Trapped into Reverse Asymmetry: Public Employment Services Dealing with Employers

Abstract

Although often neglected, the availability of employment opportunities is central to the effectiveness of active labour market policies. Employers play a crucial role in this policy field as they are both clients and co-producers of public employment services (PES). This study focuses on that relationship and reports qualitative research conducted in Tuscany (central Italy) from a street-level perspective. The findings show how public job-brokers manage this asymmetrical relationship and develop specific strategies to obtain employers’ cooperation and accomplish the PES mandate. The strategies identified here involve language adaptation, curricula “creaming”, and control of the bureaucratic procedure. These are shaped through a variable mix of four components that will be defined as relational, perceptive, technical, and tactical. This study contributes to the debate on activation policies, analysing in detail how PES frontline workers interact with employers, dealing with market logic in the public encounter.

A strategy is necessary. The policy–client conflict within different relational asymmetries: a comparison at the street-level

“…As a result, SLBs bend or break rules to accommodate regulations and client requests or needs (May and Winter, 2012). Examples of "adaptation" are turning a blind eye (Raaphorst and Loyens, 2020), finding alternative solutions to procedure-following strategies (Cohen et al, 2016;Ingold, 2018;Raspanti and Saruis, 2021) and negative consequences of alleviating procedures for clients (Dubois, 2010). SLBs tend to resolve the policy-client conflict by choosing the best solution to reduce the client discontent (Tummers et al, 2015).…”

“…In such services, like co-production arrangements (Aschhoff and Vogel, 2018), where cooperation and the client's willingness to work together play a fundamental part in service implementation (Senghaas et al, 2019), negotiation appears to be a viable strategy to conflict resolution, e.g. in conciliation justice (Raaphorst and Loyens, 2020;Tuurnas et al, 2016) or employer-oriented services (Aksnes, 2019;Raspanti and Saruis, 2021). However, negotiation may also emerge in less rule-governed services, where SLBs are vested with discretion by the rules (Mik-Meyers and Silverman, 2019).…”

“…The relationship between job brokers and employers has the characteristics of a reverse asymmetrical relationship (Raspanti and Saruis, 2021). On the one hand, employers rely voluntarily on the PES because of the availability of alternative ways to recruit the workers they need (Raspanti, 2019).…”

“…An SLB experiences action uncertainties regarding the ability to steer client interaction (Raaphorst, 2018). Solutions to reduce uncertainty and regain control over the relationship must be found in the SLB's negotiation and communication skills (Bartels, 2014;Raspanti and Saruis, 2021). SLBs base their decisions on how to service clients by collecting information (Lipsky, 2010(Lipsky, (1980), forming perceptions on client deservingness of support (Davidovitz and Cohen, 2020;Jilke and Tummers, 2018) and categorising clients according to their trustworthiness (Raaphorst and Groeneveld, 2018) during talks with clients.…”

Accountability in personalised Supported Employment-based activation services

“…First, we wish to add to existing knowledge on how accountability mechanisms impact personalised service provision by exploring public-led innovative activation work that often requires challenging and immersive work by frontline workers. Second, we wish to extend the debate on accountability and frontline activation work by highlighting variations in strategies that frontline workers adopt when faced with accountability requirements beyond coping strategies such as parking, (a practice where workers decide to focus on a proportion of their clients), creaming (selecting clients with performance targets that are easy to realise), rule bending, and rule breaking (Tummers et al, 2015;Van Berkel Knies, 2016;Freier and Senghaas, 2021;Gjersøe and Strand, 2021;Raspanti and Saruis, 2021). Our approach is to combine Dubnick's (2005) concept of account-giving behaviour through reporting, mitigating, and reframing and Brodkin's (2008) approach to street level accountability that considers how lower-level bureaucrats respond to street level conditions.…”