From Social policy to Employment policy - is employment for everyone?

Abstract

During the 2010s several reforms have loosened the control that central government has had on municipal jobcenters. The local jobcenters can now more freely choose the measures and strategies they deem most apt for handling the problems of social assistance recipients – including strategies grounded in a social-policy oriented view on the problems. At the same time, however the target group of activation has been markedly widened, so that all social assistance recipients are expected to partake in activation that leads them into employment, no matter the problems beside unemployment that this target group may have. The article uncovers how the jobcenters handle these seemingly opposite developments by drawing on two unique sources of data: A longitudinal survey among jobcenter-managers and focus group interviews with the management of six strategically selected municipal jobcenters. The survey was fi rst distributed in 2000, again in 2008 and the last round is from 2017. The focus group interviews were carried out in 2016 and 2017. By analyzing the changes in responses over time, we show how the jobcenter managers have signifi cantly changed their perceptions of their main goal and purpose. Today, the jobcenter managers view the supply of labour to local fi rms as their most important goal, while this was deemed the least important in 2000. Goals of bettering the lifesituation of social assistance recipients are considered less important today than earlier. On the other hand, we also witness an acknowledgement of the need for adopting a holistic approach to the hardest-to-place unemployed and, contrary to the responses from 2008, the jobcenter managers in 2017 see a growing divide between the needs of this target group and the available tools and resources for helping them. The combination of a narrow focus on employment for all and a growing and more diverse target group, within a system of changing economic- and performance steering measures, thus poses some dilemmas for the jobcenters in the coming years. Dilemmas where both the freedom to shift between social-policy and employment-policy measures are greater, but where the economic consequences of failing to gain employment for all are also more severe.