Workfare in international perspective

During the 1980s and 1990s important changes in social assistance provision took place in a number of welfare states. Whereas social assistance for unemployed people had generally been provided after a test of willingness to seek and accept regular work, people were increasingly required to participate in work, or in other activities, as part of their assistance contract. By the beginning of the 21st century the seven countries investigated in this volume had all extended the range of compulsory work activities applied to out-of-work groups.

The term ‘workfare’ is one that is more readily associated with social assistance programmes in the United States (US). A consequence of this is that the practice of ‘working-for-benefit’ has come to be associated with the lot of poor people in those countries that demonstrate a liberal-right ideology. In this book, the authors, who describe policies in a range of welfare state contexts, have taken the term workfare as a starting point for descriptions of policies that constitute ‘work-for-benefit’, or the nearest equivalent, in their respective countries. In doing so, this book attempts to identify similarities and differences between programmes in different countries and to chart the extent to which they diverge from an idealised quid pro quo, work-for-benefit form of policy. Using this approach, policy comparison becomes possible across a range of ideological and institutional settings, so that familiar US programmes can be considered alongside more overlooked examples of work-for-benefit policies that also exist in northern European countries.

Six northern European countries – France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and the UK – have been selected for inclusion in this comparative book. Together they represent commonly understood ‘types’ of welfare state based on Esping-Andersen's widely used typology (Esping- Andersen, 1990), namely ‘Conservative-Corporatist’ (France and Germany), ‘Social Democratic’ (Denmark and Norway) and ‘Liberal’ (UK). The Dutch welfare state is understood by Esping-Andersen to share characteristics of both Conservative and Social Democratic regimes. Chapters Two through Seven, the core of this book, take each European country in turn, moving through the three ‘typology’ groupings. A selection of workfare programmes in the US, considered a ‘Liberal’ welfare regime under Esping-Anderson's typology, are described in Chapter Eight.