to common problems in the areas of public assistance (welfare), unemployment, and disability, among others. Further chapters seek to broaden perspectives on policy options, the issues raised, and lessons learned in the course of activating the unemployed. This thorough and insightful account addresses significant contemporary issues and concerns about welfare, social security, and unemployment. It will aid policy makers, professionals, and scholars in assessing current trends in welfare in various countries throughout the world.

This volume provides an up-to-date overview of activation strategies in unemployment benefit systems and social assistance in selected European countries and the United States. A particular focus lies on the development of activation schemes, governance and implementation as well as on the outcomes of activation in terms of labor market and social integration. The volume is the first to address these issues both from a socio-economic and a legal perspective.

Welfare-to-work or activation policies refer to programmes aimed at promoting the employability, labour-market and social participation of benefit recipients of working age. Frontline workers delivering these policies are conceived of as policy implementers, as policy makers, and as actors mediating politics in an arena where conflicting interests are at stake. Frontline work plays a crucial role in determining what welfare-to-work practically means and how it affects the lives of the people it targets. Yet few books have deliberatively focused on comparing what happens when frontline workers, some of whom are professional social workers, meet clients. Pioneering the provision of scholarly reflections on both theoretical and policy relevance of studying frontline practices of delivering activation, internationally renowned researchers present the first comparative analysis of how activation policies are actually delivered by frontline staff in selected EU countries and in the United States. In trying to understand and interpret frontline practices in activation, each contribution provides insights into what ‘activation in practice’ looks like, what services are provided and how they are enacted. This involves examining processes of client selection, monitoring, sanctioning and motivating, as well as the role of external service providers. This book is an important acquisition for scholars and researchers of social policy, public administration, public management, social work and policy implementation.

This report on Bulgaria is the eighth country study published in a series of reports looking into how policies connect people with jobs. It provides a detailed analysis of Bulgaria’s inactive and unemployed population and identifies groups of people who would benefit from measures and services provided by Bulgaria’s Public Employment Service.

Since the 1990s and the 2000s, Western social protection systems have experienced a turn towards activation. This turn consists of the multiplication of measures aimed at bringing those who are unemployed closer to participation in the labour market. These measures often induce a strengthening of the conditions that must be met in order to receive social benefits. <BR> It is in this well known context that the authors gathered in this book decided to take a closer look at the relationship between activation policies for the unemployed and the right and the duty to work. If activation measures are likely to increase transitions towards the labour market, we can also make the assumption that they may, particularly when they are marked with the seal of coercion, hinder or dramatically reduce the right to freely chosen work. In such circumstances, the realisation of the -right to work-, which is often stated to be the aim of those who promote activation, tends in practice to be reduced to an increasing pressure being exerted on the unemployed. In this case, isn't it actually the duty to work that is particularly reinforced? <BR> After an historical and philosophical perspective on the issue, this assumption is confronted with the developments observed in the United States and in France, and then with the guidelines laid down in international human rights instruments. What follows is a discussion of two alternatives to the dominant activation model: the basic income guarantee and the employment guarantee."

Activation policies which promote and enforce labour market participation continue to proliferate in Europe and constitute the reform blueprint from centre-left to centre-right, as well as for most international organizations. Through an in-depth study of four major reforms in Denmark and France, this book maps how co-existing ideas are mobilised to justify, criticise and reach activation compromises and how their morality sediment into the instruments governing the unemployed. By rethinking the role of ideas and morality in policy changes, this book illustrates how the moral economy of activation leads to a permanent behaviourist testing of the unemployed in public debate as well as in local jobcentres.

This book explores welfare politics, unemployment, and interventions in relation to the labour market from a critical psychological perspective. Using critical fieldwork and theory, the author explores the administration of the unemployed, and the drive to increase labour market participation through strategies of activation. There is a strong and coherent conceptual and theoretical framing for this work, with a critical perspective (essentially, question everything) taking centre stage. It will give an overall coherence in addressing the topic. The theoretical framing is cogent and, in combination with the critical perspective, works well for integrating the material and delivering a fresh approach to this topic. Psychology, Punitive Activation and Welfare will appeal to students engaging with critical psychology, unemployment or policy, by providing a distinct application of theoretical and methodological tools to think differently about the relationship between labour market non/participation, human misery, psychology, and frontline enactment of policy and research.

This book investigates the potential of the Spanish Sociedades Laborales (SLs) as an instrument of active labour market policy for re-turning the unemployed to the labour market and also the transferability of the scheme to other EU Member States. Spanish Sociedades Laborales (SLs) – mostly small and micro enterprises – are a qualified form of conventional corporation, majority-owned by their permanent employees. Unemployed persons can capitalise their unemployment benefits as a lump sum to start a new SL or to recapitalise an existing SL by joining it. This makes SLs similar to start-up subsidies for the unemployed, an established instrument of active labour market policy across the EU. The new 2015 Law on Worker-Owned and Participatory Companies substantially modernised the concept of SLs 30 years after its inception. The book tackles two currently widely discussed policy issues at both the EU level as well as the national level, i.e., reactivating unemployed in the context of ALMP and encouraging employee co-ownership in the context of the economic reform agenda in particular with regard to corporate governance, regional economic stimuli and distributive justice.