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The promoters of welfare-to-work programmes sometimes state that these are based on the will to ‘better realise’ the right to work of their recipients. This chapter questions this assumption and examines whether and under which conditions, those programmes could eventually find their foundation on the fundamental right to work proclaimed in international human rights texts. It demonstrates from an analysis of the international pacts, their preparatory texts and the case law that welfare-to-work measures can only be considered as aimed at realising the right to work if they are likely to improve the chances of their recipients to later find a freely chosen, paid and productive job in the labour market. It shows that this open and abstract condition excludes a large part of welfare-to-work measures from a human rights-based justification for the type of work they value or the way they are implemented.

Welfare-to-work programmes imply a legal duty to perform work, often accompanied by sanctions which can be questioned from the angle of human rights and the freedom of work. The chapter examines the conformity of those programmes with the prohibition of forced labour and the right to freely chosen work proclaimed in international human rights instruments. It shows that the mandatory character of those programmes does not violate per se the prohibition of forced labour, neither the right to freely chosen work. However, those fundamental rights set limits and frames the development of welfare to work measures. Through a rigorous analysis of the emerging international case law, the chapter identifies six criteria for assessing the conformity of welfare-to-work programmes with those rights.

This chapter uses the six legal safeguards, identified in chapter 4, that concretise the proportionality test under the prohibition of forced labour and the right to freely chosen work to evaluate the national social assistance legislation in Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. The analysis shows that none of the national legislation complies with all six safeguards. The Dutch legislation stands out for its lack of legal regulation with respect to the duty to participate in work programmes. In addition, a comparison between the Danish and the British WTW law shows that, while the Danish legal provisions aim at a collaboration between the recipient of social assistance benefits and the authorities, the British provisions reflect the aim of the national authorities to control the recipient.

In the last decades, rights to social assistance benefits have become more conditional. Governments in Europe, as in other welfare states, have sought to ‘activate’ their unemployed citizens by requiring them to participate in mandatory work programmes. This chapter examines how liberal and communitarian thinkers have justified or rejected welfare-to-work (WTW) policies within social assistance systems and how these policies have been legitimised by key notions of inclusion, responsibilisation, employability and empowerment, which correspond with liberal and communitarian justifications of WTW. Drawing on critical socio-legal literature, the authors question these justifications and clarify their decision to explore WTW from a threefold normative perspective that takes into account: 1) power relations and human social rights (the legal perspective); 2) lived experiences within WTW relationships, including endemic power asymmetries and perceptions of justice (the sociological perspective); and 3) the republican theory of non-domination (the philosophical perspective). The last part of this chapter introduces the chapters of this book.

In Switzerland, the participation in certain work programmes is an eligibility criterion to social assistance benefits and the constitutionally granted right to the financial means required for a decent standard of living. This chapter examines whether the implementation of these programmes is in accordance with fundamental rights and more precisely, whether they respect the normative framework elaborated in Chapter 4. As will be shown, the right to financial assistance when in need has close links to human dignity. Therefore, the evaluation of the mentioned work programmes against the human rights background leads to some critical conclusions on their compatibility with international human rights law in general and human dignity in particular. Especially, the authors argue that the Swiss Federal Supreme Court’s case law lacks a comprehensive approach for the evaluation of human rights infringements in this context.

This chapter seeks to evaluate welfare-to-work policies in Switzerland through the lens of the theory of non-domination, using the theoretical tools developed by the capability approach and the French economy of conventions. Particular attention is paid to the normativity that is conveyed at each of the three stages of the policy-making process: its design by policy-makers and high civil servants, its implementation by street-level bureaucrats, and its reception by users and beneficiaries. The economy of conventions allows for a discussion of the multiple senses of justice that are embedded in the policy instruments going down the line of implementation, and the capability approach is fruitfully mobilised in assessing the various vectors of constraint and domination that may be imposed on each actor of the policy cycle. Domination is thus conceived as emerging from considerations of desert that are imposed on street-level bureaucrats and welfare recipients. Combining qualitative research and theoretical insights, this chapter suggests that allowing a greater margin for manoeuver to street-level bureaucrats may empower recipients by facilitating the convergence of interests and thus minimising the domination that a bureaucratic apparatus frequently entails.

This chapter shows the differences between local welfare-to-work programmes in the Netherlands in terms of the ways in which social assistance recipients are directed towards paid labour: through pressing, repressing and accommodating modes of governing. Based on 13-month ethnographic research in three Dutch social assistance offices, this chapter argues, first, that the observed local differences result from decentralisation of policy design and implementation as well as increased discretionary power for case managers. Second, that the different local practices can be understood as varieties of neoliberal paternalism legitimised through various forms of stigmatisation of social assistance recipients that leave little room for them to revolt against disfunctioning policy and wrongful treatment. Third, by means of using the republican theory of non-domination, this chapter argues that the observed local differences (between as well as within municipalities) and limited room for social assistance recipients to voice their concerns indicate that Dutch welfare-to-work policies work partly in arbitrary ways and are insufficiently democratically controlled.

This chapter draws together the book’s main conclusions by connecting the findings of its various chapters. It first analyses the relationship between the human rights perspective presented in the book’s legal section and the republican theory of non-domination. Subsequently, it assesses the cross-national variations found in the legal and sociological chapters. Based on this analysis, it proposes institutional, organisational and legal improvements to WTW policies that seek to minimise relations of domination.

With clear links to this collection's exploration of the possible emergence of a 'new behaviourism', this chapter considers the Coalition's welfareto-work strategy and explores the valorisation of work in which much of the policy agenda and related discourse is rooted. Welfare-to-work measures encompass a wide range of policies intended to encourage, enable and even compel benefit claimants to seek paid employment. In most recent years, welfareto-work policies have centred on efforts to ensure that claimants are taking all reasonable steps to return to work, with a notable increase in the use of both incentives and sanctions to promote working behaviour. Indeed, activation measures which utilise welfare conditionality (attaching behavioural conditions to benefit receipt) have been employed with increasing vigour in the UK since Thatcher's social security reforms in the mid 1980s, and are today in evidence across the OECD region.

This chapter reports on the interviewees undertaken with employers and practitioners who worked for ‘welfare to work’ agencies in Middlesbrough. The findings have a particular focus on what employers and agencies reported to be the key barriers to the unemployed getting jobs. Most commonly explanations rested on the personal attributes and attitudes of the unemployed rather than the availability of suitable work. This focus on supposed ‘supply-side’ deficits in the unemployed available workforce reflects the dominant approach to tackling worklessness in national policies. A very significant finding highlighted in this chapter is that formal qualifications and skills were notably missing from the list of personal attributes required and considered of little importance in practice by employers and agencies, working at the lower end of the labour market. The chapter illustrates how workers themselves have little power in this labour market – sent by agencies, hired or not by employers, only to return to welfare to work agencies as jobs finish or do not start. The chapter concludes by comparing, briefly, the ‘barriers to jobs’ as perceived by welfare to work agencies and as experienced by those caught up in the low-pay, no-pay cycle.

This chapter critically investigates the welfare-to-work ‘ethics’ in the UK in the context of the Big Society, using the example of the Pathways Ltd case study to show how FBOs work with government policy to suppress regimes tackling social justices in European cities.

The book concludes with a discussion of the implications of the reforms to welfare services that have occurred over the last decade and a half, and the effects these have had on frontline work in Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK. It provides a summary overview of the many policy changes that have occurred in the three nations in regard to employment services, and uses a comparison to draw conclusions about the degree of convergence between them. It also draws some broader conclusions about the core idea of governance change and the new administrative science, providing insights into institutional and policy design and how these play out in different national contexts.