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.

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.

As a guide to the gospel text used at Canterbury by Archbishop Theodore, the lemmata in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana M. 79 sup. are limited in two ways: they are few in number, totalling only 127, and one-third of them are of single words. When set against the number and variety of gospels available in the seventh century, so small a sample makes difficult the identification of particular textual affiliations.

The text is Vulgate and not Old Latin, being supported by Vulgate witnesses in nearly all readings, and the following lemmata have little or no Old Latin support. (The numbers on the left are those in Biblical Commentaries, ed. Bischoff and Lapidge, and the sigla for textual witnesses are explained in the Appendix, below, pp. 258–9.)

EvII 25 Matth. XII. 1: ‘sata’, where most Old Latin witnesses have ‘segetes’, except for Xdl and the mixed text Ea.

EvII 28 Matth. XIII. 33: ‘sata’, where most Old Latin witnesses give ‘mensura’, except for Xk (‘sata’) and Xlo and the mixed Ea (all three have ‘satis’ here).

EvII 58 Matth. XXVII. 6: ‘corbanan’, where most Old Latin witnesses have ‘loculum’, ‘corbam’ or ‘corba’, except for XI (‘corbanan’) and Xo (‘corbanam’).

EvII 67 Mark III. 21: ‘(quoniam) in furorem reuersus est’, where Old Latin witnesses give ‘quoniam exsentiat eos’, except for XI and the mixed Ea Jg.

EvII 78 Mark IX. 48: ‘omnis enim uictima salietur’. It is the accompanying commentary on this lemma which might just indicate use of the Vulgate.