Rethinking Welfare-to-work for the Long-term Unemployed – Social Policy and Society

EXTRACT

Welfare reforms across OECD countries have seen social citizenship rights contractualised and increasingly repurposed as commodifying ‘tool[s] of governance’ (Patrick, 2017: 293) designed to reconfigure people from ‘passive’ benefit recipients into ‘active’ labour market participants. But despite a significant expansion in the groups of citizens targeted for ‘activation’, countries have persistently struggled to support the labour market (re)integration of social groups at risk of long-term unemployment: variously referred to in the social policy literature as social security recipients who are ‘vulnerable’ (Andersen, Caswell, and Larsen, 2017), ‘harder-to-help’ (Whitworth and Carter, 2014: 111), or have ‘multiple problems and needs’ (Dean, 2003)…

SOURCE: McGann M, Danneris S, O’Sullivan S. “Introduction: Rethinking welfare-to-work for the longterm unemployed.” Social Policy and Society, 2019. [Accepted for publication in Social Policy and Society (Cambridge, 2019)]

Link to full text [open access as of 04 June 2019]

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