The 2008 economic crisis has had significant impacts on labour markets around the world. In Europe, in particular, the need for internal devaluation within European Union nations in financial difficulty precipitated a wave of labour market reforms alongside the reform of welfare systems struggling to cope with high levels of unemployment. Various analyses have explored the nature of these changes separately for the labour market and welfare systems. Using a conceptual framework rooted in a political economy understanding the social nature of labour, this article takes an inclusive approach to understanding regulatory changes for both employed and unemployed labour. We do this using the case of Ireland, a country that went through a severe economic crisis, was subject to a European Union/European Central Bank/International Monetary Fund bailout in 2010 and witnessed one of the most significant labour market crises in Europe. The Irish case is instructive because it highlights both the range and depth of regulatory interventions utilised by the state during periods of crisis to deal with the social nature of labour and its role under advanced capitalism.

Job creation programmes aim at increasing the employability of hard-to-place unemployed, and eventually integrating them into employment. Yet, previous evaluation studies have been pessimistic about their efficacy. For One-Euro-Jobs, a job creation programme for welfare benefit recipients in Germany, previous evaluations found unfavourable effects particularly for easier-to-place participants. Thus, in 2012 the legislator reformed the programme in order to target the hard-to-place more accurately. This study is the first post-reform evaluation of One-Euro-Jobs. We find that, although the programme is indeed better targeted than before, One-Euro-Jobs decrease participants’ employment chances within three years after programme entry. These outcomes are worse than those found for pre-reform participants. We cannot conclude with certainty whether the reform decreased the programme’s efficacy, but we identify channels through which the reform and other contemporaneous changes may have done so. These channels include changes in programme design features, changes in business-cycle conditions, and prolonged lock-in effects due to “programme careers”. To substantiate the latter explanation, we also provide novel evidence that One-Euro-Jobs seem to initiate programme careers.

Although scholarship on social assistance (or welfare) has proliferated over the years, there remains a dearth of literature on the Learning, Earning and Parenting (LEAP) program for teenage parents. We followed two LEAP cohorts (Cohort One: 2003-8; Cohort Two: 2009-14) over five years to explore how many had stayed, shifted programs (e.g. to the disability program) or left social assistance entirely. Exit rates, while higher for Cohort One (51.3 per cent relative to 43 per cent for Cohort Two), were fairly low; roughly 10 per cent lower than those of the overall social assistance caseload. LEAP does not appear to vastly improve the employment prospects of a significant proportion of its participants over time. American researchers are proposing a shift in programming towards a two-generation approach, pairing early childhood education with parent human capital development, Ontario – who imported LEAP from its US counterparts from the beginning – should follow suit.

The focus in welfare state support in the Netherlands has been shifted from workfare and activation policies to social investment strategies. The discourse on basic income and the related municipal experiments highlights this shift. We address the inspiration found in basic income and behavioural economic and motivational psychological theoretical insights for the design of the experiments and for new avenues of minimum income protection and providing participation opportunities for the disadvantaged. The emerging new paradigm also implies a shift in the cultural values and principles on which welfare state policies are implicitly founded. This means that in these endeavours particular social values are put more upfront, such as personal autonomy (capacitating people by providing opportunities and therewith ‘free choice’) and trust (activating people by putting trust in their self-management capacities) which in day-to-day policy practice means more tailor-made, demand-oriented integrated mediation and coaching while rewarding people instead of penalising them.

This article focuses on experiences of welfare recipients summoned to do volunteer work. Proponents of ‘workfare volunteerism’ argue that it leads to empowerment and employability while critics dismiss it as disempowering, stigmatising, and disciplining. Our longitudinal qualitative inquiry into experiences of sixty-six ‘workfare volunteers’ in the Netherlands shows how experiences of disempowerment or empowerment are dependent on caseworker approaches as well as on time. Disempowerment can turn into empowerment when an individual's past is considered, but can revert to disempowerment if changing needs go unrecognised. These findings have broader implications for debates on activating policies. They point to the need for diachronic approaches, which reflect the changing experiences of target groups over time and adaption of policies and caseworker approaches that respond to their clients’ changing needs and self-understanding.

Over the last decades, governments in the advanced democracies have put greater pressure on the unemployed to seek and accept employment. This development has been pointed out in much prior research, yet relatively little is known about the exact changes that have been introduced. This paper fills this gap. It draws on a novel time-series cross-section dataset on the strictness of unemployment benefit conditions and sanctions in 21 democracies between 1980 and 2012, and shows in which aspects these rules have become stricter – and in which not. The paper confirms that there has been a general trend toward tighter conditions and sanctions, but adds some important qualifications: Many rules and provisions have also been adapted in response to the emergence of new social risks and there is also a noticeable trend toward more clearly defined and precise rules. Based on these findings, new causal hypotheses are suggested.

The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. While dominant paradigms in economics abstract from the moral dimension, recent approaches to morality and ethics in anthropology neglect the material economy. E. P. Thompson’s “moral economy” has been an influential bridging concept in recent decades, but recent inflationary usage has highlighted shortcomings. Following an overview of the disciplinary debates, the moral dimension of economic life is illustrated in this paper with reference to work as a value between the late 19th and early 21st centuries in Hungary. Contemporary workfare is explored with local examples. It is shown how discourses of work and fairness are being extended into new ethical registers to justify negative attitudes towards a new category of migrants.

Beneficiary advocacy organisations, which provide advice to individual claimants about how best to navigate the welfare system, exist in the context of complex and opaque benefit-claiming processes that have resulted from workfare policies. Drawing on a case study of Auckland Action Against Poverty, an organisation specialising in poverty activism and services for welfare beneficiaries, this article examines the provision of beneficiary advocacy services as a form of everyday resistance to workfare policies. Everyday resistance is less overtly political, less confrontational, and more ordinary than spectacular acts of resistance such as protests, but one that should not be seen as accommodating workfare policies and the market-based reform projects to which they are connected. By supporting individuals to defiantly persevere with their benefit claims, beneficiary advocates help to actively resist the operational logic of dissuasion that defines contemporary workfare.

During 2011, the UK Government introduced the Mandatory Work Activity scheme, which requires JSA claimants to work in order to continue receiving benefit. Workfare has been viewed as a radical departure in the evolution of British labour market policy. However, an historical review of workfare in inter-war Britain reveals that the most recent proposals merely resuscitate a heritage of compelling the long-term unemployed to work for their benefit. Both then and now workfare has flourished in times of economic crisis, and particularly where Governments have pursued economic theories which exalt the market. Historical analysis reveals important continuities and changes in the nature of contemporary workfare.

This article contributes to our empirical understanding of self-respect in rising meritocracies by focusing on the experiences of unemployed, low-skilled people recruited as workfare volunteers in the Netherlands. As many theorists have argued, the long-term unemployed struggle to maintain self-esteem. We found that workfare projects that introduce them to voluntary work can help them regain self-respect through four types of emotional labour: feeling respected through their newfound status, enjoying a craft, being able to perform in less stressful working environments, and taking pride in the meaning bestowed by voluntary work. But the emotional labour necessary to experience their situation more positively also increases the risk of experiencing negative emotions, thereby posing new threats to the fragile self-respect of unemployed citizens.