Assessing ‘workfare’ programmes and ‘activation ：评估的工作福利计划和激活.docVIP

Assessing ‘workfare’ programmes and ‘activation strategies’ in the USA and Europe after 20 years, an empirical research programme Jean-Claude.Barbier@univ-paris1.fr Paper for the second ASPEN-ETUI-REHS conference Masaryk University, Brno March 2009 Draft, not to be quoted please  Introduction The Family Support Act was enacted in the USA twenty years ago: it contained elements characteristic of a ‘workfare’ strategy (Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007). That same year in 1988, the Revenu minimum d’insertion (RMI) Act was passed unanimously in French parliament. Some scholars have contended that ‘insertion’ and ‘workfare’ were examples of a common trend. Some strongly disagreed. Using P. Pierson’s concept, we argued that ‘activation of social protection’ was constitutive of social protection “restructuring” and that one should distinguish ideal-types of reform. In 2008, a large body of literature has been published about the consequences of ‘activation’ and ‘workfare’ reforms. With hindsight, it is possible to take stock of their consequences across Europe: have the promises been held in terms of participation to the labour market and poverty alleviation? Can one make sense of this wide ranging ideological transformation? How ‘social citizenship’ has been affected? In a first section we will review the extent of the reforms and show their diversity, within Europe and between Europe and the United States, under the same ‘umbrella’ buzzwords of ‘workfare’ and ‘activation’: a retrospective view leads to some robust conclusions. In the second section we will recall the political promises that were made by politicians in many countries when they introduced the reforms. After assessing whether these promises have been fulfilled we will see that the transformations still going on cannot be judged just by the accumulation of piecemeal econometric evaluation studies focused on particular programmes. Hence social scientists are facing a considerable issue for the near future when,