Protecting working welfare recipients through human rights experimentalism

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.

Do Disadvantaged Young Adults Benefit Less from Social Investment? Studying Matthew Effects in Activation Measures

In Germany, social investment can be crucial for disadvantaged young adults, as intergenerational mobility is low and credentials are decisive for employment. However, the literature on policy implementation calls attention to ‘Matthew effects’, by which the most disadvantaged often have the least access to social investment. We contribute to ongoing research on Matthew effects by examining whether the worst-off among young German welfare recipients are assigned to active labour market policy measures that are more advantageous or less advantageous. Findings for a register sample of 20–22 year olds in 2014 support hypotheses that those with the lowest education and employment experience participate less often in the most advantageous measures; particularly in firm-based upskilling and employment assistance, and more often in measures that proved to be not as beneficial, such as workfare programmes. On a positive note, welfare experience during adolescence as an indicator of low socio-economic status in the family of origin does not additionally affect access to social investment policy measures.

Financialization and Welfare Surveillance: Regulating the Poor in Technological Times

In light of concerns that the technologies employed by the digital welfare state exacerbate inequality and oppression, this article considers contemporary shifts in the administration of social assistance. Specifically, it examines the surveillance of recipients of government income support focusing on marginalized peoples in two jurisdictions: social security recipients subject to the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) in Australia, many of whom are Indigenous, and persons under the purview of the Lebanon One Unified Inter-Organizational System for E-Cards (LOUISE) in Lebanon, many of whom are Syrian refugees. Taken together, the cases illuminate embedded ideologies and adverse experiences associated with the financialization of social assistance and the digitization of cash. Through a dual case study approach, this analysis draws out patterns as well as contextual distinctions to illustrate how technological changes reflect financialization trends and attempt neoliberal assimilation of social welfare recipients through intensive surveillance, albeit with disparate outcomes. After considering how these dynamics play out in each case, the article concludes by reflecting on the contradictions that emerge in relation to the promises of empowerment and individual responsibility through financialized logics and technologies.

Applying Neo-Republican Theory to Welfare to Work Practices: Rules and Arbitrary Power in Mandatory Work Programmes in the Netherlands

Drawing on the neo-republican theory of non-domination and a qualitative case study conducted in three Dutch municipalities, this article explores the extent to which external rules are able to prevent arbitrary power in relationships between welfare officers and work supervisors, on the one hand, and welfare recipients participating in mandatory work programmes, on the other hand. It concludes that external rules were insufficiently implemented in the three municipalities in question. In addition, it found that rules cease to be capable of constraining arbitrary power where institutional contexts themselves are unpredictable and insecure. Under these conditions, welfare recipients may seek to avoid risks and act in accordance with the preferences (or their expectation of the preferences) of the welfare officer or work supervisor by playing the role of the ‘good recipient’ instead of relying on available rules of a protective nature or rules that enable them to have a say in their participation in mandatory work programmes.