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The 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith was decided against the defendants, but when analyzed using casuistry it is found to be an easy case for upholding their free exercise right. The state lacked specific expert testimony and hard data against the use of sacramental peyote, while the evidence produced by the Native American Church's experts showed that the Native American Church was successful in fulfilling the paradigmatic goals of the War on Drugs (no addiction, productive lives, etc.) and that the nonaddictive sacramental peyote lacked the same social harms endemic to addictive drugs (illegal market traffic, gangs, etc.). The Court, however, ignored the particulars of the case and fixated solely on the illegality of the ingestion of peyote. Accordingly, the particulars are explored in great detail, placing the facts in their larger, societal contexts and highlighting the Court's conclusive presumption and radical deference to the state and total disregard of the facts and other particulars both of the defendants’ unemployment compensation context and of the Native American Church and its practices.

This chapter describes the basic principles that support the new approach to activation in Germany. The discussion examines the individualised measures and services that form a relevant part of the philosophy of a ‘new social contract’. The chapter begins with an overview of the characteristics and structure of unemployment compensation and active labour market policy. This is followed by an outline of the initial steps taken by the Red-Green government, and a discussion of the ‘Hartz reforms’. The chapter ends with a look at the meaning of individualisation in the German approach to activation.

On the Last day there would be a potluck and a drawing for some free appliances and $100 in cash. It was clear, though, that those still around in September 2004 could hardly wait for this drawn-out shuttering finally to be over. Crews were taking down the lighting, removing tables and cabinets, and gathering screws and air gun bits to toss in the garbage. “I don’t know if they are going to start with fresh tools down there in Reynosa or what the deal is,” Tracy Warner said. The crews also asked workers to remove photographs and newspaper clippings from their workstations. “They are dismantling it all around us, like they can’t wait for us to get out of there.” The lawn outside, usually covered in pop cans, plastic wrappers, and cigarette butts, was cleaned up and sprayed green by Chem Lawn. Management was trying to sell the old place. Warner’s imminent layoff was part of a sea-change in Illinois in the first years of the new millennium. The pace of the hollowing out of manufacturing in the fourth-largest manufacturing state in the country had been unprecedented. From June 2000 to November 2003, Illinois lost more than 100 manufacturing jobs a day, or one out of every six. Gone were over 150,000 jobs in a state of 12,500,000. In Rockford, the machine-tool industry wilted, and unemployment spiked at over 11 percent. In Harvard, located near the Wisconsin border, Motorola closed its cellphone plant. Developers wanted to turn the site into the world’s largest indoor water park. In Peoria, Decatur, and Kankakee, laid-off workers applied for jobs at Walmarts and Home Depots that would pay them maybe half their former wage. In suburban Chicago, Winzeler Gear went from making 2 million gears a month with fifty-five workers to making 16 million a month with thirty-five employees. A robot the size of a minivan increased the factory’s output while also eliminating human labor. Even with the productivity boost, the owner doubted the company would be able to stay competitive.

Annette Dennison Was asleep when a girlfriend called her with the news. It was mid-morning on October 11, 2002, her thirty-fifth birthday. Annette, a self-proclaimed “night owl,” had worked the second shift the night before and pulled into her driveway in Monmouth at 1 a.m. after the sixteen-mile trip from the warehouse in Galesburg. Monmouth, over forty years after Michael Patrick made his first commute to Appliance City in 1959, was still a town of about 10,000. Home to a hog slaughterhouse on one side and little Monmouth College on the other, Monmouth claimed to be the hometown of gambler, gunfighter, and lawman Wyatt Earp. “No way!” She sat alone, dazed. Her boys were at school. Her husband, Doug, was at the factory getting briefed by managers from Newton. Happy birthday, Annette, she thought. Now find something else to do with your life. A flood of emotions overwhelmed her that morning. She had been stuck in the factory since she was 22 and didn’t care for the mind-numbing work. Recently she had spent her evenings on an electric forklift in the Regional Distribution Center zipping through a landscape of brown cardboard boxes. She loaded and unloaded washers, dryers, microwaves, stoves, and refrigerators in and out of semis, one after the other, all night long. Most Maytag appliances built in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio came to the cavernous warehouse across the street from Appliance City. On the forklift Annette would sometimes daydream about getting out, but the work had become comfortable. She had spent nearly her entire adulthood in the factory. She had girlfriends, drinking buddies, and an assortment of familiar and friendly faces she would miss. It was through them that Annette had developed strong loyalty to the factory and even to the brand itself since she started in 1989, the year of the first Maytag refrigerator. A million questions popped into her head. She had always been a Type A personality and planner, and this was so sudden. She had no idea what to do.