Abstract
Quasi-markets in employment services often follow social policy turns toward activation. Critics see this as no accident, arguing that marketization is intended to raise the odds that workfare policies will be implemented. Drawing on surveys of Irish frontline activation workers, this study harnesses a natural policy experiment whereby Ireland introduced a Payment-by-Results quasi-market alongside a parallel program contracted without outcomes-based contracting. Although the demandingness of activation remains modest in Ireland, the study finds that regulatory approaches are more common under market governance conditions, which in turn has been associated with significant workforce changes and stronger systems of performance monitoring.
Highlights
Recent decades have seen an unfolding trend across welfare states toward reconfiguring social security systems into vehicles for motivating employment
The study addresses whether there are any differences between JobPath and Local Employment Services (LES) staff in terms of the degree to which they prioritize rapid labor market attachment when working with clients, or in their willingness to report clients for noncompliance with activation measures
Since 2011, the country has turned significantly toward a more demanding activation model and, as in several other countries, this has been swiftly followed by market governance implementation reforms
Summary
Recent decades have seen an unfolding trend across welfare states toward reconfiguring social security systems into vehicles for motivating employment. Summarizing decades of reform, Patrick (2017) argues that welfare has become “mobilised as a tool of governance” for reconfiguring citizens into “active” labor market participants 435) in social policy, an umbrella term describing the reconfiguration of labor market policies toward “supplyside employability interventions” Whitworth and Carter (2020) argue that this demanding approach, termed “workfare” or “welfare-to-work” (Bonoli, 2010; Dingeldey, 2007), has “become the standard welfare orthodoxy at the heart of international welfare systems,” motivated by governments’ pursuit of austerity and “desire to responsibilise individuals for their own welfare provision” Within the vast literature on activation, a distinction is often drawn between enabling measures such as training and work experience programs designed to build skills and subsidies to support recruitment of the long-term unemployed, and demanding measures that try to stimulate employment through regulatory means such as tighter eligibility criteria for payments, benefit reductions, and sanctions for noncompliance with work-related conditionality requirements (Dingeldey, 2007). Whitworth and Carter (2020) argue that this demanding approach, termed “workfare” or “welfare-to-work” (Bonoli, 2010; Dingeldey, 2007), has “become the standard welfare orthodoxy at the heart of international welfare systems,” motivated by governments’ pursuit of austerity and “desire to responsibilise individuals for their own welfare provision” (p. 845)
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