European perspectives on welfare reform: A tale of two vicious circles?

Abstract

This paper discusses the effects of 'welfare to work' and 'making work pay' policies such as tax credits on job quality in the wider labour market. It examines the consequences of two policy approaches to the problem of work incentives for the unemployed. One approach is greater conditionality of bene ts systems, of which the extreme case is workfare; the other is transfers to supplement low wages. It is argued that both approaches, individually or in combination, threaten to set up vicious circles, creating yet more of the problems they attempt to solve. Through qualitative interview material from Britain, France, Germany and Belgium, from a recent international project supported by the EU, 1 the paper illustrates how the responses of the unemployed to the four countries' bene ts systems and insertion programmes structure the effects of these policies on the labour market.

Workfare Revisited

“…Could this 'vicious circle' 45 be mitigated if courts would assess benefit conditionality in general, and workfare programmes in particular, against the right to 'free choice of employment', a component of the right to work? 46 Notwithstanding the unsuccessful challenge that relied on Article 4 ECHR, this argument may be worth pursuing, according to the ILO's Committee of Experts on the Application of Convention and Recommendations (CEACR) and the European Committee on Social Rights (ECSR).…”

One-way Europe? Institutional guidelines, emerging regimes of justification, and paradoxical turns in European welfare capitalism

“…Very schematically, activation can be identified through a set of measures aimed at formalizing a specific link (more or less strict, depending on the different interpretations we find of this principle) between social protection and labour market participation. 3 According to that principle, social policies are deeply restructured (Barbier, 2002: 308): a systematic preference is given to the engagement of welfare recipients on the labour market (independent of the quality of the job and of its real effect in terms of empowerment), according to the slogan 'work-first'; the eligibility for welfare measures is conditioned and subjected to (different degrees of) sanction (Gray, 2002).…”

Workfare als Mindestsicherung

“…Anhand des Speenhamland-Systems wurde von unterschiedlichen Akteuren Kritik an staatlicher Fürsorgepolitik formuliert (Block/Somers 2003: 292). Die Argumentationsfiguren dieser Kritik werden bis heute herangezogen, wenn Mindestsicherungssysteme diskutiert und diskreditiert werden (Gray 2002;Somers/Block 2005). Diese Grundmuster können nach unterschiedlichen Lesarten unterschieden werden: In der ökonomischen Lesart werden rationale Wahlhandlungen Einkommen und Freizeit maximierender Individuen herausgestellt und Kommodifizierung.…”