Basic Social Rights Research Articles

The Duty to Work without a Wage: A Legal Comparison between Social Assistance Legislation in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom

Since the rise of the activation paradigm in the 1990s, the duty to work without a wage has become widespread in European social assistance legislation. This paper investigates in a precise way the extent to which the duty to work without a wage follows the legal logic of a contractual relationship and how this duty is related to the fundamental right to an adequate standard of living. A comparison between German, Dutch and British social assistance legislation shows that the duty to work without a wage increasingly takes the form of a reciprocity requirement. That is, instead of re-integrating into regular paid work, recipients of social assistance are required to show that they are worthy of attaining basic social rights, not only by improving their capability to work but, above all, by showing a willingness to work. It concludes that the duty to work without a wage enhances governmental control over recipients of social assistance rather than improving their employability and notes that, in this respect, the Dutch social assistance regime seems to be stricter than the German and British ones.

Can conditional cash transfer programs generate equality of opportunity in highly unequal societies? Evidence from Brazil

This article examines whether the state, through conditional cash transfer programs (CCT), can reduce the poverty and extremely poverty in societies marred by high levels of income concentration. We focus on one of the most unequal countries in the globe, Brazil, and analyze the extent to which this country's CCT program - Bolsa Família (BF, Family Grant) program - is able to improve the life chances of extremely poor beneficiaries, through the three major goals of PBF: First, to immediately end hunger; second, to create basic social rights related to healthcare and education; finally, considering also complementary policies, to integrate adults into the job market. The analysis relies on a quantitative survey with 4,000 beneficiaries and a qualitative survey comprised of in-depth interviews with 38 program's participants from all the regions of the country in 2008, it means that this study is about the five first years of the PBF. In order to answer the research questions, we ran four probit analyses related: a) the determinants of the realization of prenatal care; b) the determinants of food security among BF beneficiaries, c) the determinants that adult BF recipients will return to school, d) the determinants that a BF beneficiary will obtain a job. Important results from the study are: First, those who before their participation on PBF were at the margins have now been able to access healthcare services on a more regular basis. Thus, the women at the margins who were systematically excluded - black women, poorly educated and from the North - now, after their participation in the CCT program, have more access to prenatal care and can now count with more availability of public healthcare network. Second, before entering the Bolsa Família program, 50.3% of the participants faced severe food insecurity. This number went down to 36.8% in very five years. Men are more likely than women; non-blacks more likely than blacks; and South and Centre-West residents more likely than Brazilians from other regions; to become food secure while participating in BF. Third, instead, that moment in 2008, a small proportion of the adult participants indeed were able to return to school and to increase their educational qualifications. The lack of technical skills and the huge predominance of informal employment are central social problems in Brazil and that the PBF has failed to address such issues. This study confirms what other previous studies have reported on: BF has had a positive impact in reducing poverty in the country. Hence the main contribution of the present study is in identifying the main determinants of unequal results among individuals participating in the BF program: why some, but not others, are more easily able to access the healthcare or to overcome food insecurity while in the program?

Las cooperativas de vivienda como alternativa al problema de la vivienda en la actual crisis económica

Markets are not equitable providers of basic need goods and social rights and this also applies to the field of housing. In the Basque Autonomous Community, house prices have stopped rising after two decades and the current real estate crisis has resulted in a dramatic drop of privately provided housing. At the same time, austerity measures have seriously constricted public housing policies and the possibilities for public housing provision. In this paper, we therefore propose to reinforce the role of housing cooperatives as an alternative for publicly or privately provided housing. We present various models of such cooperatives in order to find ‘best practices’ that could be implemented in our local context.

A success story or a flawed example? The anatomy of the Turkish model for the Middle East

AbstractThis article argues that it is fallacious to promote the Turkish democratic experience under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) as a model for the emerging Arab democracies. Despite the early political reformism of the AKP, an empirical analysis of the government’s recent crackdown on basic rights and freedoms demonstrates that the “Turkish model,” defined as a marriage of Islam and liberal democracy, cannot respond to the demands of Arab reformers. In this regard, the article falls into three sections. In the first section, assets of the “Turkish model” according to various actors are examined, which casts doubt on the emancipatory discourse underlying the promotion of the model. The second section proposes the term “leader democracy”—or, more specifically, “Erdoğanism”—as a way of denoting the governmental structure of Turkey as of early 2014. The final section depicts the current Turkish democracy in terms of the state of checks and balances and of basic political and social rights.

Institutional analysis and the “resource curse” in developing countries

The present article examines the recent advances reported in the literature regarding the mechanisms underlying the “resource curse” in developing countries. By analyzing the Rule of Law Index, we investigated how the institutions responsible for allocating hydrocarbon royalties can help minimize the effects of the resource curse. We used a qualitative methodology based on case studies. The results show that evidence of legal violations on the part of these institutions and the lack of tools in resource-rich developing countries to uphold basic social and economic rights are associated with the resource curse. Our findings suggest that strengthening the institutions, closer monitoring of oil revenue allocations, and public participation can help to alleviate the resource curse.

Reestruturação produtiva e seu impacto nas relações de trabalho nos serviços públicos de saúde no Brasil

The restructuring of productive systems and economic globalization are directly impacting the basic social rights of workers. In the semi-peripheral countries such as Brazil, where the wage-based society and the consolidation of social rights are not completely implemented, this process of change in the world of labor contributes to aggravate the inequality in the capital-labor relationship and hampers access to employment. By means of a critical review of the scientific literature regarding changes in the world of labor and its impact on the organization and production of health services in Brazil, this article pinpoints the weakness of regulation of the labor market in Brazil, especially in the health sector. It also stresses the need to increase the debate on new forms of institutionalization of the labor relationship in order to ensure equity in the workplace and protect the rights to work and in the workplace.

Report on Health Provision to Nomads: Improving Medical Staffing at Haima Hospital, Jiddat-Il-Harasiis, Oman

Introduction In January 2012 the authors visited Haima Hospital in the Jiddat-il-Harasiis, Al Wusta province, Sultanate of Oman (Figure 1). It is the most remote secondary health care service in the country--nearly five hundred miles from the capital, Muscat, and five hundred miles from Salalah in the south (Figure 2). The visit was part of a larger research initiative to document contemporary life among the Harasiis pastoral camel- and goat-herding nomads and those Harasiis families newly settled in the government-built 'tribal centre' at Haima. This initiative followed on from the original United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project to extend government services to pastoral nomads in the interior deserts of Oman without forcing them to settle. The UNDP project helped support the development of weekly boarding schools, mobile primary health care and expanded immunization initiatives as well as the establishment of social affairs offices, veterinary support and other government initiatives (Chatty 1996: 92). The Harasiis are a mobile herding tribe of approximately five thousand people spread out over a traditional territory, which they have occupied for several centuries, of about forty-two thousand square miles, an area about the size of Scotland, along the edge of the Empty Quarter (Rub' al-Khali). For several decades, the government of the Sultanate has tried to extend meaningful health services to this largely mobile if not entirely nomadic population. Over the years several hospitals have been built on this site; and mobile services have been initiated and just as suddenly stopped. Difficulties in maintaining a consistent level of use have meant that it has been very hard to retain staff and the services offered at these institutions have generally shrunk to the bare minimum, making the hospitals at times no more than primary health care units. This report attempts to examine the difficulties of providing secondary health care services to a widely dispersed population and makes a number of suggestions for enhancing and improving health care delivery to remote and widely dispersed populations in general. Background Basic health care provision for pastoral peoples in the Middle East has been difficult to provide due to their remoteness and mobility. These marginal mobile or recently settled populations have had limited access to government health care provision. In addition, the populations of the Middle East have experienced particularly rapid socio-economic change over the past forty years, due largely to the discovery and exploitation of oil and the consolidation of the nation state. The basic social, political and cultural rights of the pastoral populations of the peninsula have largely been ignored, in part due to their remoteness and inaccessibility, but also due to the very fact of their mobility. Government services, based upon Western models, are designed for fixed, permanently domiciled populations. The organization of pastoral societies, with their mobile and constantly shifting households, does not fit into existing paradigms of Western-inspired development. A shortage in the resources and funds of government ministries has restricted public health services and the establishment of mobile clinics. Furthermore, pastoral societies' communal, traditional pattern of land use has not been understood by states in the region. This has resulted in serious societal upheaval, loss of control over vital grazing lands and often coercive pressure to settle and farm or enter the unskilled labour market. In the arena of health care, these marginal, mobile and remote populations have largely been excluded or have excluded themselves from government initiatives. Those that have settled have had only limited provision within or nearby their rural villages. In addition, the providers are largely focused on curative aspects rather than health promotion and disease prevention. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Many of the Harasiis have moved into social housing provided by the government in the tribal centre at Haima. …

Screening in or out? Surveillance of unwanted humanity across the EU

Abstract Routinised surveillance systems are generally regarded as public (and corporate) interference in the privacy of citizens. Yet such comprehensive forms of surveillance intervention can be a counterpart of citizenship rights, and even of the ‘right to have rights’ within EU cities today. This paper is about selective surveillance, here termed screening out, of undocumented people and how it operates inside EU cities today. A 2002 EU Directive on “Strengthening the Penal Framework to Prevent the Facilitation of Unauthorised Entry, Transit and Residence” underpins coercive policies designed to exclude ‘unwanted humanity’ from the realm of rights-bearing residents within EU urban spaces. Through individual narrative and a range of evidence, the article shows how selective surveillance screens out unwanted humanity from exercising their rights within EU urban spaces. The key aim is to expose the deliberate governmental use of selective surveillance – to disable and prohibit the access of some people to local resources and urban services vital for a basic decent minimum level of life. The logic of deterrence strategies underpin screening out and create non-persons, including failed asylum seekers who are the main focus of this article. Without comprehensive data collection, there is little oversight possible and intervention is lacking which might improve the life chances of undocumented people who live in cities of the EU. Destitution, detention and deportation are the 3-Ds that mean the most basic social and civil rights of undocumented people are routinely neglected. Public institutions, including medical authorities, local authorities and even charities, have become points of exclusion for the unwanted. Little is known about their health conditions or needs, with the exception of some NGO and academic studies on small samples. Redefined across most EU cities as ‘unwanted humanity’, undocumented people and those campaigning on their behalf are increasingly a legitimate ‘target group’ for violent forms of privatised security. Selective surveillance – or screening out - is thus a strong indicator of unwantedness, as shown with some examples from UK, Dutch and French cities. Comprehensive surveillance could be viewed as a public good, so long as it is applied in a non-selective manner.

A “AJUDA” DO PROGRAMA BOLSA FAMÍLIA: REPRESENTAÇÕES DA TRANSFERÊNCIA DE RENDA PARA SEUS BENEFICIÁRIOS

The Family Grant Program (PBF) is currently the Brazilian social policy to fight hunger of greater magnitude and scope. Aimed at families in poverty and extreme poverty, it associates the transfer of financial benefits with access to basic social rights through conditionality. Three main axes and interrelated actions should make this program: income transfer, access to public health and education, and access to employment and income through complementary programs. However, it is clear that income transfer plays a central role in PBF. This study aimed to identify the representations of PBF beneficiaries about the financial benefits received and, therefore, discuss the relation between these individuals and the program. We conducted 23 interviews and analyzed them through the hermeneutic-dialectic approach. The interviews summarized the representations of beneficiaries with the category help . The main points we highlight on this categorization are: a lack of benefit considering the needs of the family; disregard of this benefit as a right, ie, understanding that it is some kind of grant; and the feeling of disaffiliation from the labor market, which generates feelings of worthlessness and social inertia.

The Disadvantaged Among the Dutch: A Survey Approach to the Multidimensional Measurement of Social Exclusion

While combating social exclusion has been a key target of the European Union’s social policy in recent years, the concept remains contested and various ways of measuring its prevalence have been proposed. In the Netherlands a survey-based method has been in use since 2004, which refers to four theoretical elements of social exclusion: material deprivation, limited social participation, inadequate access to basic social rights and a lack of normative integration. In this article we propose an improved and more concise version of the instrument. Using focus groups and cognitive tests, the study first examined whether it adequately covers the different elements of social exclusion. Based on the results, the existing items were reformulated and supplemented. A revised questionnaire was then submitted to a new stratified sample of 650 respondents, randomly drawn from an online panel and a database of people without access to the Internet. The weighted outcomes may be regarded as representative for the entire adult Dutch population, although some caveats apply. Using nonlinear canonical correlation analysis, we identified a single underlying dimension in our new data set. This contains 15 items, with three to four indicators for each of the theoretical elements of social exclusion. According to our general index, just under 5 % of the Dutch population aged 18 years or older are faced with a serious degree of social exclusion. On the four subscales the figure ranges from 7 % (social rights) to 22 % (material deprivation).

Governing as gardening: reflections on soft authoritarianism in Singapore

The idea of ‘soft authoritarianism’, as a general description of many Asian societies, can be defined as a political system in which there are minimal components of democracy such as elections and political parties but, as a consequence of rapid modernisation, state control of the economy and an emphasis on export-driven growth, basic social and political rights are often compromised. Typically, these states govern in the name of constitutionalism but often use the law to suppress political activity on the part of citizens. These societies have often replaced the rule of law with neo-Confucian rule of virtue in which the duties of the citizen to the state are more important than the responsibilities of the state towards the citizen. In these authoritarian polities, the state constructs an educational system to discipline the electorate rather than to create an informed citizenry, simply because there is low trust between leaders and electorate. The duty of the passive citizen is merely to consent to the legitimacy of the regime; the duty of the state is to provide security by weeding out citizens who are troublesome. We argue that Singapore has, until the recent election in 2011, been the classic illustration of soft authoritarianism, but we conclude by asking whether Singapore is moving from governance based on a gardening metaphor of weeding out bad influences to a more mature and open democracy.

Programa Bolsa Família: a interface entre a atuação profissional e o direito humano a alimentação adequada

The Human Right to Adequate Nutrition must be ensured through the public policies included in SAN, namely the Food and Nutritional Security campaign. Besides the income transfer geared to ensuring access to basic social rights, the "Bolsa Família" Program (PBF) is included in this context. This study seeks to analyze the operational aspects of the PBF and also ascertain whether or not the health professionals see the program as a core element of the SAN public policy. With this in mind, semi-structured interviews were conducted with primary healthcare workers involved directly both with the PBF and with the families who receive this benefit. By the end of the study, it was possible to perceive the importance of training health professionals who work in this area, because when one dissociates the social reality in which the beneficiaries live from the program objectives, this can lead to the simple mechanization of these practices. In this respect, it should be stressed that health professionals need to understand the proposals of the program as political and social strategies which, in addition to providing immediate relief, strive to overcome the problems related to poverty and hunger.

Social Justice: Reflections on Human Dignity and Equality

With regard to new democracies in developing societies, the majority of citizens is less interested in the right to freedom of speech or to assembly and more concerned with having sufficient food to eat, a roof over their heads, education and accessible health care for their children. The study aims or is triggered by a recent visit to South Africa by the president of Botswana, Lt. Gen. Seretse Khama Ian Khama. In a keynote address at the Drivers of Change and Investing in the Future Awards in Johannesburg, Mr Khama urged states or leaders and the courts to tolerate or rather accommodate the need of the poor and the most vulnerable. If a (new) constitution is to have credibility and command the respect of the people subject to its provisions, it must take account of these demands and reflect them. In this way, for example, the right to health care and shelter has been recognized. This study asserts that a claim of lack of financial resources by the state is not an excuse for a failure to provide adequate services such as in the cases of Hoffman v South African Airways, Government of the Republic of South Africa v Grootboom and Soobramoney v Minister of Health, KwaZulu-Natal. Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further. This situation (lack of financial resources) warrants a reflection on the right to equality and human dignity. If equality is denied to people who have no food, clothing, shelter or access to health services, it follows of necessity that equality cannot be achieved unless all people have adequate food, clothing, shelter and access to health services. People who are denied access to the basic social and economic rights are denied the opportunity to live their lives with a semblance of human dignity.

Care of Older People in Migration Contexts: Local and Transnational Arrangements Between Peru and Spain

Care arrangements for the elderly are becoming a main social process in contemporary societies due to socio-political and lifestyle changes over the last few decades. The family and the State play a basic role in the construction of care systems and in the establishment of strategies to access care resources. In the present context of migration, these resources interact at a transnational level, challenging family and State migratory regimes. These new realities need the recognition of basic international social rights, as the experiences of Peruvians living in a migration context in Spain show.

Bedouin in Lebanon: The Transformation of a Way of Life or an Attitude?

The populations of the Middle East have experienced particularly rapid socio‐economic change over the past 40 years, due largely to the consolidation of the nation‐state after the break‐up of the Ottoman Empire at the close of WWI. The basic social, political and cultural rights of the pastoral populations (the Bedouin) of this region have been largely ignored, however, in part due to their remoteness and inaccessibility, but also because of the very fact of their mobility and physical marginality. With a few exceptions ‐ such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia ‐ cultural differences between the mobile Bedouin and the settled urban and agrarian populations have translated over time into development of discriminated minorities. The Bedouin way of life has come to be regarded as backward and primitive; in some places their very authenticity as part of the nation‐state has been questioned as they fail to ‘Modernise’ at the same pace as surrounding populations. Thus in Lebanon the majority of Bedouin are ‘stateless’ without papers and live beyond the ‘boundaries’ of government services. Their mobile way of life is largely a thing of the past, but their sense of tribal belonging remains strong. Their desire for nationality papers reflects a wish to end their marginalisation and statelessness and be able to access government services.

Social Movements, Culture, and Politics in the Work of Brazilian Sociologists

When Brazilian society returned to democracy in the 1970s, social movements demanding recognition of basic social and political rights became the focus of sociological research. This research was informed both by the social context and by interdisciplinary theories that gave analytic centrality to social and political actors. It broadened the horizons of sociological interpretation to include political activities outside the established institutions and the collective representations that shape public actions and produced new ideas about conflict and the behavior of those involved in it.

Government Assistance in the Exercise of Basic Rights (Procedure and Organization)

For a brief period - during the first half of the 1970s - it appeared as though the fundamental debate concerning the function of basic rights (to a certain extent an individual-oriented reprise of the Rechtsstaat-social state controversy of the 1950s and 1960s was coming down to the alternatives “Basic Rights: (only) Defensive Rights” or “Basic Rights: (also) Rights to Participation and Claims to Performance” Peter Häberle's demand (made at the 1971 Constitutional Law Teachers' Conference) that the base-line substantive legal status of basic rights be supplemented by a“status activus processualis”(in the sense of a “government-performative due process”), and the Federal Constitutional Court's (FCC's) first Numerus-Clausus decision (of 18 July 1972) and its Term Abortion decision (of 25 February 1975), with its recognition of the state's “comprehensive” duty to protect (and promote!) unborn life, all mark advanced positions in theory and judicial decision-making. At the same time, new life was given to the discussion concerning “basic social rights” (such as the “right to work”, “to shelter”, “to education”, “to social security”, etc.), and new and expanded forms of social protection, in short: concerning the concretization of the social state principle. Yet the welfare-state, “social-liberal” reform impulse soon ran up against political-economic limits: the “feasibility proviso” allowed the merely “ideal standard” character of subjective performance rights to become all too quickly apparent.

Immigration Status and Basic Social Human Rights: A Comparative Study of Irregular Migrants' Right to Health Care in France, the UK and Canada

The article examines the constraints that irregular migrants' immigration status exerts on the realisation of their basic social human rights. To this end, the article focuses on the right to health care and undertakes a comparative study of irregular migrants' access to health care in France, the United Kingdom and Canada. The study shows that States perceive the conferment of social rights on irregular migrants as an erosion of the government's immigration power notwithstanding their characterisation as human rights. The resource-intensive nature of the right to health care further heightens States' reluctance to extend this right to irregular migrants. Yet compliance with international human rights law and respect for human dignity require that States reinstate personhood as a source of rights and therefore reassess the relevance of their immigration power.

Global Citizenship Education: Politics, Problems and Prospects

In his book Global Citizenship Education (2008) the author noted that the modern concept of citizenship – a recent concept historically – implies the existence of a civil or political community, a set of rights and obligations ascribed to citizens by virtue of their membership in that community, and an ethic of participation and solidarity needed to sustain it. Most traditional accounts of citizenship begin with the assertion of basic civil, political and social rights of individuals and note the way in which the modern concept, as inherently egalitarian, took on a universal appeal with the development of the liberal tradition which is often understood as synonymous with modernity. Yet the concept has appealed to both conservatives and radical democrats: the former emphasize individual freedom at the expense of equality and see state intervention as an intolerable and unwarranted violation of the freedom of the individual while the latter stress the democratic potential of citizenship. Increasingly, on the Left the concept has been seen as a means to control the injustices of capitalism. For the Left, the most pressing question has been the status of citizenship in the modern state and what kind of political community best promotes it.

Free movement, equal treatment and workers' rights: can the European Union solve its trilemma of fundamental principles?

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the trilemma the EU is facing concerning three fundamental principles on which the Community rests: free movement of services and labour; non‐discrimination and equal treatment, and the rights of association and industrial action. With rising cross‐border flows of services and (posted) labour after the Eastward enlargement, the conflict between these rights has triggered industrial disputes and judicial strife. In the view of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), highlighted in the Laval Quartet, some principles are more fundamental than others. Tracing the ‘dual track’ along which European integration has evolved, whereby supranational market integration has been combined with national semi‐sovereignty in industrial relations and social policies, our claim is that the supremacy of free movement over basic social rights implied by the ECJ judgments is leading Europe in a politically and socially unsustainable direction. To prevent erosion of the European Social Models and of popular support for European integration, the politicians have to reinsert themselves into the governance of the European project. A pertinent start would be to ensure that the rising mass of cross‐border service workers in Europe become subject to the same rights and standards as their fellow workers in the emerging pan‐European labour market.