Introduction

The UK and Australia have similar employment service systems dominated by an outsourced model of service delivery. In the UK, this began with private sector-led New Deals from 1998 and was further consolidated under the Work Programme 2011–17 and the Work and Health Programme from 2017. In Australia this occurred with the dismantling of the Commonwealth Employment Service in 1998 and the formation of a network of employment service providers – Job Network, then Job Services Australia and most recently jobactive and Workforce Australia. Collaboration between employment service providers has not been a feature of either model as the contracting regime and payment models have effectively discouraged this by encouraging intense competition between service providers (Ingold and Stuart, 2015). Also, commissioners do not account for employers as key stakeholders in either commissioning or contract management. Given the importance of employer engagement to the success of programmes, the commissioning landscape means that providers must ‘retrofit’ their delivery to efficiently and effectively service employers in a competitive environment comprising multiple programmes and providers in the same geographies with siloed caseloads all approaching the same employers (Ingold and Carr, 2020). This chapter compares approaches in the UK and Australia to improve the servicing of employers’ needs through collaboration. In the UK, the ReAct Partnership, aligned to Restart from 2021, and in Australia the Magpies Next Generation Local Jobs Program are examined.

Paths to collaboration in the UK and Australia

Earlier developments in the UK

There have been two important bases for attempts at collaboration amongst the employment services sector in the UK. Firstly, the growing evidence that to service both jobseekers and employers as key customers of employment services requires collaboration between providers. Evidence suggests that if employers’ requirements are greater than one provider can meet, there is a good case for collaboration, or providers risk losing immediate and future job opportunities from employers (Ingold and Stuart, 2014, p 8). In practical terms, providers can only place customers they have been assigned, meaning the available labour pool is spread across many providers. This means that an employer recruiting from one provider will not hear about all the available jobseekers in that area.

Introduction

This chapter explores the intentions behind, progress made towards and practical barriers faced by the Australian government in its bid to help more people with disabilities gain meaningful employment. Insights into these issues along with some key recommendations are illustrated through a case study of Holy Cross Services in their adherence to new government policy. The chapter thereby provides insights into the general policy issues along with some specific recommendations.

Four key dimensions are explored, based on a continuous improvement approach to supporting people with different abilities in achieving their career goals. Firstly, we provide an overview of the Australian employment market for people with a disability and recent changes. Secondly, we present a case study reviewing the design and implementation of a supported employment (SE) service delivery model designed to empower people in achieving their career ambitions. Thirdly, we offer an introduction to the challenges encountered by people with different abilities as they progress through their career opportunities. Finally, we discuss the learnings and principles informed by these initiatives and case study to support future employment models for empowering the individual to achieve their career goals and enabling employers to employ more people with different abilities.

Australian disability employment policy

National Disability Insurance Scheme

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) provides support for Australians with disability, their families and carers. The NDIS is designed to provide approximately 460,000 Australians under the age of 65 who have a permanent or a significant disability, reasonable and necessary support to live an ordinary life. As an insurance scheme, the NDIS takes a lifetime approach, investing in people with disability early to improve their outcomes later in life. The NDIS supports people with disability to build skills and capability so they can participate in the community and employment. Participants are provided with an NDIS package which allows them to receive support from service providers of their choice, and when they choose it, giving the participant ‘choice and control’ over where and what support they receive. This model of providing services to people with their own funding is referred to as individualized funding.

This chapter examines employers’ recruitment of staff via active labour market programmes (ALMPs) through the lens of corporate human resource (HR) strategy. It reviews the available evidence on the characteristics of employers engaged with ALMPs in England and highlights their concentration in low-waged sectors, such as retail, hospitality, social care and cleaning. The chapter draws on HR management theory to propose a strategic explanation for why employers in such sectors invest in the recruitment and retention of low-skill employees through engagement with ALMPs. The HR-based proposition is explored through a case study of a supermarket retailer’s engagement with the Work Programme, the UK’s flagship ALMP initiative from 2011 to 2017.

The chapter has three main sections. In the first section, the available and most up-to-date evidence of the characteristics of ALMP-engaged employers in England is analysed, highlighting the predominance of large employers in sectors characterized by low wages. The sensitivity of the data is discussed. In the second section, Lepak and Snell’s (1999) model of HR architecture is elaborated to propose a set of strategic recruitment and retention practices that may be expected to apply to entry-level employment via ALMPs. In the final section we explore our theoretical proposition through a short case study, which presents the experiences of recruiting staff via the Work Programme at ‘Midstore’, a supermarket retail chain. The case illustrates how engagement is driven by strategic imperatives and sustained by some local managers, yet also constrained by other local managers and various corporate and extraneous factors.

Who are the engaged employers?

The study of employer engagement is relatively new (Ingold and McGurk, this volume), so empirical research to date in this area is rather disparate, and there are few comprehensive explanations for why certain employers might engage. One important and long-standing generalization made in the relevant policy literature (see for example Snape, 1998; Hasluck, 2011), as well as in the related academic literature (van Gestel and Nyberg, 2009; Simms, 2017; van Berkel et al, 2017), is that engaged employers tend to be motivated by a combination of corporate social responsibility and business efficiency concerns.

This chapter provides a critical discussion of the principal ways in which employers in England have engaged with further and higher education in recent years to improve workforce skills. There is a specific focus on recent apprenticeship reforms as illustrative of the strongest form of employer engagement, involving employers as co-producers alongside colleges and universities. The final section of the chapter examines the broader role of employers in engaging with apprenticeships as a means to improve workforce diversity, thereby contributing towards the government’s social mobility goals.

Employer roles in further and higher education in England

Employer engagement in England provides a critical case of how employers behave as stakeholders in a liberalized workforce development system. In other words, the English context illustrates what happens when next to no demands are made on employers to develop workforce skills, leaving them free to engage with education providers as they wish, while taking advantage of changing government incentives. By contrast, other advanced industrial democracies – and even the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – place clearer obligations on employers through more formalized institutional arrangements (see Bredgaard, Ingold and van Berkel, in this volume).

Further education (FE) in England encompasses the compulsory elements of education up until the age of 19 as well as post-compulsory education and training below the level of university degrees. Full-time FE provision is primarily provided by school sixth forms and sixth form colleges, which concentrate on university entrance qualifications, as well as FE colleges, which also provide the majority of part-time training for young people and adults. Alongside FE colleges are a growing number of private and non-profit training providers, commissioned by the state to provide both full-and part-time training courses. This institutional landscape – of FE colleges, alternative accredited training providers and, to a lesser extent, sixth form colleges and school sixth forms – is the primary site of workforce skills development in England. Employers play various roles, most notably in the provision of work experience placements and work-related experiences as part of training courses.

Introduction

This chapter draws attention to the wider political economy of the labour market, and in particular provides a framework for a deeper, nuanced understanding of social processes and institutional relations in and through which employer engagement is framed. Our perspective takes on board an analytical framework that views a welfare regime as embodying historically formed class (struggle) relations, in which policies are contingent upon the balance of social forces and specific forms of political struggle. Struggles tend to be centred around both the redistribution of income and access to power resources and representation structures. In relation to representation we refer to both elected local and national government, and systems of political exchange such as social dialogue and corporatist networks (Jessop, 2016).

Esping-Andersen’s (1990) concept of welfare regimes as systems of power and negotiation between key interests and actors helps us understand the social and political dynamics of labour regulation. He argued that the redistributive and potentially inclusive dimension of a welfare regime is contingent on labour movement power and influence. The historic development of industrial capitalism in the Scandinavian countries, including Denmark, involved the formation of a highly developed trade union movement and systems of collective bargaining. In earlier work (Etherington and Jones, 2004a) we argued that ‘welfare through work’ in Denmark is shaped largely by the industrial relations framework and the key role that trade unions (TUs), labour movement organizations and the public sector play in labour market policy.

This chapter suggests that four key elements of the Danish system are crucial in shaping employment and skills. The first is that high union density and membership make TUs important actors. In Denmark, the TUs manage unemployment insurance (UI) benefits (the Ghent system), which are important in connecting trade unions to unemployment policies. All these elements combined are crucial to employer engagement in labour market policy. Second, and linked to this, is the TUs’ active involvement in social dialogue and bargaining around employment policy and relatedly, third, a developed system of collective agreements where unions negotiate changes and improvements to welfare and skills policies (Valizade et al, 2022).

Introduction

Social security and social policy science studies the function, organization, legal basis, costs and effects of social security and labour. The public social security system protects individuals and households against the financial consequences of illness, disability, unemployment and old age. Since the end of the 1980s, socially activating labour market policies in Europe have been aimed at allowing people who do not participate in the labour market to enter the regular labour market as much as possible, so that they no longer have to use social security benefits (typically, a volume policy that aims to minimize the number of people on social benefits). The core idea behind this is that the best form of social security is to be able to obtain and keep work as a source of income. In the mid-1990s, labour market research shifted towards a transitional perspective on labour markets (Schmid, 1995). Social security thinking is no longer about the current labour market status of individuals (employed or unemployed), but also about accounting for the transition people make to, in and from the labour market. This more dynamic view of the European labour market is referred to as the transitional labour market (Schmid and Gazier, 2002). Employment security (the possibility of finding employment and remaining employed, but not necessarily in the same job with the same employer) (Borghouts-van de Pas, 2010) is the new focal concept replacing the concept of job security (expectations of holding a specific job for a long time) (Wilthagen and Tros, 2004; European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 2008). The transition from one job to another in the event of redundancy, instead of the transition to unemployment, is a crucial one that enhances employment security (Voss et al, 2009). Employers, not social policymakers, offer jobs and employment. Taking this perspective as a starting point, it is important to focus on the coherence and mutual influence of social security and employer behaviour by means of their human resource management (HRM) policies in facilitating a transitional labour market.

The overriding theme of this book on employer engagement has been ‘making active labour market policies work’. This is to say that, while our collection offers a broad and varied intellectual exploration of employer engagement – including its meaning, interpretation and practice in comparative context – our ultimate aim has been to arrive at a clearer understanding of how employers may contribute to ALMPs in a way that successfully secures sustained employment for people who are often widely left outside the workplace. We have approached this by exploring the issues at three levels: macro (institutional and national policy), meso (regional and implementation through partners) and micro (workplace organization).

It is clear from the material in this book that there is no magic formula for engaging employers to make ALMPs work. The diversity of policy orientation and institutional machinery across countries and within regions is simply too great and complex, as is the variety of partners, programmes and the employers themselves. Yet despite the complexity and diversity of employer engagement policy, implementation and practice, we can conclude that some general, and critical, lessons that may be drawn in order to shed light on the pragmatic question facing all countries about how employers may be engaged more effectively in active labour market policies. Firstly, we synthesize the lessons from the different country contexts in the collection’s chapters. Secondly, we offer some ingredients for successful employer engagement at macro, meso and micro levels. Finally, we set out an agenda for future research and scholarship in this area.

General lessons from the country cases

Three of the chapters in the collection are devoted to international comparison, specifically between the UK, Denmark and The Netherlands (Bredgaard, Ingold and van Berkel), then between the UK and Australia (Baker, Ingold, Crichton and Carr) and finally between the UK and Germany (Wiggan and Knuth). The remaining chapters are all based on single-country studies, though the only country beyond this set of countries is the USA (Hanson and Moore; Moore, Hanson and Gustafson). This is helpful in that the conclusions drawn in the comparative chapters provide a useful set of starting points on which the conclusions from the single-country chapters may then build, to create a richer set of contextualized insights.

For centuries governments have been exercised by the challenge of how to deal with individuals in the population who are not in paid labour. It is a highly politicized issue, cutting across a range of policy domains including macro-economics, labour markets, social security, education and health. In the early part of the 20th century countries in the Global North introduced some form of public employment service provision, or ‘labour exchange’ (Price, 1998). Active labour market policies (ALMPs) as we now know them first emerged in the 1950s in Sweden under what is known as the ‘Rehn-Meidner model’ after the two economists who conceived them (Bonoli, 2010). Their aims were equality of wage distribution, sustainable full employment, modernization of Swedish industry and addressing the recurrent problem of labour shortage. The idea of ALMPs subsequently spread to France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere. Following the 1970s oil shocks and economic depression, there was a shift away from ‘activation’ aiming to provide occupations and activities for jobless individuals and to address mass unemployment, as well as temporary jobs and training programmes in the public sector, amounting to job creation.

These early indicators of the importance of the demand side of labour markets (employers) were largely left behind in the 1990s when a ‘new wave’ of ‘active labour market policies and programmes’ emerged. The diffusion of ALMPs across countries was aided by supra-national institutions such as the European Commission and the OECD promoting ALMPs as key policy solutions (Ingold and Monaghan, 2016), leading to some considerable convergence in the direction and focus of them. However, there was also a ‘reorientation’ of ALMPs away from the goal of job creation and towards incentivizing work over ‘welfare’ and providing employment assistance to address what was perceived as the key policy problem: the mismatch of workers with jobs. This inevitably led to a shift away from ‘passive’ public spending on cash transfers through social security benefits towards supply-side measures oriented around increasing the ‘employability’ of individuals by ‘activating’ them for work.

ALMPs have historically been provided by the public employment services (PES), but the contracting-out of services to for-profit and non-profit organizations is now a feature across a variety of countries.

This chapter examines the environmental conditions, pressures and processes that promote an inclusive, adaptive organization. An adaptive organization is necessary for recruiting and retaining marginalized groups in the labour market. We begin with theoretical concepts in well-established leadership theory, and transition to real-world examples. Based on years of research findings from multiple cases involving large corporations, we lay out important strategies for organizations to successfully integrate large numbers of disabled members into the workforce. Specifically, we draw from three studies involving global industries: 1) three distribution centres for Walgreens, a retail and wholesale pharmaceutical corporation; 2) three distribution centres for Sephora, a cosmetics corporation; and 3) a manufacturing plant in North America, part of a multinational automotive supplier. All three global corporations have undergone recent, radical change improving inclusivity. The first two of the example corporations have each developed three distribution centres – where in a single 500-employee distribution centre, there are between 100 and 200 employees with disabilities. In the third example, the multinational automotive supplier changed the culture in a large manufacturing plant containing over 800 employees generating $US1 billion in sales (Moore and Hanson, 2022). In all three corporations, production, retention, and job satisfaction increased from previous conditions, with absenteeism and turnover rates declining, while productivity increased.

Internal and external pressures can create the need for organizations to adapt to new conditions. Some pressures are helpful, while others stymie organizational purpose. Furthermore, pressures can be created within the organization to promote changes that make a better fit with the environment, leading to outcomes such as innovation, increased productivity, and faster solutions to company challenges. In part, leaders are able to shape a unit’s pressures and conditions for building a successful, inclusive organization.

In this chapter we begin by discussing the importance of moving away from traditional styles of leadership, and adopting a more comprehensive model that better supports inclusive organizations. We introduce elements of complexity leadership theory, which we argue provides a stronger framework for adaptability – the creation of an inclusive organization. After a short introduction, we integrate case study examples while discussing the importance of organizational conditions, pressures, and processes – all critical elements in creating a successful, inclusive organization.

An inclusive workplace with a diversity of disabilities

Sephora North America created an adaptive and engaged employee culture in response to shortages of entry-level employees. This case study reveals the best practices Sephora used when developing an inclusive initiative aimed at hiring individuals with physical or cognitive disabilities. Our objective in this chapter is to illustrate an inclusive roadmap for companies seeking to operationalize similar inclusive initiatives which will transform their culture and improve their productivity.

Sephora, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury goods group, was aggressively expanding in North America, which necessitated building a strong, loyal, and productive employee culture. A brand-new distribution centre in Las Vegas was created in 2019 to support the west coast while implementing an inclusive workforce that would decrease employee turnover. Our findings reveal that, through the development of an inclusive workforce on a large scale, Sephora achieved employee engagement while also improving productivity and employee retention. Our findings present the four-stage journey, namely to (1) establish the vision, (2) build the bridge, (3) launch and (4) optimize.

The real-world problems facing Sephora were the shortage of human capital and the need to have an engaged, adaptive, and innovative employee culture. This was in the context of a crisis in employee loyalty across America with a majority of employees not trusting their employer (Aityan and Gupta, 2012; Wharton, 2012). In the manufacturing industry, and especially for the distribution centre, retaining and hiring employees was one of the key human resource crises which elevated the essential role of the manager (Ellinger et al, 2002; van Hoek et al, 2020; The Conference Board, 2021). Furthermore, COVID-19 has led to employment shortfalls in migrant workers who fill seasonal operator positions, putting pressure on farming, service, and manufacturing sectors (Barrero et al, 2020; Corbishley, 2020; Maurer, 2021). Another impact of COVID-19 has been the increase in online shopping that increased distribution centres’ volumes. Hourly-paid employees working in these entry-level positions were rarely loyal to their employer and left for just a little better remuneration.