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This chapter examines EU policies concerning social exclusion, migrant integration, labour migration, and asylum in the early 21st century. A two-pronged approach analyzes EU efforts in the realm of migrant integration together with its interventions in the area of immigration and asylum. A new anti-discrimination orientation is being turned into mandatory EU directives and EU-sponsored transnational development programmes, but this reorientation towards diversity, social inclusion, and equal opportunity is part of a new European Social Model, which is conditioned by a neo-liberal policy dynamic. The contours of the EU’s modernized Social Model are those of a post-national workfare regime. This has critical implications for the transformation of the frameworks of citizenship marking the post-war European welfare states in general, and the incorporation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in European societies in particular. The first part of the chapter explores the changing conditionality posed by the neo-liberal turn and changing frameworks of citizenship with regard to the inclusion of resident denizens and citizens with migrant background. That is, it focuses on the actual condition of being a citizen. The second half of the chapter discusses the changing conditions for becoming (or not becoming) a citizen, framed by a newly emerging supranational political economy of border control, migration management, and asylum.

Drawing upon a variety of analyses, this chapter constructs a taxonomy of competing approaches to inequality, social cohesion, and citizenship and proceeds to locate the Third Way as a hybrid approach. While the Third Way strongly embraces elements of market liberalism, it also exhibits a mixture of social democratic, communitarian, and moral authoritarian features. The Third Way approach to policies for social inclusion is traced through a discussion of the European Union’s Social Inclusion Strategy, the development of ‘workfare’ type policies, and in the specific context of new labour policies in Britain. The ambiguous consequences of such policies are examined in relation to measures of inequality, poverty, and social exclusion. The chapter concludes that the Third Way maybe more than a pragmatic compromize, but whether it maybe capable of ameliorating the dislocating social effects of a market driven economic agenda remains uncertain.

Uses historical and contemporary evidence to demonstrate how British government policies toward the unemployed have increasingly come to rest on the notion of duties and obligations arising from a commitment to liberal contractualism. King explores 150 years of welfare policy, beginning with the 1834 New Poor Law and ending with modern Labour workfare schemes of the late 1990s. He argues that more contemporary versions of workfare—although sharing affinities with previous programmes—signal a sharp break from the past by establishing conditions and enforcing sanctions on individuals who fail to comply with policy requirements.

King discusses the history and politics of workfare in the US, the practice of requiring work activity in exchange for welfare benefits. He analyses the late nineteenth‐century Poor Law deterrent traditions as well as the post‐1960s shifts to modern contractualist workfare, which culminated in the 1996 Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Within this discussion, King examines the influence of an English institutional inheritance as well as American cultural attitudes towards welfare as expressed in public opinion surveys strongly marked by racial cleavages and perceptions of dependency. King argues that modern American workfare programmes are not driven solely by pragmatic needs or electoral pressures, but rather by moralistic concerns about failing to work along with the prevailing view that welfare harmfully fosters dependency amongst its recipients.

This chapter examines the extent to which social activation policies have incorporated principles of ‘workfare,’ which requires people to work in exchange for social assistance benefits. Welfare programmes in Europe and the United States are compared. Welfare provision in Europe is characterised by a move away from entitlement to conditional aid. Welfare in the US combines an end to entitlement with an emphasis on harassment rather than help.

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.

This chapter addresses four persistent legal and philosophical issues that imbue workfare, albeit usually not explicitly. First, forced labour is a relatively common charge against workfare. If workfare is tantamount to forced labour, it cannot be justified, legally or morally. But to what extent do we truly object to forcing people to work? Second, the chapter asks what is unique about requiring people to work? Third, we address reciprocity, probably the most persuasive, most common, and most controversial argument in justifying workfare. And finally, the chapter addresses Basic Income Guarantee, which is the mirror image of forced labour: If forced labour is the epitome of the ills of capitalism, basic income is the tool to save capitalism from itself. If forced labour is the charge, basic income is the (perceived) solution. But it also addresses the problems of conditionality. For if Basic Income is not only plausible, but morally justified, it offers a strong argument against conditioning benefits on work.

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.

The chapter explores how Danish WTW policies have recently been implemented and extended while to a large degree avoiding the hazards of public justification. The chapter investigates three cases, which exemplify three different ways to expand the scope of WTW polices, without them having to be publicly justified. The first case digs into classification processes where the work capability of Danish social assistance claimants is assessed. It shows how incremental changes of such processes have formed a system where more and more claimants are deemed capable of working – and therefore legitimate targets of harsher demands and sanctions. The second case explores how the political quest for evidence-based employment policies comes with an inherent bias: ‘Evidence’ is constructed in ways that clearly favour work first policies. The third case investigates how the municipal welfare offices’ autonomy to try out new and innovative activation programs, is currently being restructured by subtle changes that increase the incentives to take up activations programs that support WTW strategies.

This chapter focuses on social assistance recipients’ evolving views on the fairness of being summoned to do volunteer work by Dutch local authorities. This ‘workfare volunteering’ is often considered the best alternative to – but also route towards – paid employment. Building on Nancy Fraser’s work on recognition and redistribution as well as Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘worlds of justification’ framework, this chapter reveals how social assistance recipients’ perceptions of ‘workfare volunteering’ change over the course of their involvement as volunteers. While many social assistance recipients initially judged the obligation to do volunteer work as unfair, the meaning many found in their voluntary positions reversed their initial judgements. But over time – especially as the lack of sustained guidance left them as far away from the paid labour market as ever – they came to see workfare volunteering as deeply unfair. The chapter aims to further our theoretical and empirical understanding of social justice from the perspective of the subjects of welfare-to-work policies.

This chapter uses data from two ongoing studies in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, to provide empirical evidence supporting the claim that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. It begins with a history of the separation of income maintenance from social services, then briefly describes the current situation. It is shown that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. However, despite the similar needs of these populations, indeed, even a large overlap between the populations, these two systems continue to operate largely independently, if not at cross-purposes. These findings call into question both the structure of service systems in jurisdictions like Milwaukee and the federal welfare and child welfare policies that lead state and local policy makers to create such misaligned systems.

This chapter examines the development of the welfare state from a political economy perspective. Initially, the emergence of post-war welfare state capitalism is examined, and subsequently international variations — Fordist welfare state regimes — are outlined and compared. The crisis and reform of developed welfare states as forms of labour market regulation and capital accumulation are then examined and contextualized within the wider economic and political structural shifts from Fordism to post-Fordism. The emergence of new forms of welfare — post-Fordist workfare state regimes — is also described. In the final section, the role of the welfare state as mediator in the social determinants of health is outlined and differences in population health and health inequalities by welfare state regime are examined.

This chapter provides a working definition of workfare, which is used in this book. The discussion identifies key elements of workfare programmes, and outlines the policy context for workfare policies in a discussion of a move from ‘passive’ to ‘active’ labour market policies. An ideological context is presented in the discussion of two competing concepts — ‘dependency’ and ‘social exclusion’ — in relation to worklessness. The chapter then presents the structural context for workfare, as well as giving a presentation of key economic indicators in the seven countries and a description of differences in welfare state and social assistance regimes.

This chapter provides a systematic overview of the most ‘workfarelike’ workfare policies in each of the countries that previous chapters have discussed. A comparison of the programmes in terms of their aims and ideological underpinnings, their target groups, their administrative framework, and the extent to which they diverge from an ‘ideal-type’ workfare model is included. It discusses the patterns of variation, and ends with a section of the implications for the future of workfare. It concludes that workfare programmes are faced with a common set of problems that come directly from the fact that they are compulsory, work-based and targeted at a population facing formidable barriers to work.

Chapter 7 analyses the reform labelled ’Everyone can be useful’ in Denmark in 2011-13. The reform transformed the system of the uninsured unemployed in several ways. It reduced benefits and installed an ‘education injunction’ for young recipients, required all ‘able’ recipients to work for their benefit, strengthened sanctions, introduced new instruments towards the ‘vulnerable’ recipient and young single parents, and created a complex system of ‘triage’ in order to categorise the recipients according to a variety of instruments. Part of the process were two public scandals in which two individual recipients came to exemplify the dysfunctions of the system. In different ways the scandals put the question of whether the system was in fact ‘active’ to the test. The chapter further analyses the problem of profiling recipients, as well as how so-called ‘utility jobs’ became a panacea for all able recipients.