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Inclusion through Participation

The case studies (WP3): comparative report

Report in the context of the INPART research project

Contract nr. SOE2-CT97-3043

December 1999

Dr Rik van BerkelUtrecht UniversityWelfare State [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Contents

1. Introduction 5

2. Theoretical and socio-political backgrounds 82.1 Introduction 82.2 Discourses on social exclusion and poverty 92.3 The INPART research project 10

3. The design of the case studies 123.1 Research questions and hypotheses 123.2 Types of work 123.3 Investigating types of work: the importance of contextualisation 143.4 Conceptualisation and operationalisation 143.5 Methodology 17

4. The case studies 194.1 Primary labour market 194.2 Secondary labour market 204.3 Unpaid work 244.4 Training and education 264.5 Some concluding remarks 28

5. The respondents 325.1 Introduction 325.2 Gender 325.3 Age 335.4 Level of education 345.5 Duration of unemployment 345.6 Household composition 35

6. Unemployment and exclusion 376.1 Introduction 376.2 Exclusion from domains of participation 376.3 Experiences of exclusion 406.4 Self-exclusion through deviating work attitudes? 43

7. Employed in the primary labour market 457.1 Introduction 457.2 Primary labour-market participation and inclusion in participation domains 457.3 Experiences with inclusion 47

8. Employed in the secondary labour market 508.1 Introduction 508.2 Inclusion into and exclusion from domains of participation 508.3 Experiences of inclusion and exclusion 54

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9. Participation in unpaid work 619.1 Introduction 619.2 Voluntary work 619.3 Informal work 65

10. Education and training 6910.1 Introduction 6910.2 Inclusion into and exclusion from domains of participation 6910.3 Experiences of inclusion and exclusion 71

11. Conclusions 7611.1 Introduction 7611.2 The concepts of inclusion and exclusion 7611.3 Participation and inclusion 7811.4 Types of participation 8011.5 Domains of participation 8411.6 Traditional and new activation approaches 86

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1. Introduction

This report is the third comparative report written in the context of the research project Inclu-sion through Participation, a two-year project funded by the EC (4th Framework, Targeted Socio-economic Research, Area III). This report, which is based on separately published na-tional research reports gives an account on the case studies that have been carried out in the participating countries: Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. Through these case studies and a comparative analysis of their results, we try to an-swer the main research question of the project:

How is participation in various types of work related to inclusion and exclusion and experiences thereof? To what degree are these experiences determined by factors such as people’s needs, resources, orientations et cetera?

The structure of this report is as follows. Part I contains the introductory chapters. Chapter 2 describes the socio-political and

theoretical backgrounds of the INPART project in general and of the case studies in particu-lar. Chapter 3 deals with the design of the case studies, the methodologies used and conceptu-alisations and operationalisations. Chapter 4 describes the case studies in more detail.

Part II goes deeper into the findings of the case studies. Chapter 5 presents some back-ground information on the respondents involved in the case studies. Chapter 6 is an ‘inter-mezzo’ on unemployment and exclusion. Often, the unemployed are portrayed as a group of excluded and non-participants. This is a statement that we will critically examine on the basis of our empirical data. Chapters 7-10 deal with the types of work and participation we distin-guished in the INPART project, i.e. primary labour-market participation, secondary labour-market participation, unpaid work and education.

Part III deals with the conclusions of the case studies. These conclusions, together with those from the other INPART work packages, will form the basis of policy recommenda-tions to be presented in the final report.

In designing the case studies, which constitute the empirical part of the INPART project, dif-ferent national policy contexts as well as different theoretical and methodological traditions of the participating institutions and researchers have been taken into account explicitly. From a comparative point of view, one might argue that a more homogeneous research design would have been desirable. At the same time, this would have required much more preparation time, which was no feasible option given the time limits the project was subject to. Furthermore, despite the fact that the pluriformity of approaches of the case studies made concessions with respect to their comparability necessary, we think that this pluriformity also has an advantage: the different theoretical points of view and methodological approaches underlying the case studies contribute, as we hope the reader will agree, to the richness of the material presented in this report.

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Part 1

Introduction

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2. Theoretical and socio-political backgrounds

2.1 IntroductionThe main interests of the INPART research project originate among others from some well-known and by now well-documented developments that took place in the nations of the European Union (as well as on a more global scale) and that have deeply and significantly changed the fabric of ‘work’ in these societies. Even though scientists use different theoretical concepts to make sense of these developments (‘from Fordism to post-Fordism’, ‘from indus-trialism to post-industrialism’, ‘from industrial society to risk society’, ‘from the Keynesian welfare state to the Schumpeterian work-fare state’), they all agree on some of the manifesta-tions of the changes that took and are taking place, among others the diversification of paid work and newly arising issues related to the paid work/unpaid work relationship. For our pur-pose, which is to gain insight into the consequences of the heterogeneisation of ‘work’ in terms of the inclusion and exclusion of people, more specifically people on the margins of the labour market, the following developments are of major importance: Developments in the labour market, where flexibilisation on the one hand and the indi-

vidualisation of labour-market participation on the other (compare the increasing labour-market participation of women) have made the life-time, full-time job less and less ‘nor-mal’ and have introduced a panoply of flexible jobs, labour contracts and work careers;

Developments in social policies and social security, where traditional ‘passive’ policies gradually are making way for ‘active’ policies and where the introduction of all kinds of ‘activation measures’ not only involves a shift in the aims of welfare states from income protection to participation or even work-fare, but also introduces new types of work and participation. Partly related to these developments and reflecting the necessity to deliver active policies tailor made to regional or local circumstances, social policies have increas-ingly become decentralised;

Developments in people’s survival strategies: societal changes influence people’s oppor-tunities and needs to lead a decent and respectable life. It is quite clear from the vast liter-ature analysing current social developments, that they produce both winners and losers or, less dramatically put, groups at risk of loosing the capacity to adjust to the new conditions. Nevertheless, the latter try to cope with changing circumstances as well, sometimes by making use of informal or illegal survival strategies (black economy, informal work, etc.).

We have described these developments in more detail before, as part of the earlier work of the INPART project. For our present concern, it suffices to say that the heterogeneisation of work resulting from developments taking place at all levels of society (ranging from the global level to the level of the individual household) reorganises people’s opportunities and risks with respect to being able to fulfil their needs, not only in economic terms (such as financial independence, income situation) but also in more social-psychological terms (such as worthi-ness, self-fulfilment, social participation). This is even more so, since work –or, to be more precise, a paid job- is considered to be an important condition for full participation in society or, in other words, for full social citizenship. In the past, this was hardly problematic as there was full employment (actually, full male employment) and the typical job was a fixed, full-time and often life-long job, although even then debates on the quality of work, labour condi-tions, workers’ co-determination et cetera raised the question whether some jobs involved ‘fuller’ citizenship than others, and the women’s movement started claiming already that wo-

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men’s non-participation in the labour market involved forms of exclusion and second-rank citizenship. Today, the contribution of work to full citizenship and social inclusion is a major issue in social scientific and social policy debates, due to high unemployment, the hetero-geneisation of work and the increasing labour-market participation of women.

2.2 Discourses on social exclusion and poverty The growing emphasis in social policies on activation and participation was preceded by the introduction of the concept of social exclusion. A lot of debate has been going on and is still going on with respect to the meaning of this concept, particularly in relation to the concept of poverty. Some have taken on the view that both concepts are more or less synonymous, whereas others emphasise the differences between the two. For example, some state that whereas poverty refers to financial constraints (either because of a lack of financial resources or because of high expenses), social exclusion mainly refers to issues related to participation. Also, the concept of poverty is said to be more static, whereas the concept of social exclusion is supposed to be more dynamic, paying attention to the processes that exclude people from (parts of) society.

These debates are not purely academic. They also may have consequences for social policies addressing problems of poverty and exclusion, for example with respect to the em-phasis the policies put on income improvement. In a recent book on social exclusion1, in which she analyses the social policy debates in the UK in particular, Ruth Levitas has distin-guished three ideal-typical discourses of social exclusion: a redistributionist discourse (RED), a moral underclass discourse (MUD) and a social integrationist discourse (SID). She charac-terises theses discourses as follows.

The characteristics of the redistributionist discourse are summarised as follows: RED emphasises poverty as a prime cause of social exclusion; RED implies a reduction of poverty through increases in benefit levels; RED is potentially able to valorise unpaid work; In positioning as the obverse of exclusion, RED goes beyond a minimalist model of inclu-

sion; In addressing social, political and cultural as well as economic citizenship, RED offers a

critique of inequality including material inequality; RED focuses on the processes which produce that inequality; RED implies a radical reduction of inequalities and a redistribution of resources and

power.

The characteristics of the second discourse, the moral underclass discourse, are summed up as follows: MUD presents the underclass or socially excluded as culturally distinct from the main-

stream; MUD focuses on the behaviour of the poor rather than the structure of the whole society; MUD implies that benefits are bad, rather than good, for their recipients, and encourage

dependency; MUD ignores inequalities among the rest of society; MUD is a gendered discourse about idle, criminal young men and single mothers; MUD does not acknowledge unpaid work;

1 Ruth Levitas (1998), The inclusive society? Social exclusion and new Labour, MacMillan (see chapter 1 in particular).

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MUD regards dependency on the state as a problem, but does not do this for personal eco-nomic dependency, especially dependency of women and children on men.

Finally, Levitas characterises the social integrationist discourse as follows: SID narrows definitions of inclusion and exclusion to participation in paid work; SID does not squeeze out the question why people who are not employed are consigned to

poverty; SID obscures the inequalities between paid workers; SID obscures gender and class inequalities in the labour market; SID erases from view the inequality between productive property owners and the working

population; SID is not able to address the question of unpaid work in society properly; SID implies an increase in women’s workload; SID undermines the legitimacy of non-participation in paid work.

Connecting these discourses to the issue of the concepts of poverty and social exclusion, it is quite clear that in RED poverty dominates over exclusion, in MUD exclusion is reduced to self-exclusion, and in SID exclusion dominates poverty. Or, in Levitas’ own words (p. 27): “(…) in RED they have no money, in SID they have no work, in MUD they have no morals”.

These discourses, which in some form can be found in all countries involved in the INPART research, highlight some important issues research in social exclusion should deal with. This research project’s main concern is with the inclusionary potential of different types of work. It does not, however, limit work to paid work only; neither does it treat paid work as an undif-ferentiated category. Also, even though our focus is on participation in types of work, the im-portance of income, both as an element of inclusion in itself and as a condition for full parti-cipation, is not neglected. Furthermore, we will also pay attention to people’s needs, wishes and attitudes with respect to participation in general and with respect to participation in paid work in particular. Thus, rather than positioning ourselves in one of the discourses summar-ised above, we have used them in conceptualising and operationalising some of our core con-cepts. We will return to this in the next chapter. In the next section, we will present the re-search project’s main research questions.

2.3 The INPART research projectGenerally speaking, social policies – more and more emphasising the importance of participa-tion, as we have stated before - are based on the assumption that labour-market participation involves social inclusion whereas unemployment involves exclusion; and many social scient-ists seem to share that assumption. In Levitas’ terminology, this may be interpreted as reveal-ing the dominance of the SID discourse, although the dominance of paid work and the neglect of unpaid work can also be found frequently among adherents of the RED discourse. This as-sumption, however, may be criticised because of its determinism (having a job equals inclu-sion, being unemployed equals exclusion), its universalism (the road to inclusion is the same for everyone) and its simplicity (lack of differentiation in the concepts of work and unemploy-ment). It is not very hard to find empirical evidence that may support these criticisms, espe-cially when people’s own experiences with work or unemployment are taken into considera-tion:

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Some jobs seem to have exclusionary rather than inclusionary potential, whereas at the same time, there are quite a few unemployed people that seem to be fully or at least par-tially included;

For some people, having a paid job is a necessary, though not automatically sufficient, precondition for inclusion, others manage very well without;

Different types of work can contribute to, or limit, people’s inclusion in various ways, not only depending on characteristics of the work involved (quality of work, labour condi-tions, social relations, autonomy, et cetera) but also on active social policies themselves (income levels, participation opportunities opened up or closed off, etc.) and on personal characteristics (e.g. orientations).

Against this background, it is the purpose of the INPART project to investigate the relation-ship between participation/non-participation in types of work and inclusion/exclusion empir-ically, thereby testing the social policy assumption mentioned above. The main research ques-tion we want to answer in this report is:


The first research question tests the assumption that participation in paid work equals inclu-sion whereas non-participation in paid work equals exclusion. The second question tests the assumption that roads towards inclusion can be defined universally and independent of the people involved. We will elaborate this in the next chapter.

In order to investigate these questions, various types of work and participation have been distinguished: Participation in jobs in the primary labour market (‘regular’ jobs, full-time or part-time,

fixed or flexible, temporary or permanent); Participation in jobs in the secondary labour market (subsidised jobs for the unemployed,

e.g. job schemes or capitalisation of benefits); Participation in unpaid types of work; Training and education2.

In the next chapter, the design of the case studies will be described in more detail.

2 Training and education may, of course, involve one of the other forms of participation, for example paid or un-paid periods of work experience.

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3. The design of the case studies

3.1 Research questions and hypothesesAs has already been stated in chapter 2, the general research questions underlying the IN-PART project in general and the case studies in particular are as follows:


The first of these two questions relates to the issue whether non-participation in paid work ‘automatically’ induces social exclusion and, vice versa, whether labour-market integration brings about social inclusion. Another issue this research question deals with is whether parti-cipation in forms of work/activities other than ‘regular labour-market participation’ can in-crease social inclusion, even in the case of the absence of a regular labour-market job. The second research question tries to identify whether the answer to the first research question dif-fers for different social groups. For example, research has shown that in general men are more dependent on regular labour-market participation for their social inclusion than women. The same goes for some ethnic groups compared to others. Thus, the policy relevance of this second research question may be that policies aimed at social inclusion of groups of people might be different for different groups of people. Formulated in a more general sense, this re-search question raises the issue whether there is only one road to full citizenship or whether full citizenship can be reached along various pathways.

With the use of case studies, we want to shed some light on the validity of the following hy-potheses: Participation in paid work is a necessary and sufficient condition for social inclusion.

Non-participation in the labour market implies social exclusion. In terms of their ‘inclusionary potential’, various forms of work constitute a hierarchy in

which primary labour-market participation contributes most to social inclusion and unpaid work/activities less. State programmes of subsidised and/or additional jobs for the unem-ployed create a new segment of relatively marginalised work in the labour market.

Assuming that the concepts of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ refer to participation/non-parti-cipation in various domains of society (see below), participation in the domain of ‘work’ stimulates integration into other domains.

The inclusionary potential of various types of work cannot be assessed without reference to the needs, resources, orientations etc. of the people involved. The contribution of active social policies to inclusion can be enlarged by taking the needs, resources and orientations of their target groups into account.

3.2 Types of workEach of the six research teams participating in the INPART project carried out one or more case studies. Each case study was focused on one particular type of work/participation, fitting in the distinction in types of work we made in chapter 2. In the context of each case study, participants in the type of work being studied in that case study were investigated, particularly with respect to their inclusion and exclusion. In the next chapter, the types of work that were

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studied in the case studies (which were sometimes related to specific activation measures) will be described in more detail. The following table gives a general overview of the types of work studied in the six countries.

Table 1. Types of work under investigation in the INPART case studiesPrimary labour mar-ket

Secondary labour market

Unpaid work Training & Educa-tion

Belgium X XDenmark X X X XThe Netherlands X XPortugal X XSpain XUnited Kingdom X X

The relatively high number of case studies under the heading of secondary labour market is no coincidence. These secondary labour-market case studies all relate to specific active social policies that have been introduced to stimulate work participation of the unemployed. Given the fact that these activation programmes all involve forms of work deviating from regular la-bour-market participation (if only because they are focused on the unemployed), and given the interest of the INPART project in vulnerable and marginalised labour-market groups, it stands to reason that these programmes receive ample attention. It should be emphasised that the diversity we found within this type of work is large. As will be shown in more detail in the next chapter, some programmes involve in fact subsidies for creating regular labour-market jobs, whereas others create a permanent separate labour-market segment clearly distinguished from the regular or primary labour market.

The training & education case studies involve focused activation programmes as well: they all are dealing with programmes targeted at increasing labour-market opportunities of unemployed people, either by augmenting their qualifications or by offering them work ex-perience (or a combination of both).

Unpaid work is a type of work traditionally largely ignored by social policies aiming at stimulating social inclusion and integration. Nevertheless, this type of work might contrib-ute to social inclusion as well. The case studies under this heading (emphasising unpaid work, but also giving some attention to informal paid work) are meant to test this hypothesis. As will be described in more detail in the next chapter, these case studies both involve social policies (the Dutch case) and ‘bottom-up’ initiatives by (employed and unemployed) people themselves (the UK case).

Finally, two case studies deal with participation in the primary labour market. Al-though this type of work receives less attention than less ‘regular’ types of work, we did want to include it in order to shed some light on the social policy assumption that inclusion in paid work, especially paid work in the ‘regular’ labour market, equals social inclusion.

Apart from these types of work, one of the Danish case studies focused on a group of unemployed people. Whereas the point of departure in all other case studies is participation in some type of work, the starting-point in this case study is non-participation – either in the la-bour market or in activation programmes.

Given the fact that some of the case studies directly involve targeted active social policies and others do not (or only indirectly), the backgrounds of the participants in the case studies differ as far as their labour-market position is concerned. Thus, all respondents of the case studies under the headings of ‘secondary labour market’ and ‘training & education’ have experienced shorter or longer spells of unemployment before participating in these types of work/particip-

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ation, since these case studies are dealing with active unemployment policies. On the other hand, respondents in the case studies under the heading of ‘primary labour market’ may have had either stable or unstable labour-market histories. As far as the case studies under the head-ing of ‘informal unpaid or paid work’ are concerned, the situation differs for each case study. The respondents in the Danish and Dutch case studies into unpaid work are unemployed. This is not necessarily the case for the British case study, where respondents are either employed or unemployed.

3.3Investigating types of work: the importance of contextualisationIt should be emphasised that in investigating the types of work we have distinguished, re-search results can never be interpreted with reference to these different types of work only. This would require a research context in which we would be able to investigate these types of work in their ‘pure’ form, all other things being equal. Apart from the fact that there is no such thing as the ‘pure’ form or ‘prototype’ of the types of work under investigation, other things are never being equal. Thus, our typology of types of work is abstracting from contex-tual issues that may, and indeed are, very important in explaining the differences and similar-ities we found in situations and experiences of inclusion and exclusion. This can be illustrated quite easily by looking at the activating social policies included in our case studies. These policies not only differ with respect to types of work/participation (sometimes involving sub-sidised work, sometimes unpaid work, sometimes training/education), but are also different in many other respects: the obligatory/voluntary nature of participation, the income provided to participants, the guidance offered to participants, the perspectives offered to participants after participation, etc. Furthermore, these policies may be targeted at very different groups, and may be implemented very differently in companies or institutions. It goes without saying that these contextual characteristics of active social policy schemes and programmes will influ-ence participants’ situations and experiences of inclusion and exclusion as much as the types of work they are involved in (our case studies will bring forward evidence supporting this statement).

3.4 Conceptualisation and operationalisationThe issue that received the most attention from the INPART group concerns the concepts of social inclusion and social exclusion. The conceptualisation and the definition of these con-cepts, as well as the way they should be operationalised and handled in empirical research have been objects of continuous debate, also within the INPART group. From this point of view, the conceptualisations and operationalisations of both concepts that were used in the case studies should be seen as ‘working’ conceptualisations and operationalisations.

In the design of the case studies various theoretical perspectives on the concepts of in-clusion and exclusion have been combined. At the same time, given the variety of scientific backgrounds of the INPART partners, it will be clear that some partners have more affinity with, and feel more attracted towards, certain theoretical perspectives, whereas others prefer other perspectives. Thus, whereas we have been using a common framework for the conceptu-alisations and operationalisation of the concepts of inclusion and exclusion, the national teams have emphasised different elements to different degrees. Although this does impair the com-parability of the results of the case studies, it has the advantage of showing more clearly the pros and cons of various conceptualisations and ways of operationalisation.

In conceptualising and operationalising the concepts of inclusion and exclusion, we first of all had to take into account the fact that there is quite a gap between common sense and scientific notions of these concepts. For example, in the Portuguese case studies, it was

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shown that most interviewees did not use the concept of exclusion when talking about their own situations, but they reserved it to describe the situations of severely marginalised groups such as the homeless, gypsies et cetera. Even though this in itself is an interesting finding, it shows the importance of developing more advanced ways of ‘measuring’ inclusion and exclu-sion.

Although the concepts of exclusion and inclusion were introduced into social scientific dis-course only recently, the connection with the concept of integration which has received quite some attention by social scientists is clear. At the same time, the concept of integration as it has been developed in the social sciences has various meanings and has been used in many different contexts3. One question that has to be answered in conceptualising the concepts of inclusion or integration deals with the issue: inclusion (or integration) into what? Answering this question by talking about ‘inclusion in society’ is not very satisfying, since ‘society’ is no homogeneous entity but is highly differentiated; theories of modernity point at differentiation as one of the main characteristics of modern societies. Thus, in talking about inclusion (or in-tegration), the ‘parts’, ‘segments’ or ‘systems’ to which one refers should be specified. Fol-lowing this line of reasoning, another issue can be raised: how is inclusion in, or exclusion from, one ‘part’ of society related to inclusion in or exclusion from other domains? As we saw in the previous chapter, current active or activating social policies take a clear stand on this issue, stating that labour-market participation or the inclusion in regular paid work is a precondition for being included in other parts of society. The role ascribed to labour-market participation in facilitating other forms of inclusion or integration is also revealed when un-employment is equated with social exclusion and social isolation.

In order to take into account the differentiated character of society, we distinguished various ‘domains’ of participation, inclusion or integration, enabling us to investigate whether participation and non-participation in the domain of work is related to participation and non-participation in other domains. The following domains of participation were distinguished which, in turn, can be subdivided into various sub-domains. The economic domain, encompassing the sub-domains of work, income and consumption; The social domain, encompassing social relations and networks with family, friends,

neighbours, colleagues and so on. These social networks may operate in more or less formal and institutionalised contexts (compare the social relations with colleagues at the workplace with social relations in mutual-aid groups or friendships);

The political domain, which may range from involvement in more ‘formal’ politics (vot-ing, membership of political parties or trade unions) to involvement in, for example, de-cision-making processes at community level or forms of protest. Of course, participation in the political domain may be more passive (membership) or active (e.g. being actively involved in interest representation);

The cultural or leisure domain, which involves a large number of formal and informal activities: visiting theatres, cinemas, museums; being an active or passive member of leis-ure organisations (sports, health, education, hobbies etc.); reading books or newspapers; taking part in community-based or religious activities, et cetera.

Another important issue in the conceptualisation of inclusion concerns the question whether one defines inclusion or exclusion in what we have called an ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ way. A similar distinction is also made in debates on the conceptualisation or definition of the

3 See, for example, the recent volume Capitalism and social cohesion. Essays on exclusion and integration, ed-ited by Ian Gough and Gunnar Olofsson (MacMillan, 1999).

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concept of poverty. In a way, using the terminology of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ is some-what confusing. In essence, the issue at stake here is whether inclusion is defined adopting an outsiders’ point of view, or whether one takes the participants’ perspective as the point of de-parture4. When defining the concepts of exclusion and inclusion in an objective way, meas-ures are developed to assess and measure the degree of participation of respondents and the results of this are translated into different degrees of inclusion/exclusion. In its most simple form, participation in paid work is equated with inclusion, whereas non-participation is equated with exclusion. For our purpose, this is not very useful, however, since one of our ob-jectives was to test this hypothesis rather than take it for granted. A more advanced way of conceptualising inclusion and exclusion from an objective point of view would be to use the differentiated concept of society we elaborated before. From that point of view, and given our concerns with the inclusionary potential of types of work, the question is whether participa-tion in a certain type of work is positively, negatively or not at all related to participation in other domains or sub-domains. On the one hand one might expect that participation in a regu-lar job contributes positively to participation in other domains, and that unemployment, i.e. non-participation in paid work, is accompanied by non-participation in other domains. On the other hand, one might expect that this ‘dominance’ of participation in paid work does not ex-ist. In other words: participation in paid work might not be a necessary condition for particip-ation in other domains, which would also imply that unemployment does not necessarily lead to ‘full’ exclusion.

When applying an objective definition, statements with respect to people’s inclusion/exclu-sion are made without reference to people’s own experiences of their situation. Implicitly it is assumed that people share a set of needs and that in assessing whether people are included or excluded, we can take the existence of these needs for granted. In a subjective definition of in-clusion/exclusion, people’s needs are investigated explicitly, as is the issue whether and to what degree participation in types of work meets these needs or, put in other words, what meanings people ascribe to participation in work. By defining inclusion and exclusion in such a way that the participants’ perspective is taken into account, one recognises that people’s needs may differ, and that different types of work may or may not offer them resources to sat-isfy their needs. In order to further operationalise the concept of needs, we made use of in-vestigations into the unemployed and the meanings of work. Apart from the ‘material’ need of income (and access to consumption), these investigations distinguish the following ‘immater-ial’ needs: Status and respect (e.g. feeling recognised by others, feelings of pride/shame, being able

to live up to one’s own and others’ expectations); Autonomy and self-determination (e.g. being able to live independently, having control

over one’s living and working conditions); Being engaged into meaningful social interaction (e.g. considering oneself a full member

of society or a full and ‘interesting’ partner in daily social interactions); Appreciation and being able to contribute to society (e.g. being useful to others or society

at large, getting appreciation for one’s contribution); Individual development and personal rehabilitation (e.g. being able to use and develop

one’s capacities and qualifications, being able to deal with personal problems); Spending time (e.g. having opportunities to be engaged in meaningful activities and avoid

boredom).

4 See, for example, Engbersen, G., J. Vrooman, E. Snel (1999), Armoede en verzorgingsstaat. Vierde jaarrapport armoede en sociale uitsluiting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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In conceptualising exclusion and inclusion in our research, we made use of both perspectives. From an outsiders’ point of view we were interested in observing whether people are included in or excluded from the domains or sub-domains of society we distinguished. From a ‘subject-ive’ point of view we wanted to see what meanings people attach to being included or ex-cluded from an ‘objective’ point of view. Although all case studies used the objective and subjective definitions, they emphasise these core elements of our conceptualisation to differ-ent degrees. More details regarding the conceptualisations and operationalisations of key con-cepts in the separate case studies can be found in the national research reports, annexed to this report.

3.5 MethodologyDuring the preparation of the case studies, and as part of the INPART work packages (work package 1 and work package 2; see Hansen and Hespanha 1998, De Schampheleire et al. 1998), we analysed social policies with respect to types of work/participation and reviewed research literature on inclusion and exclusion, including research into the inclusionary poten-tial of various types of work. Furthermore, interviews were organised with key informants that could inform us in more detail about the types of work and social policy interventions with respect to these types of work, such as social workers, trade union representatives, local authorities etc.5.

The core of the case studies involved research among the participants in the types of work under investigation. The designs of the case studies vary, first of all with respect to methodology. Some case studies used a small-scale, intensive and mainly qualitative ap-proach, conducting in-depth interviews with respondents in order to gain insight into the in-clusionary and exclusionary potentials of the types of work6. Others applied a more large-scale, extensive and mainly quantitative approach, using the survey method to gain more stat-istically representative research data. A combination of both methods in each case study would, of course, have been desirable, but resources were not sufficient to do so. This com-bination was only used in the case of the Danish research team, since it was successful in ap-plying for additional funds to carry out the research. Secondly, the locales of the case studies differ. Most case studies took place in a local context. The reasons for this were not only prac-tical or related to methodology, but also had to do with the fact that insofar as active social policies are concerned, the implementation of these policies is becoming increasingly decent-ralised, influencing what is actually going on in these programmes at the local level. For this reason (but, obviously, for others as well), the local context may be an important variable in explaining the effects of participation in types of work for participants. Unfortunately, we were not able to investigate these local differences in any depth in the case studies. Neverthe-less, the Spanish case studies, which took place in two metropolitan areas, and the Belgian case studies, which took place in 52 locales in five big cities in Flanders and Wallonia, do generate some insight into this issue. The Danish case studies, that were designed to be na-tionally representative, are the only ones that took place at a national level. Table 2 summar-ises some characteristics of the case studies: the methodology used and the number of parti-cipants under research in each case study.

5 In some cases, these key informants also assisted in finding the respondents for the case studies.6 In two cases (the Portuguese and Dutch case studies), a longitudinal approach was used. The Spanish respond-ents were interviewed twice.

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Table 2. Design of the case studies: methods and number of respondentsPrimary labour mar-ket



Belgium Survey(25 projects, n=218)

Survey(27 projects, n=297)

Denmark7 In-depth interviews & Survey(n-survey = 284)

In-depth interviews & Survey(n-survey = 267)



The Netherlands In-depth interviews(n = 25)

In-depth interviews(n = 20)

Portugal In-depth interviews(n = 20)

In-depth interviews(n = 20)

Spain In-depth interviews(n = 100)

UK In-depth interviews(n = 23)

Survey(n = 125)

As was mentioned above, the Danish team also investigated a group of unemployed people. The unemployed were not involved in the in-depth interviews. The Danish survey involved 148 unemployed people.

7 In the Danish case studies, no distinction was made between activated people in secondary labour-market pro -grammes and training & education: both groups were treated under the heading of ‘activated people’. For the purpose of this report, people participating in Educational Projects will be grouped under the heading of ‘Train-ing & Education’, whereas people in other activation projects (job training, individual job training, pool jobs and starting businesses) will be dealt with under the heading of ‘secondary labour market’.

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4. The case studies

In this chapter we will describe the case studies in more detail, specifically with respect to the types of work under investigation. This means that some of the case studies will get more at-tention than others, simply because the less ‘regular’ types of work need more explanation than the regular ones. First of all, table 3 summarises the types of work under investigation in the case studies. Once again, apart from the case studies mentioned in table 3, one Danish case study focused on unemployed people in particular.

Table 3. INPART case studiesPrimary labour mar-ket



Belgium Local social eco-nomy activities within TSO’s

Education and work-training in TSO’s

Denmark Regular paid work Activation: subsid-ised work

Voluntary work Activation: educa-tional projects

Netherlands Subsidised work: Melkert-1

Unpaid work: Social Activation

Portugal Occupational Pro-grammes

Measure 2, INTE-GRAR subprogram-me

Spain Capitalisation of un-employment benefits

UK Part-time work Unpaid (and in-formal paid) work

4.1 Primary labour marketParticipation in the primary or ‘regular’ labour market constitutes, at least from the perspect-ive of social policies, the prime form of social inclusion. Other types of work are either pre-parations for regular labour-market participation or considered to be only imperfect substi-tutes for a regular job.

There is, of course, no such thing as ‘a regular job’: the concept ‘regular’ itself can hardly be defined. As we have pointed out before, the primary labour market has become more and more differentiated, including all kinds of flexible jobs, temporary jobs, part-time jobs, jobs where people are self-employed or working in secondment constructions, et cetera. This diversity would justify a research project on its own, studying the inclusive potential of all these different types of ‘regular’ jobs.

We did not choose to use this approach, as we have already explained. Nevertheless, two case studies do focus on primary labour-market participation directly. One of the Danish case studies focused at a sample of employed people drawn from the national labour force re-gister (with respect to the survey part of this particular case study). No selection criteria were used with respect to kind of jobs, types of contract and so forth, so that the sample includes all types of jobs found in the primary labour market.

The British case study under the ‘primary labour market’ heading did focus on a spe-cific kind of job in the primary labour market, namely the part-time job. Part-time work is be-

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coming an increasingly ‘regular’ way of labour-market participation, especially for women. At the same time, the British case study clearly shows the importance of contextualising the types of work in the case studies, as was argued in the former chapter. For example, compared to full-time jobs, part-time jobs do not necessarily have to be ‘regular’ where employment rights protection of part-time workers is concerned. This goes especially for the British case, where part-time work under the Conservative governments has been adopted as a low-pay, ‘low-skilled’ labour-market strategy. Furthermore, Britain was exempt from the Social Pro-tocol of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, so that many of the employment rights directives de-veloped in the EU were not applied in the UK. Since Labour came to power, the inclusive po-tential of part-time work has been increased, for example, by the introduction of new employ-ment rights, which particularly benefited part-time workers. Thus, the British case is interest-ing for investigating the connections between part-time work, part-time workers’ entitlements and part-time workers’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion. The British case study into part-time work adopted in-depth interviews and took place in the retail and catering sectors in the city of Sheffield. As a demarcation criterion, working less than 30 hours a week was used to define part-timers. The largest group of respondents, however, work 16-24 hours; 35% work less than 16 hours, 9% more than 24 hours.

4.2 Secondary labour marketUnder the heading ‘secondary labour market’ we grouped several activating programmes that are designed to integrate the unemployed, temporarily or permanently, into some type of paid work or ‘benefit-+’ construction. Apart from being targeted schemes, one of the main charac-teristics of these programmes is that the jobs involved are somehow subsidised, for example, by using benefits to subsidise wages or to capitalise benefits in order to help people start their own company. Sometimes, these initiatives combine the objectives of stimulating social in-clusion and meeting unsatisfied local needs (for example, with respect to the environment, services, public security). The relationship between this ‘secondary labour market’ and the primary labour market can be quite different for the schemes involved in the case studies. Sometimes, the schemes provide subsidies to help to create regular employment. In other cases, the focus is on giving the unemployed opportunities for work experience (and some-times qualifications), and the schemes are designed to be stepping-stones towards participa-tion in the primary labour market. And finally, there are schemes that provide more perman-ent participation opportunities, on conditions more or less divergent from primary labour-mar-ket conditions.

The Belgian case study focused on local economy initiatives undertaken by third-system or-ganisations. The local operation of these initiatives is an example of decentralisation tenden-cies we can observe in all EU countries where tackling the problems of unemployment and social exclusion is concerned. The third system organisations aim at providing goods and ser-vices to the local community and therefore undertake economic activities at the local level, but contrary to private enterprises, profit maximisation or profit generation are not their ob-jectives. Besides other actors and institutions involved in policies against unemployment and exclusion, these organisations play an increasingly important role, since they are giving par-ticular attention to the problems of disadvantaged persons or groups, either by integrating them into the labour market or by providing services (or a combination of both). These organ-isations are subsidised by the state and may also raise funds from donations or non-commer-cial loans. Consequently, the organisations are often involved in partnerships with public

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and/or private organisations or resulting from individuals associating together in order to meet a common need.

It should be emphasised that contrary to many nationally implemented social policies, some of these initiatives try to develop bottom-up approaches where individual demands are the starting point of reintegration interventions.

Methodologically, the local initiatives are a mix of three ingredients: a job offer, a training programme and individual guidance and assistance. The way these ingredients are mixed in specific programmes is an important aspect of the contextualisation of this type of work. Local projects may contain different mixes of these ingredients. In this section, we will focus at the more ‘work-oriented’ projects; the more ‘training-oriented’ projects will be de-scribed in section 4.4. Within these ‘work-oriented’ projects, we may distinguish the follow-ing types. Work experience, involving various kinds of temporary work contracts combining paid-

job experience with preceding or supplementary training. The basis of the payment for training hours is the social benefit, for working hours it is the sectoral minimum wage. Since the activities are mostly of a social or environmental nature without being econom-ically very profitable, the projects and third-system organisations organising them are highly dependent on subsidies. Participation usually lasts 1 to 2 years.

Insertion enterprises, where low-skilled or long-term unemployed people work temporar-ily on a subsidised contract. The subsidy is considered a compensation for low productiv-ity of the employees. These enterprises, though primarily concerned with social and envir-onmental needs, have to be economically profitable. In Flanders, the enterprise has to be-come independent of subsidies after three years of operation. In Wallonia and Brussels profitability rules are less strict. Participation may be permanent, but wage subsidies of the participants are not.

Social enterprises, which only involve work with no explicit perspective on an increase in skills or productivity. Most people involved are very long-term unemployed (more than 5 years) or those who have been dependent on the subsistence minimum. Work is subsidised at a moderate level but continuously; participation may be permanent. The enterprise has to be economically profitable.

Both the work-experience projects and the insertion enterprises should prepare people for reg-ular labour-market participation. The case study investigated 25 initiatives in the Antwerp, Liège, Mons and Ghent areas, and Brussels.

The Danish case studies include a group of activated people. This group involves people who are dependent on unemployment benefits and people dependent on social assistance. Al-though the activation of both groups of unemployed is regulated by different laws, the activa-tion programmes are quite similar. Here, we will deal with work-oriented programmes; educa-tion and training will be discussed in section 4.4.

The unemployed in Denmark have become increasingly subjected to activation policies. For some groups these programmes have a stronger work-fare-like character than others, for example, age-groups are treated differently under current Danish social policies. Above, we have pointed at the obligatory nature of participation in activation schemes as an important contextual element in understanding people’s experiences with these schemes. Gen-erally speaking, recipients of unemployment benefits are activated after one year of benefit dependency, and the same goes for people on social assistance who are 30 years old or older. Younger social assistance recipients receive an activation offer after 13 weeks of unemploy-ment. Thus, in most cases the activated unemployed will be long-term unemployed, that is

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they have been unemployed for at least one year. Work-oriented activation programmes in-clude the following schemes. Job training, which may be with private or public employers. Pay and other working con-

ditions should be according to collective agreements applicable to the sector. Wages are a maximum of 12 Euros per hour for persons activated in the public sector. Employers re-ceive a wage subsidy of about 6 Euros per hour for each recruited unemployed. After 6 months of having received subsidies, a private employer has to employ the unemployed without receiving a subsidy any longer, or should offer the unemployed training.

Individual job training also involves a temporary job at a private company, a public insti-tution or a semi-public organisation. The employer receives a wage subsidy, which may exceed 6 Euros per hour. The subsidy period may be longer than 1 year. Conditions in in-dividual job training are rather flexible and working time is set individually. The wage is a special project allowance and should not exceed the maximum rate of unemployment be-nefits. Other working conditions should be as close to normal as possible.

Pool jobs are public sector jobs of up to three years’ duration for persons who have been unemployed for a period of 1 year. Hourly pay is the same as in public job training. The main aim of this scheme is to create more permanent jobs to meet social needs or improve the quality of existing services. Jobs can be created by public employers in the following sectors: environmental protection, conservation of nature, culture, collective public trans-port, housing, education, health and care, and the labour-market field.

With the exception of those involved in job training in the private sector where no income ceiling exists, the participants in these schemes may not earn more than the maximum rate of unemployment benefits. When full-time wages exceed this limit, working hours are reduced accordingly. Although participation periods may be shorter or longer, they are in general de-signed to increase integration opportunities within the primary labour market.

One of the Dutch case studies deals with the ‘Extra Employment for the Long-term Unem-ployed Scheme’ or Melkert-1 Scheme which was introduced in 1995. The aim of this scheme is to enlarge the availability of low-skilled and low-paid jobs in the Dutch labour market, and, at the same time, to improve the quality of public services. The jobs are targeted at people who have been unemployed for at least 1 year and who are entirely or partly dependent on so-cial assistance. Participation in these jobs may be permanent. In January 1999, 34,700 Melkert-1 jobs had been created, partly in the health sector, partly by the 79 municipalities that, in 1997, were allowed to create Melkert-1 jobs. This case study focuses only on the latter part of the scheme as implemented in the city of Rotterdam, which employs over 10% of all Dutch Melkert-1 workers. On average, Melkert-1 workers work 32 hours a week. Wages are set at a minimum of 100% of the nationally set minimum wage8 and a maximum of 120% of the minimum wage, on the basis of a regular full-time working week (usually 36-38 hours). Other labour conditions depend on the collective agreement applicable to the sector in which the Melkert-1 worker is employed. Although the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment likes to stress that Melkert-1 jobs are ‘regular jobs’, they deviate from regular jobs in the fol-lowing ways: Melkert-1 jobs are funded according to specific regulations; They are targeted at the long-term unemployed; They are subjected to the legal regulation that Melkert-1 workers can never earn more

than 120% of the minimum wage. This also means that working overtime must be com-

8 As of January 1st 1999, Dutch minimum wage for adults (23 years of age and older) is 1,064 Euros per month (gross).

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pensated in free time once the 120% threshold is reached. Since July 1997, supplements for irregular working hours are no longer taken into consideration;

The work tasks of Melkert-1 workers are defined by legal regulations, and should only in-volve simple, routine tasks requiring little formal qualifications.

Formally, people may refuse a Melkert-1 offer (as any job offer may be refused), but, accord-ing to social assistance regulations, they risk sanctions when refusing a job offer. Melkert-1 jobs are completely subsidised: for each newly created Melkert-1 job, a subsidy of 18,000 Euros is available.

One of the Portuguese case studies focuses at the Occupational Programmes for Unemployed People (POC), that have been in operation since 1985. POC’s are oriented towards people re-ceiving either unemployment benefits or the unemployed in economic need, whom they provide with short-duration (< 1 year) occupational activities under projects promoted by non-profit organisations, largely in the areas of environment, culture, heritage, social support and other social areas. According to official documents, POC’s were created to ‘combat demotiva-tion and marginalisation tendencies’ among the unemployed, and to aid their social integra-tion through a ‘socially useful occupation’. It is recognised that the programmes ‘are not tar-geted at job creation nor at being engaged in productive jobs in the labour market’. Participa-tion in a POC is explicitly temporary.

According to a recent revision of the law, recipients of an unemployment benefit or social security benefit are obliged to accept a POC job offer, or else they will lose their bene-fit entitlements. POC placements entitle recipients to a complementary income of 20% of the unemployment benefit, plus transportation, meals and costs for accident insurance. The Por-tuguese POC case study took place in the town of Figueira da Foz.

Finally, the Spanish case studies have the least characteristics of a secondary labour-market programme. In fact, subsidies are provided to create ‘normal’ jobs in the primary labour mar-ket. Thus, of all job schemes presented in this section, the Spanish scheme resembles primary labour-market participation most. The scheme under investigation is the capitalisation of un-employment benefits scheme. This scheme is the most important activation measure in Spain aimed at creating new employment in the regular labour market. The jobs that this measure tries to stimulate are located in the social economy sector. Until 1992, workers had the option to invest their capitalised benefits either in an autonomous company or in the social sector. In 1992, the option to invest the money in self-employment actions was cancelled. From then on, to make use of the scheme one has to invest all the money generated by capitalising unem-ployment benefits into a social company (Anonymous Labour Societies, Limited Labour So-cieties or Social Co-operatives). The general idea of this capitalisation process is that workers can receive in one time the total value of their unemployment benefit entitlements. Contrary to most other schemes discussed in this section, the Spanish scheme is not targeted at the long-term unemployed specifically. The reason for that is simple: the longer people are unem-ployed, the more of their unemployment benefit entitlements they will have consumed, and the less interesting capitalising their unemployment benefits will be. In general, people will apply for the capitalisation scheme as soon as they get unemployed. Since administrative pro-cedures for judging the application take about 3 months, the applicants will have been unem-ployed for about 3 months once they start working in the new business. Furthermore, since the scheme only involves people that are entitled to unemployment benefits, it is aimed at people who can be assumed to function in the labour market and have years of work experi-ence.

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As was mentioned before, one should distinguish two periods in the history of the scheme. During the first period, 1985-1992, investments often took place in previous private companies located in the industrial sector that had closed down. Thus, the capitalisation of un-employment benefits scheme were used to ‘take over’ private companies that were threatened with closure. Besides, during this period workers also had the option to invest the money in self-employment actions. The latter option was used by workers to create a new company, dif-ferent from the one they were employed by before. Starting in 1992, workers were obliged to invest the money in social companies. Some of the new social companies that were estab-lished after 1992 are managed by young workers, which was not the case during the first period.

In 1997, the Labour Societies Law was approved. According to this law, to create Limited Labour Societies it is necessary to invest 3,000 Euros and to have three associated workers. After this legislation, many social companies of this kind are being established: workers prefer to establish Limited Labour Societies rather than Labour Anonymous Societ-ies.

Within the social companies, two categories of workers can be distinguished. The as-sociated workers have shares in the company and have a voice in the company’s assemblies. The second category of workers, non-associated workers, do not have these rights.

The case studies took place in the areas of the metropolitan cities of Barcelona and Bilbao, where unemployment was relatively higher.

4.3 Unpaid workThe case studies presented under this heading involve different degrees of ‘social policy re-latedness’. The British case study, mainly concerned with unpaid work but also involving a certain degree of informal paid work, focuses attention to working and unemployed people’s strategies of doing and making use of unpaid work to get work for themselves or others done. The Danish case study involves a group of unemployed people that, on their own initiative, began to participate in voluntary work and received permission from benefit agencies to do so. The Dutch case study is concerned with a specific activating social policy scheme, tar-geted at the long-term unemployed and aimed at increasing their social inclusion by stimulat-ing and supporting their involvement in unpaid activities.

The British case study deals with informal work, predominantly unpaid work but also in-formal paid exchange. The promotion of unpaid work is often seen as problematic since gov-ernments may harness it either to reduce the welfare state by trimming social services and em-phasising ‘individual responsibilities’, or to cut back on social rights. However, besides this social policy approach of unpaid or informal work as a way of replacing employment and the welfare state, another approach may be distinguished which seeks to supplement, not replace, employment and state provision: the ‘assisted self-help’ approach. In this case study, unpaid work is studied from the latter point of view.

Two socio-economic backgrounds seem to legitimise attention to unpaid/informal work in the context of the INPART research. First, there is the continuous high level of unem-ployment and underemployment in many European countries. Second, although unpaid and informal work are often thought of as manifestations of ‘backwardness’ rather than ‘modern-ity’, unpaid work has always formed a very important part of the total work time in advanced economies and its importance has even increased. In other words, at least some advanced eco-nomies seem to witness a process which might be defined as a ‘southification of the north’ rather than the opposite: an informalisation of work.

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Paying attention to this type of work may contribute to answering the question which of the three following policy options should be chosen to deal with unpaid and informal work: To enable deprived populations to rely less on informal work by giving them access to

formal-sector provision through either employment creation or higher benefits; To allow the situation to continue as it is by adopting a ‘laissez-faire’ approach; To swim with the tide of these structural changes and harness such work.

These same issues and policy choices are relevant to the two other case studies dealing with unpaid work as well. The Danish case study includes a group of unemployed people who are participating in some sort of institution or organisation on a voluntary basis, while still receiv-ing benefits. They might be called ‘self-activated’, since they have found this voluntary work themselves. Their participation does not take place in the social-policy context of a process of qualifying for labour-market participation. One might even state that this group of people do not necessarily have major difficulties in finding an ordinary job. Generally, they are unem-ployed for a relatively short term. Although social security systems have often been reluctant to recognise or allow voluntary work by unemployed people, because it was considered to re-duce their labour-market availability, the Danish social security system does, under certain conditions, permit unemployed people to do voluntary work without this having any con-sequences for their unemployment benefits.

Finally, the Dutch case study on unpaid work deals with a social policy initiative focusing on socially integrating long-term unemployed people through unpaid activities. The case study focuses on one of the experiments in the context of the scheme ‘Experiments working while retaining benefits based on article 144 of the Social Assistance Act’, also known as Social Ac-tivation or Melkert-3. In 1996, a new Social Assistance Act was introduced in the Nether-lands, aimed at, among other things, increasing the activating function of social assistance. In this context, municipalities were offered the opportunity to start experiments with the object-ive of activating unemployed people with very small labour-market chances in unpaid activit-ies. In a sense, the scheme targets a ‘hard-core’ group of unemployed people that have been subjected to ‘creaming-off’ processes by previous activation measures. In other words, Social Activation was designed to be a ‘participation safety net’.

Social activation is not a job scheme. Participants are engaged in unpaid activities and remain social assistance recipients. Local discretion in designing experiments is quite large, which means that these experiments may differ on various dimensions. Our case study fo-cuses on the largest and one of the earliest Social Activation experiments, the experiment in the city of Rotterdam. The dimensions of classification of Social Activation experiments and the position of the experiment in Rotterdam within this classification are as follows: The objectives of the experiments may primarily focus on combating social exclusion

(‘welfare policies’), on preparing labour-market participation (‘labour-market policies’), or on a mix of both. In the Rotterdam experiment, labour-market participation is no ob-jective. At the same time, social activation participants who want to find a job should be supported while realising this objective. Re-entering the labour-market is considered to be a positive ‘side- effect’ of social activation.

Participation in the experiments may be voluntary or obligatory. In Rotterdam, participa-tion in the project is voluntary. If people do not want to participate, they will not be sanc-tioned in any way.

The target group may be defined narrowly (very long-term unemployed on social assist-ance), but sometimes participation is opened up for other groups of people confronted

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with social exclusion as well (for example, elderly people or people on disability benefits). In Rotterdam, long-term unemployed social assistance recipients are the most important target group in the experiment. Nevertheless, other groups do occasionally participate in the project.

The methodology used in the experiments may be ‘top-down’: municipalities develop some forms of participation and then start looking for candidates; or the methodology may be ‘bottom-up’ or client-centred, starting with an assessment of people’s capacities, wishes, ambitions etc. and finding or developing appropriate participation opportunities when this assessment has been completed. In Rotterdam, the latter approach is being used.

In addition, the following characteristics of the experiment in Rotterdam should be men-tioned. Participation in the experiment is allowed for a maximum period of 2 years. After this

period, prolongation of participation is possible. Participants in social activation are released from the obligation to apply for jobs. People

who do not want to participate remain under this obligation. A variety of unpaid participation options is open to participants. These options include or-

ganised voluntary work, informal unpaid activities, education and intensive guidance or counselling.

Participants in the project that are involved in socially useful activities receive a reim-bursement of expenses. The maximum reimbursement participants can get amounts to 540 Euros a year.

Social activation in Rotterdam is not just targeted at people who are not participating in social activities at all. It is also open to people who are already participating in unpaid activities. In practice this often means that they continue these activities, but now are re-leased from the obligation to apply for jobs and get a reimbursement of expenses.

The ‘activation work’ is carried out by 12 decentralised Social Activation agencies. These agencies operate independently from the municipal social services.

4.4 Training and educationLike the case studies that were described under the heading of ‘secondary labour market’, the case studies focusing on training and education relate directly to active social policy initiat-ives. Training and education are practically always aimed at increasing the qualifications or ‘human capital’ of the unemployed in order to improve their labour-market chances. From this perspective, the effect and ‘successfulness’ of training/education programmes may be de-scribed in terms of their contribution to labour-market integration of participants. From a broader perspective, however, training and education activities can also be seen as types of participation in themselves, for they may provide participants with new social networks, use-ful activities, status (‘trainee’ or ‘student’) et cetera. In the case studies, training and education initiatives will be investigated from both perspectives.

As we have already described above (see 4.2), the Belgian case studies deal with several local social economy initiatives undertaken by third-system organisations. A number of these initi-atives can be classified as training, even though the demarcation lines between initiatives fo-cusing on training and on work are not drawn very clearly. Thus, the initiatives we will de-scribe here are primarily oriented at training, but may involve elements of work or work ex-perience as well.

There are three kinds of programmes that can be distinguished in the Belgian case

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studies on education and training. Alternating learning is primarily focused on young school drop-outs (aged 15-21). These

programmes give young people the opportunity to learn and to acquire skills in a work-shop environment during a maximum period of 4 years. Although the workshop formula involves the production of economic goods, these are not economically profitable, which explains the involvement of third-system organisations. Participants receive an income that is derived from the minimum wages for young people.

Vocational training. The content of these training programmes is quite similar to training programmes organised by municipal governments. However, the involvement of third-system organisations facilitates the participation of people who are not registered as un-employed or of people facing individual problems. Programme duration is between 1 and 3 years. Participants remain on social benefits.

Training enterprises. Resembling the alternating learning programmes, training enterprises also involve learning in a workshop environment. However, the target group of these pro-grammes is not as homogeneous as is the case in alternating learning. Regional differ-ences exist with respect to the target group of the schemes. For example, in Brussels and Wallonia, access is restricted to people who have not finished secondary education. Fur-thermore, the participation period is shorter than in the case of alternating learning: 9-18 months. Participants receive social benefits plus a remuneration of 1 Euro per hour. Indi-vidual guidance and route counselling are typical for these programmes.

In the Belgian case study, 27 of these training and education initiatives were investigated.

As was already stated, the Danish case study involves a group of activated unemployed. In section 4.2, we described the general rules that govern the activation of unemployment bene-fits and social assistance recipients. There, we also described the work-oriented activation programmes. Here, in the context of training and education, we will deal with the education/training part of the Danish activating policies. These training and education schemes may take place in the ordinary educational and training system or are organised as part of special, tailor-made programmes. Unemployed persons participating in these schemes may receive a trainee allowance, but as a main rule, no training allowance will be granted to participants in medium- or higher-level education programmes. Participation in vocational training pro-grammes is another option in the context of these schemes. Young people (under 25) on un-employment benefits who have not completed a formal education or training programme are treated differently from other unemployed. After 6 months of unemployment, their benefits are reduced to 50%, and they have the right and obligation to participate in education or train-ing for at least 18 months.

Finally, the Portuguese case study on training and education focuses on the so-called Measure 2 of the Integrar Sub-Programme. This programme was adopted in 1994 under the second EU Support Framework through the programmes ‘Improving the Quality of Life and Social Cohe-sion’, and ‘Health and Social Integration’. The core aim of the Integrar sub-programme is to create, through training and employment measures, conditions for the economic and social in-tegration of marginalised social groups.

Measure 2 is directed at the vocational reintegration of the long-term unemployed by promoting informative sessions, vocational guidance and training courses. Priority is given to the low-skilled unemployed, women who have difficulties with vocational reintegration, per-sons unemployed for more than 2 years and those who are not receiving unemployment bene-fits (neither contributory benefits nor social assistance), as well as to recipients of the Guaran-

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teed Minimum Income. The case study investigates a Measure-2 training course targeted at women in the town of Figueira da Foz.

4.5 Some concluding remarksAs will be clear from the case studies described in this chapter, a large variety of types of par-ticipation has been studied in the INPART project. This variety not only concerns the four types of work/participation we distinguished, but also differences within the four types. In the case studies, our main concern is with the situations and experiences of the participants in these types of work. Up until now we only highlighted some of the contextual issues that are important in understanding and describing these situations and experiences. For example, only some elements of the welfare state regimes people live in were mentioned. Even less at-tention was paid to more general socio-economic indicators or the labour-market situation in the different countries or regions/municipalities where the case studies were carried out.

Giving these contextual issues, the explicit attention they require to fully understand the respondents’ situations and experiences would demand a separate report. Part of this work has been undertaken in earlier work of the INPART group. Here, we will limit ourselves to mentioning some of the core themes that need to be kept in mind when reading the results of our case studies.

First of all, socio-economic indicators show important differences between the countries in-volved in this research. Table 4 summarises some key indicators.

Table 4. Key socio-economic indicators, INPART-countries and EU average (%, 1997)Unemploy-ment

Proportion of long-term un-employment

Youth unem-ployment

Female unem-ployment

Labour-mar-ket participa-tion

Female LM-participation

Belgium 9.2 58.7 6.8 11.9 57.3 47.0Denmark 5.5 27.2 6.0 6.6 77.5 71.1Netherlands 5.2 48.0 6.1 6.9 66.7 54.9Portugal 6.8 51.5 6.2 7.8 67.5 58.6Spain 20.8 51.9 15.9 28.3 48.6 33.9UK 7.0 38.6 2.7 6.0 70.8 63.9EU-average 10.7 48.6 9.8 12.4 60.5 50.5Source: EU/DG5, Employment Policies in the EU and in the Member States. Joint Report 1998.

Unemployment in 1997 was below the EU average in the Netherlands (5.2%), Belgium (9.2%), UK (7%), Denmark (5.5%) and Portugal (6.8%), while very high in Spain (20.8%). The proportion of long-term unemployment is low in Denmark (27.2%) and high in Belgium (58.7%). Major differences also exist with respect to levels of youth unemployment, which is below the EU average in all INPART countries except Spain, where youth unemployment is at 15.9% (1997). Unemployment under women is higher than unemployment under men in all EU countries except the UK. In Spain, female unemployment is very high: 28.3%. Labour-market participation in 1997 was below the EU average in Spain (48.6%) and Belgium (57.3%), and above this average in the other countries, with Denmark at the top (77.5%). Ma-jor differences exist when adding the gender dimension, showing that female labour-market participation is considerably lower in all countries under study. These indicators influence the ‘opportunity structures’ in which people in the different countries make choices with respect to their participation, and will also influence their experiences with inclusion and exclusion.

Another important element are the social policy and employment rights regimes in the various countries, which also influence the choices people make and the experiences they

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have. Active social policies, for example, reveal different ‘risk and opportunity’ structures when different countries are compared as well as when different policies in the same country are compared. Work-fare-like active policies may increase participation opportunities for the unemployed (and sometimes, but certainly not always, opportunities for income improve-ment), but refusing to take part in these schemes may have far-reaching consequences with re-spect to benefit entitlements (cf. the case of the Portuguese POC scheme). Another ‘high-risk environment’ is constituted by the Spanish capitalisation scheme. Workers in the scheme have to work for at least a period equivalent to the quotation period in order to gain new unemploy-ment benefit rights. If a worker capitalised two years of unemployment benefit, he will only regain unemployment benefit rights after working in the social company for at least two years. If the company crashes before these two years have passed, workers will not be entitled to contributory unemployment benefits. In these cases, they can obtain the minimum income assistance. A completely different situation exists in the Dutch social activation programme (at least in some municipalities), where participation is voluntary and people can opt out without any consequences.

A third aspect relates to the national welfare states as well and concerns the levels of income provision that welfare state arrangements offer the unemployed. Even though, as our case studies will show, financial incentives are not the only driving forces that motivate people to participate in the labour market or in active policies, they are, of course, very im-portant. It is quite clear that the social security systems in the countries under study confront people with very different levels of financial hardship. These differences are relevant with re-spect to both their participation choices and their experiences of participation.

Fourthly, the availability of state/non-state provisions and of informal economic ar-rangements to fulfil people’s needs are an important element in shaping their opportunities and experiences. In Northern European nations, state provisions are highly developed but al-ternative non-state provisions have become scarce. In Southern European nations, the family is an important provider of welfare provisions in a context where the welfare state is still de-veloping and state interventions meet much more suspicion and scepticism than in Northern European countries. For the same reasons, the role of NGO’s in welfare provision is much more important in Southern European countries. Nevertheless, NGO’s are of increasing im-portance in some Northern European countries as well. As we saw in the case of the Belgian third-system organisations, the Belgian state subsidises these NGO’s, delegating part of wel-fare provision to these organisations. Finally, informal economic activities as a resource for participation and income generation are of very different importance in the INPART nations.

Evidently, the more advanced welfare states are, the more recipients of welfare provi-sions become subject to regulations and the less their own initiatives to prevent or solve prob-lems of exclusion are respected and recognised. In this sense, one might argue that high levels of state protection may indeed result in high levels of dependency, not so much because they create calculating citizens (as adherents of the dependency culture thesis state), but because private coping strategies are curbed. We will return to these issues in the concluding chapters.

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Part 2

The case studies

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5. The respondents

5.1 IntroductionIn this chapter we will present some background data on the respondents of our case studies. These data are presented here for descriptive purposes mainly. Given the fact that not all case studies were designed to be statistically representative, the presentation of data in this chapter will not be used to make sample/population comparisons. For issues of representativeness of the case studies, we refer to the national reports on the case studies that are annexed to this re-port.

5.2 GenderTable 5 presents the gender of the respondents of the case studies. As in the following tables, we will present the data for each separate case study, clustered according to the types of parti-cipation we distinguished earlier.

Table 5. Gender of respondents (%)Types of participation/case studies

Male Female N

Primary Labour MarketEmployed (DK)Part-time (UK)

52 48 284- 100 23

Secondary L.M.TSO’s: Work (B)Activated-Work (DK)Melkert-1 (NL)POC (PT)UB Capitalisation (ES)

69 31 21835 65 35252 48 25- 100 2063 37 100

Unpaid WorkVoluntary Work (DK)*Social Activation (NL)Informal Work (UK)

(22)45 55 20N/a N/a 125

Training/EducationTSO’s Training (B)Activ.-Education (DK)*Measure-2 (PT)

51 49 297

- 100 20OtherUnemployed (DK) 41 59 148* Respondents of these groups are included in the ‘Activated Work’ case study

One should be careful in drawing more general conclusions from these figures, as well as from other data presented in this chapter. Keeping this in mind, some comments can be made. First of all, we have observed that three case studies focus on women only: the two Por-tuguese case studies and the British case study on part-time work. As far as the Measure-2 case study is concerned, the training course under study was aimed at women. With respect to the other case studies, the fact that they had only female respondents may reflect the overrep-resentation of women in these types of participation, but this may also be because only wo-men showed willingness to co-operate in the investigation.

Secondly, the Danish case study among the activated, which is based on a random sample from a national register of activated people, shows the overrepresentation of women in

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activation programmes. Official figures on participants in activation schemes in Belgium show the same picture. However, this picture may be different for different activation pro-grammes. For example, data on participants of the Dutch Melkert-1 and Social Activation schemes in the city of Rotterdam show that men are slightly overrepresented in Melkert-1 whereas women are highly overrepresented in Social Activation (even more so than is reflec-ted in the sample characteristics). An overrepresentation of men can also be observed in the Spanish capitalisation of unemployment benefits scheme. This reflects both the different la-bour-market histories of men and women in Spain and the target group of the scheme: people who capitalise their unemployment benefits usually have long labour-market participation his-tories, which we find more frequently among men than among women.

5.3 AgeIn table 6, we given an overview of the age-groups the respondents belong to at the time of in-terviewing.

Table 6. Age of respondents (%)Type of participation/case study

<30 30-40 40-50 50+ N

Primary Labour MarketEmployed (DK)Parttime (UK)

11 33 25 31 28443 30 13 13 23

Secondary L.M.TSO’s: Work (B)Activated-Work (DK)Melkert-1 (NL)POC (PT)UB Capitalization (ES)

29 40 22 9 21728 23 20 28 35216 24 20 40 2535 25 30 10 2017 31 35 17 100


(22)- 25 50 25 20N/a N/a N/a N/a 125

Training/EducationTSO’s: Training (B)Activ.-Education (DK)*Measure-2 (PT)

64 23 11 2 297

55 45 - - 20OtherUnemployed (DK) 27 24 18 31 148* see note under table 5

Some careful observations can be made with respect to age groups participating in activating social policies. In general, the Danish case studies show that the distribution of age groups among the unemployed and activated is quite similar. Nevertheless, specific measures seem to reach and/or to be targeted at specific age groups. This is revealed by the fact that respondents from our training and education case studies are mainly people under 40, many of them younger than 30. More generally, one may expect that activation measures designed as being stepping stones towards regular labour-market participation (training/education or temporary work or work-experience schemes; for example POC in Portugal) will be directed at relatively younger unemployed people, whereas schemes providing more permanent participation (Melkert-1 in the Netherlands, capitalisation of unemployment benefits in Spain, social enter-prises in Belgium) will (also) be targeted at older unemployed people.

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5.4 Level of educationIn table 7, we present data on the educational levels of the respondents. Because of differ-ences between national educational systems, we only use rough indicators for this variable.

Table 7. Educational levels of respondents (%)Type of participation/case study

Max. Primary Secondary Post-secondary* N

Primary Labour MarketEmployed (DK)**Part-time (UK)

18 47 35 284- 91 9 23

Secondary L.M.TSO’s: Work (B)Activated-Work (DK)**Melkert-1 (NL)POC (PT)UB Capitalisation (ES)

25 70 5 21649 24 27 35232 56 12 2560 40 - 2017 36 47 96

Unpaid WorkVoluntary Work (DK)***Social Activation (NL)Informal Work (UK)

35 55 10 20N/a N/a N/a 125

Training/EducationTSO’s: Training (B)Activ.-Education (DK)***Measure-2 (PT)

13 83 4 294

85 15 - 20

OtherUnemployed (DK) 55 24 21 148* Including intermediate and higher vocational education and university.** Primary education includes both ‘no vocational education’ and ‘vocational training’. *** see note below table 5

The bulk of respondents who are participants in activating social policies (secondary labour market, the Dutch social activation case study and training/education) have completed sec-ondary levels of education maximally. This reflects, of course, the overrepresentation of lower qualified people among the target groups of these policies, the unemployed and particularly the long-term unemployed. In Spain, the participants in the sample stand out because they are relatively high qualified compared to participants in other activating policies. This scheme will be most attractive to workers that are either qualified or have the extensive work experi-ence necessary to run their own company. Nevertheless, the scheme is also accessible to workers with lower qualifications, for the only requirement for scheme participation is to have accumulated unemployment benefit rights to invest in a social company.

5.5 Duration of unemploymentConcerning the participants in active social policies, some information is available with re-spect to the duration of their unemployment. We have no detailed information on the activated people in the Danish case study, but given the logic of Danish activating policies, generally speaking the respondents in this category will have been unemployed for at least 1 year. As we have mentioned already with respect to the Spanish case studies, participants in this scheme –at least those that are ‘associated workers’ and capitalised their unemployment bene-fits- will normally have been unemployed for only a couple of months. For the Belgian and Dutch case studies, more detailed information on the duration of unemployment of respond-ents is available. From the Belgian respondents, we know the duration of employment experi-

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ences prior to the interview. From the Dutch respondents, duration of social assistance de-pendency was measured. Although the figures refer to different variables in both countries, we present them together in table 8.

Table 8. Indicators for duration of experiences of unemployment of participants in Belgian and Dutch case studies (%)Type of participation/case study

<1 year 1-2 years >2 years Never re-gistered*

N

Secondary L.M.Loc. S.E. Work (B)Melkert-1 (NL)

8 19 56 17 163- 28 72 - 25

Unpaid WorkSocial Activation (NL) 5 15 80 - 20Training/EducationTSO’s: Training (B) 16 14 25 45 256* The category of ‘never registered’ in the Belgian case studies refers to school leavers and other new labour-market entrees

5.6 Household compositionFor most of the case studies, we also have data on the household composition of the respond-ents. These are presented in table 9.

Table 9. Household composition of respondents (%)Type of participation/case study

Single Single parent Couple, no children

Couple with children

Other N

Primary Labour MarketEmployed (DK)**Part-time (UK)

18 82 - 2844 22 - 74 - 23

Secondary L.M.TSO’s: Work (B)Activated/Work (DK)**Melkert-1 (NL)POC (PT)UB Capitalization (ES)

41 11 13 21 13 21840 60 - 33020 20 16 20 24 25- - 15 70 15 2017 5 10 56 12 100


50 20 15 10 5 20N/a N/a N/a N/a N/a 125

Training/EducationTSO’s: Training (B)Activ.-Education (DK)*Measure-2 (PT)

28 5 13 16 37 297

- 25 - 70 5 20OtherUnemployed (DK)** 46 54 - 148* see note below table 5** since slightly different categories were used in the Danish case studies, we only use the distinction singles/couples here

The figures clearly show that in the Northern European countries (Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands), many participants in activating measures are either single or single parents, cor-responding with the living situation of many unemployed in these countries (cf. the number of single people among the Danish unemployed). Contrarily, most of the respondents in Portugal and Spain fall into the category of married couples, either with or without children. Even

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though these figures cannot validate this, one is inclined to explain at least part of this differ-ence by the fact that Southern European countries constitute welfare societies in which the family plays a more important role.

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6. Unemployment and exclusion

6.1 IntroductionOne of the assumptions underlying social and political debates on unemployment and exclu-sion is that unemployment induces social exclusion. At the same time, there is enough sci-entific research evidence to question this assumption, and to claim that social exclusion may be a risk linked to unemployment, but not necessarily an unavoidable consequence of unem-ployment.

Some of our case studies have generated results that can be used to take a more de-tailed look at the assumption mentioned above. On the one hand, there is the Danish case study on unemployed people. On the other, the case studies on some Portuguese and Dutch active social policies generated insights into the life-histories, the situations and experiences of the unemployed and former unemployed participating in these policies, which may shed some light on the validity of the assumption. The same goes for the British case study on in -formal work, though most of the results of this case study will be presented in one of the sub-sequent chapters. It should be emphasised that making this distinction between the period of unemployment before participation in the types of work under investigation and the period of participation itself is a bit artificial. First of all, it might suggest that before starting their parti-cipation in the types of work we are investigating, the unemployed were ‘passive’ and not participating at all. As we shall see, this is not the case. Secondly, in some of the types of par-ticipation we have been investigating, participants remain officially unemployed.

6.2 Exclusion from domains of participationThe assumption is more or less taken for granted that the unemployed are excluded from par-ticipation in the regular labour market. However, this picture seems too simple. In the light of our case studies, and given the respondents’ labour-market participation histories, relations between unemployment and labour-market exclusion vary: First, there are the ‘part-time’ unemployed or underemployed, people that have part-time

and/or flexible jobs and receive supplementary benefits and are therefore registered as un-employed;

Secondly, part of the unemployed are not directly available for the labour market, for ex-ample because they are participating in education and training programmes or because they are released from the obligation to apply for jobs because of illness or caring re-sponsibilities;

Thirdly, there are the unemployed for whom periods of unemployment seem to be a ‘regu-lar’ feature of their labour-market participation histories;

Fourthly, there is the group of long-term or even very long-term unemployed that seems to experience structural difficulties in entering or re-entering the labour market.

Thus, while the first group is ‘partly’ integrated into the labour market, the second is more marginalised, whereas the third is more structurally excluded from labour-market participa-tion. This picture would become even more complex if participation in informal or ‘clandes-tine’ work were added. Especially in the southern European countries but certainly not absent in the other countries, participation in the informal economy is frequently used as a participa-tion strategy. And although the ‘quality of inclusion’ differs importantly when comparing the regular with the informal labour market, for example, in terms of employment rights or social security entitlements, it would be equally wrong not to distinguish the ‘really’ unemployed

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from the unemployed that are able to find some employment in the black economy.

That unemployment does not necessarily imply exclusion from other types of work becomes quite clear from the results of our case studies. The following table, derived from the Danish case studies, compares participation in various types of work of employed and unemployed people.

Table 10. Participation of employed and unemployed people in various types of ‘non-occupational’ work in the last 3 months, Danish case studies (%)Type of work Employed UnemployedVoluntary work 28 12‘Moonlight’ work 5 3Helping friends 34 19Do-it-yourself 42 22None of the above 31 57N 284 148

The other case studies also show participation of unemployed people in various types of work. For example, of the respondents in the Dutch case studies, about one third had been participating in voluntary work during unemployment, whereas for a slightly smaller group, taking care (mostly raising children by single female parents on social assistance) was an im-portant activity during unemployment. In the Portuguese case, organised voluntary work is less common, whereas domestic work and, to a lesser degree, informal unpaid work for relat-ives or friends are activities in which the unemployed engage more frequently. In this context, we should point out that all Portuguese respondents were women.

Of course, we cannot assume that the respondents in the Dutch and Portuguese case studies are representative for the unemployed. For example, it may be that active social policies –and our respondents were participants in these policies- select the more active part of the unemployed population. The Danish case study shows some evidence for this: the group of activated people, i.e. participants in active social policies, participates in voluntary work more frequently than the group of unemployed. Nevertheless, participation is not absent among the unemployed. Whether these activities constitute meaningful forms of participation is a question that we will return to in the next section.

Table 10 also shows that participation among the Danish unemployed is at a significantly lower level than among the employed, and non-participation in the types of work that are dis-tinguished is more frequent. At the same time, differences are perhaps smaller than one might expect when considering a paid job as the ‘entry ticket’ to other forms of participation. When looking in more detail at the results of the Danish case study, comparing the levels of exclu-sion and inclusion of employed and unemployed people in the domains we have been distin-guishing, more or less the same picture emerges. Thus, exclusion is more widespread among the unemployed (for example, in the social domain, from partner relations; in the political do-main, from active involvement in various organisations or institutions; in the leisure/cultural domain, from activities that involve spending money), but at the same time, differences with the group of employed are relative rather than absolute. Apart from labour-market exclusion, perhaps the most striking form of exclusion among the unemployed is the exclusion from partner relations, or, at least, from cohabiting with a partner. This may well be a more general characteristic of the unemployed in the northern European countries; although the Dutch case study shows that the situation may be very different for various ethnic groups.

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It is quite usual to relate social exclusion to unemployment. From this point of view, unem-ployment is the main factor contributing to high risks of social exclusion. Nevertheless, our case studies enable us to identify other risk factors our respondents are confronted with as well. Furthermore, these risk factors cannot always be fully and unambiguously ascribed to unemployment. Health is a well-known example: health problems may be both the result and cause of unemployment. The Portuguese and Dutch case studies clearly show that practically all respondents face more than one risk factor; and in some cases, one will reach the conclu-sion that unemployment is not the most important one. On the basis of these case studies, we may distinguish the following risk factors. Lack of financial resources. Even though unemployment and a low level of income are

closely related, it is useful to deal with both risk factors independently. Whether or not un-employment results in financial hardship depends on many things: level of welfare state support; support from relatives, friends et cetera (‘welfare society’); duration of unem-ployment; composition of the household; standard of living people are used to; availability of alternative income resources or of other ways ‘to get things done’; people’s inventive-ness in coping with financial hardship; the importance attached to income; et cetera. Thus, even though it is not very hard to establish that the financial situation of the unemployed in, say, the Netherlands is better than in Portugal, it is far more difficult to establish whether this implies that the Dutch unemployed find it easier to escape from social exclu-sion than the Portuguese. Anyway, even though levels of welfare state provision vary con-siderably, all case studies provide us with instances where financial hardship leads to forms of exclusion: from social relations, from cultural activities, from leisure activities, et cetera. This clearly shows how participation has increasingly become subject to pro-cesses of monetarisation.

Poor educational levels. The poor education of many respondents in the Portuguese and Dutch case studies reduces their opportunities in the labour market considerably. The backgrounds of these poor educational levels are diverse. For example, they may be re-lated to dropping out from school, to prioritising paid work to education during people’s youth, or to immigration (non-recognition of educational levels attained in the country of origin). Some try to increase educational levels later in life, others develop or have de-veloped a rather negative attitude towards education.

Precarious employment. Especially in the Portuguese case study, the interviewees repor-ted vocational histories in which precarious or clandestine employment were quite com-mon. Of course, these work histories in low-paid jobs with little social rights influence their situation negatively in periods of unemployment. Among the Dutch respondents, clandestine work is far less common. Particularly the Melkert-1 participants have fairly stable work histories, but were eventually confronted with long-term unemployment. The Social Activation participants who on average became unemployed at a younger age, more frequently report employment histories in flexible, less secure jobs.

Family instability. The most obvious example of family instability is, of course, divorce. Having to take care of your children on your own, and the emotional and psychological problems divorce may cause, can increase exclusion risks considerably. Family instability does not necessarily have to be limited to conflicts between spouses, but can involve intra-family relationships more generally. In the Portuguese case, family problems related to persisting regimes of patriarchal authority are quite common. Not coincidentally, women are confronted with exclusion risks related to family instability more frequently.

Housing. Particularly among the Portuguese respondents, housing and, more specifically,

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shortness of housing space, were factors of vulnerability to their households. The urban respondents were talking about excessive rents they had to pay. The rural respondents were home owners. Among Dutch social assistance recipients, homeownership is very scarce. In the Dutch case studies, housing conditions were not dealt with explicitly, but it is a well-known fact that Dutch social assistance recipients pay large parts of their income on housing and that they often live in high-risk neighbourhoods.

Health. Among the relatively young Portuguese respondents, physical health problems were not reported as an important issue. There were, however, reports of mental health problems related to unemployment or family instability. Among the on average older Dutch respondents, physical and/or mental health problems were reported more fre-quently.

Alcoholism and drug addiction. Some respondents reported about these problems, which may have far-reaching consequences, not only for their health but also for their inclusion in work and in social relations.

Social isolation. Being deprived of social networks may increase exclusion risks. We have already noted that in the Northern European countries, many unemployed are single or single parents. From the Portuguese case study we learn that social isolation is more wide-spread in the urban environment. Of course, social isolation may be also depend on other risk factors.

Social security systems. Social security regimes themselves may contribute to exclusion, not only because of the low levels of income they provide to people dependent on social security, but also because of the rules and regulations attached to receiving social benefits. Clear examples of these are the rules and regulations that influence the choices people make with respect to the composition of their households (starting to live with a partner may have important income consequences because of the income test) and with respect to participation (often, work tests only take into account paid work, not the unpaid work of single parents or volunteers).

6.3 Experiences of exclusionIn this section, we will report on the experiences the unemployed have had with respect to so-cial exclusion. Labour-market participation is seen as offering people resources to fulfil spe-cific needs, and unemployment may endanger the satisfaction of these needs. Charting exclu-sion experiences of the unemployed presents us with a picture of heterogeneity. Exclusion ex-periences of the unemployed can be very different, both in intensity and quality. These differ-ences not only depend on the needs people emphasise, but also on the availability of resources and the successfulness of strategies they deploy to satisfy their needs.

Income and consumption are, of course, very important needs that are endangered by unem-ployment in all case studies. In all case studies, and most frequently in the Portuguese case studies, lack of income and financial hardship are reported as major causes of experiences of exclusion. All case studies show instances where low levels of consumption and participation (housing, clothing, food, participation in cultural activities, holidays et cetera) are directly re-lated to financial hardship. At the same time, ‘income’ seems to be a complex concept, as we have already shown in the precious section. Material needs and the availability of ‘alternative’ resources explain part of the variety of experiences of exclusion from income and consump-tion. For example, the importance of family support is most clear in the Portuguese case study, as more than half of the number of respondents receive material and other support from the family.

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Despite these instances of financial hardship, the Danish case study on unemployed people revealed a surprisingly high satisfaction with present standards of living. Of the unem-ployed respondents, two-thirds were either satisfied or even very satisfied with their standard of living (compared to 97% of the employed). Only 37% of the unemployed stated that they have economic problems or expect these in the year to come. At the same time, two-thirds of the unemployed also stated that their income inhibits their self-expression. When combining objective measurements (level of income) and subjective measurements (level of satisfaction with standard of living) to construct an indicator of the level of inclusion into/exclusion from the consumption domain, the Danish case studies found only minor differences between the unemployed and the employed: 14% of the employed and 19% of the unemployed are ex-cluded from the consumption domain. Whether the unemployed have adjusted their con-sumptive and participation needs to their income levels, or whether they hope to be able to improve their situation soon, remains unclear.

The topic of income not only relates to the level of income as such, but also to the issue of economic independence or autonomy. Being dependent on benefits may not only confront people with financial constraints, but may also curb their independence and autonomy. Inde-pendence and autonomy are, of course, related to the level of income. But besides that, they are also related to the rules and regulations attached to receiving social benefits. In the Dutch case studies, a lack of autonomy and independence was mentioned by several respondents as a clear example of experiences of social exclusion. They related these experiences both to a lack of choice in leading the life they wanted to live and to the condescending ways in which social security consultants sometimes treated them.

Social isolation is another aspect of the social exclusion unemployed people experience. Missing the social relations that paid work offers almost automatically, lack of financial re-sources, feelings of shame due to unemployment and social benefit dependency, being ‘trapped at home’ as a consequence of raising young children alone, lack of self-confidence or ‘fuel’ for conversations are all examples of the way respondents relate their unemployment to feelings of social isolation. Nevertheless, once again unemployment does not bring about so-cial isolation unavoidably. For example, the Danish case study shows that three-quarters of the unemployed answered ‘no’ to the question whether they sometimes feel lonely; among the employed the percentage was 85%. Dissatisfaction with social networks was found to be three times as high among unemployed compared to employed, but percentages were relat-ively low: 12% and 4% respectively. Using both objective and subjective indicators, the Dan-ish team constructed an index of inclusion in and exclusion from social life. One in every 5 unemployed is excluded from social life, against one in every 8 employed.

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of people’s social life are not necessarily related to each other. In the context of ‘objective’ operationalisations of exclusion, being part of only small social networks is often interpreted as indicating social exclusion. However, small so-cial networks may be quite meaningful and satisfying for some, whereas others need more ex-tended social networks to feel comfortable. Thus, the extension of social networks may also reflect cultural preferences, for example with respect to ‘local’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyles. At the same time, smaller social networks, for example, limited to the family, can make people’s social life more vulnerable in cases of ‘critical events’. Frequency of social contacts and people’s perceptions of social life seem to be related in a complex way. For example, the Danish team found no correlation between frequency of social contacts and feelings of loneli-ness among the unemployed, but there was a correlation between frequency of social contacts

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and satisfaction with the social network. Finally, we found some instances of ‘self-isolation’. For some people, being involved

into social interactions is so demanding and threatening that they opt for as few social interac-tions as possible. Here, isolation is turned into a survival strategy.

In general, a paid job is seen as providing workers with a respectful social role. Unemploy-ment may take away status and respect, and may contribute to experiences of exclusion from a ‘decent’ and ‘worthy’ life. The same goes for another aspect of paid work: being involved in useful activities and the ability to contribute to society. As might be expected, several unem-ployed respondents in our case studies did mention the exclusion from status, respect and use-ful activities as important aspects of their situations. On the other hand, we also found several respondents who found other ways to gain status and respect and to be involved in useful activities. They looked for or, less consciously, got involved into alternative social roles: as parent, partner, family member, volunteer, student, et cetera.

Finally, the Dutch case studies pointed at two other needs people found difficult to satisfy. First of all, some respondents felt excluded from personal development: they found it hard to use and develop their skills and competencies and to meet new challenges. Secondly, a group of respondents felt excluded from ways of dealing with personal problems: for them, being involved in meaningful activities might distract their attention from these problems and in-crease their capacities to cope with them.

Up until now, we mainly concerned ourselves with the economic and social domains of parti-cipation and the consequences of not having a paid job. Partly, this may be seen as a research-ers’ bias, since in several case studies more attention has been paid to these domains than to the political domain and the cultural, leisure and religious domain. However, there is an em-pirical reason for this as well. For example, both the Portuguese and the Danish case studies which did pay explicit attention to the domains of politics and culture/leisure/religion, found that, for the respondents, participation in the economic and social domains was more import-ant. As far as unemployed people’s experiences of exclusion from the other domains are con-cerned, we have some data from the Danish case study on political inclusion (we will come back to the Portuguese case studies in the following chapters). These data reveal that almost half the number of unemployed, compared to one-third of the employed, feel that they have insufficient influence on matters that concern them. Again combining objective and subjective indicators, the Danish team concludes that the unemployed feel politically excluded twice as frequently as the employed: 26% and 13% respectively.

In this section we have been discussing unemployed people’s own experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Both in terms of exclusion from participation in domains as in terms of exclu-sion from satisfying needs we have shown that unemployed people are confronted with quite a number of exclusion risks. At the same time, our case studies reveal that the respondents de-velop various strategies aimed at diminishing these risks. Although this distinction is slightly artificial, we can distinguish strategies aimed at: Increasing income or reducing expenses: looking for a job, getting engaged in informal or

clandestine paid work, ‘tightening one’s belt’, developing networks of solidarity and mu-tual help, domestic production et cetera;

Getting engaged in alternative social roles: being a parent, volunteer, student, carer of a partner, relatives, friends, neighbours, et cetera.

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Even though these strategies often can have both functions, the first group emphasises com-bating material exclusion risks, whereas the latter emphasises more immaterial needs the un-employed try to satisfy. It should be pointed out here that these coping strategies are not ne-cessarily realistic options for all unemployed, either because they do not have the resources to develop them (social networks, equipment, skills, support et cetera) or because they do not consider them attractive, worthy or full alternatives to participation in paid work.

6.4 Self-exclusion through deviating work attitudes?In the final section of this chapter, we will have a look at the work attitudes of the unem-ployed. Are the attitudes of the unemployed towards paid work part of the explanation for their exclusion from the labour market? Although our data do not allow a final answer to this question, they do point out the importance the unemployed attach to work. For example, about two-thirds of the Belgian respondents consider work to be a familiar duty, and three-quarters of the Danish unemployed agree that people should support themselves by working. The meanings people ascribe to work are various, and the emphasis placed on various mean-ings differs for each national sample. For example, three-quarters of the Belgian respondents consider work important because it generates income. Contrary to what one might expect, the Portuguese female respondents do not consider earning money the most important meaning of work less: self-fulfilment is mentioned more often than earning money, although one might argue that economic independence is an important precondition for self-fulfilment. Both the Belgian and Danish unemployed mention self-esteem and self-respect as important meanings of work, though the Danish employed seem to consider this meaning of work more important than the Danish unemployed, which may signify that the unemployed did manage or, put dif-ferently, saw themselves forced to create other ways of gaining self-respect. The same may be true for the risk of social isolation attributed to not having a paid job: one-third of the Danish employed fear that they will become socially isolated when unemployed, against 18% of the unemployed. Of the Belgian unemployed, almost two-thirds thinks that work is an important resource for meeting other people.

The fact that income is still an important meaning of work, but by no means the only meaning of work, also becomes clear from the way the respondents react to a citizens’ or guaranteed income scenario. This question was asked in the Danish, Portuguese and Belgian case studies. In the Danish case study, two-thirds of the unemployed would certainly continue their paid work when they would receive a basic income of 1,000 Euro a month, and almost half would certainly continue working when receiving a basic income of 1,700 Euro a month. In the Belgian case studies, these percentages were different as were the levels of guaranteed income presented to the respondents: 37% would keep on working and 31% would stop work-ing when they would receive a guaranteed income of 1,735 Euro a month, whereas 28% would keep on working and 43% would stop working when receiving a guaranteed income of 2,480 Euro a month. Two-thirds of the Portuguese respondents would remain working if they got a basic income at the level of the National Minimum Wage, which amounts to 306 Euro a month.

From the Dutch case studies one may conclude that strong labour-market orientations do not necessarily lead to active job-search behaviour. For example, among the Social Activation re-spondents (40% of whom have been dependent on social assistance for more than 10 years), we found that 50% stopped searching for jobs after several years of fruitlessly looking for one, even though they were not released from the obligation to apply for jobs officially. The respondents point out various reasons for deciding to quit job-searching.

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They consider their high age and low educational levels as insurmountable barriers to la-bour-market participation;

They want to avoid the feelings of frustration that numerous unsuccessful job applications gave them;

They have found other meaningful social roles and activities.Special attention should be paid to the position of single parents (practically all of them wo-men). According to Dutch law, single parents have to start applying for jobs when their youngest child reaches the age of 5. Some women, even though they stress the importance of motherhood, start applying for jobs sooner because they consider motherhood unchallenging, and as causing situations of social isolation. For others, motherhood seems to be more ful-filling (or, perhaps, is experienced as more demanding): even though they do not rule out la-bour-market participation in the future, they do not want to start looking for a job until they feel sure that their children can handle their mother’s absence.

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7. Employed in the primary labour market

7.1 IntroductionIn this chapter we will start the presentation of the results of our case studies concerning the inclusionary potential of various types of work and participation. This chapter differs consid-erably with the previous one. In the previous chapter, we dealt with the issue of unemploy-ment and exclusion/non-participation, and made a first attempt to evaluate the statement that unemployment equals exclusion and non-participation. In this chapter, we are dealing with the presumably most included in society: people who are employed in the primary labour market. On the basis of two case studies we will evaluate the hypothesis that primary labour-market participation equals inclusion. Firstly, there is the Danish case study of the employed, on which some data were already presented in the previous chapter. Secondly, there is the British case study into part-time employment. This case study particularly looked at the importance of employment rights in harnessing the inclusionary potential of regular paid work.

7.2 Primary labour-market participation and inclusion in participation domainsGenerally, and more or less axiomatically, workers in the primary labour market are con-sidered to be included in the economic domain, especially in work. However, this statement needs to be qualified, if only since the ‘world of paid work’ has changed and differentiated dramatically. In our case studies, the British research into part-time work makes this point quite clear. It shows that we are far from an equal treatment of different groups of workers –even though the UK has been changing its policies regarding this issue considerably during the last few years-, specifically with respect to the distribution and realisation of employment rights. This situation not only causes different inclusionary potentials of different types of jobs. It also makes that different groups of workers are protected in different degrees against risks that may or will occur in the future, such as unemployment, illness and old age. And since the distribution of types of jobs is heavily gender biased, inequality in the security and protection provided by different types of jobs is an important element of gender inequality.

Table 11 shows the access to employment rights and occupational benefits of the 23 female part-time workers in the British case study.

Table 11. Respondents’ access to employment rights and occupational benefits, British part-time case study (%; n = 23)Employment rights/bene-fits

Entitled Not entitled Not known

Paid holidays 70 30 -Sick pay 70 30 -Pensions 70 30 -Maternity leave 70 26 4Written contract 74 26 -Wage slip 83 17 -National insurance 57 43 -Permanent contract 74 26 -Training opportunities 65 35 -Promotion opportunities 57 43 -

On the one hand, the figures presented in table 11 can be interpreted as a considerable im-provement with respect to the coverage of employment rights and occupational benefits for

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British part-time workers compared with the early nineties. This is mainly due to the fact that after 1995, hours thresholds that used to be applied to occupational rights and benefits were abolished. Nevertheless, there are still barriers that complicate full access of part-time work-ers to rights and benefits. First of all, for some occupational rights a two year qualifying period is applied, which can limit the inclusionary potential of part-time jobs in sectors with relatively high turnovers of staff. Secondly, access to rights and benefits is quite different in large and medium sized firms compared with small companies (less than 10 employees). All respondents working in small companies were excluded from basic statutory, occupational and welfare based rights. They were not entitled to paid holidays, sick pay, they had no writ-ten contract, only one received a written pay slip, all their earnings fell below the national in-surance threshold (although minimum wage legislation was implemented in small firms) and none had a pension. In this context, it is important to distinguish between the formal availabil-ity of rights and entitlements, and their actual implementation and realisation, since small companies are legally subject to the new and existing employment rights legislation as well. A third barrier is posed by National Insurance thresholds. 43% of the respondents earned be-low the National Insurance threshold, paid no National Insurance contributions and thus are not accruing entitlements to statutory pensions, maternity benefits and other insurance-based rights. Here, the issue of pensions is particularly interesting, since it may be used to illustrate both the structural exclusion and inclusion/exclusion strategies of respondents themselves. Apart from the state pension, three-quarters of the respondents work in companies that have pension schemes. Of these respondents, however, 41% decided to opt out of the company pension scheme in order to increase current income. Some of them paid into the state pension (even though their entitlement may be patchy due to periods of unemployment or below Na-tional Insurance threshold earnings), others did not pay into the state pension either. Thus, here we see how people trade-off short-term income security against long-term income pro-tection.

We have described the situation of British part-time workers in some detail to show that the often quoted slogan that ‘a job offers the best social security’ should be qualified. Economic inclusion of part-time workers, both in terms of their current situation as in terms of future security, looks far from perfect, even though major improvements have been intro-duced since the New Labour government came to power.

Looking at the inclusion in the sub-domain of income, the British case study of part-time work shows yet another example of trade-offs people make between various forms of in-clusion. Earning an income is the primary motive of the respondents in this case study to have a job; yet, they construct their employment and choices regarding labour-market participation around their role as primary carers for their children. This strategy of combining child care and labour-market participation limits opportunities for full income inclusion, which is exem-plified very clearly by the 26% of respondents that were also claiming in-work benefits.

How about the inclusion of the employed in the social domain? Looking first at their particip-ation in types of non-paid work, the Danish case study shows that the employed are more of-ten engaged in voluntary work, helping friends or do-it-yourself activities than the unem-ployed or activated people (see table 10). Nevertheless, one-third of the employed is not en-gaged in either of these types of non-paid work. In chapter 9, we will find a similar result with respect to the involvement of higher and lower income groups in informal work: informal economic activity is slightly more concentrated in higher-income households. As far as the British part-time working respondents are concerned, a large minority of them are involved in voluntary work. Once again, one may observe that participation strategies concentrate around

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the role of carer of children, since many voluntary work turned out to be children oriented.For the British respondents, working part-time was, apart from the necessity to earn an

income, also a strategy not to limit social participation to the family and household, and to enlarge social networks outside the family domain. As far as the Danish employed are con-cerned, they are more strongly integrated into the family than the activated and unemployed people, at least from an objective point of view. We already noticed that they live together with partners much more frequently. Furthermore, they have more frequent contacts with par-ents and children not living in the same household. On the other hand, the unemployed and activated have more frequent contacts with friends. This may point towards differences in the composition of social networks of employed and unemployed people, but it may also be a re-flection of priorities the employed use in spending their spare time9.

As far as inclusion in the political domain is concerned, the Danish case studies show that al-though the employed have a significant higher political activity rate than the unemployed and activated, this activity rate is at a rather low level. In the British case study on part-time work-ers, political inclusion focused on trade union membership particularly. This issue was raised in the case study since trade unions might improve part-timers’ inclusion in employment rights. At the same time, unionising part-time workers has been a trade union problem for a long time. Of the part-time respondents, 30% were unionised, those in small companies clearly being underrepresented.

Finally, the Danish case study presents some data on the inclusion of employed people in the cultural or leisure domain. On the basis of the empirical observations it can be concluded that there are only minor differences as to the degrees to which the four groups under investigation in the Danish case studies are involved within cultural or leisure activities. Two observations are relevant, however. First, the employed and unemployed seem to be involved in different kinds of cultural/leisure participation, the unemployed being more frequently absent in activit-ies that involve spending money. Secondly, the employed undertake leisure activities together with others, specifically colleagues, more often than the unemployed.

7.3 Experiences with inclusionIn the chapter on unemployment and exclusion we identified several needs, that the unem-ployed felt unable to satisfy, which we used as an indicator of experiences of exclusion. How do the employed experience their inclusion or, if applicable, exclusion?

As far as income and consumption are concerned, we already saw how income im-provement was an important objective of the part-time workers in the British case study, but this strategy was strongly conditioned by the responsibilities for their children. Furthermore, we found examples showing that short-term income gains were preferred to long-term income protection. This seems to reveal that, in the perception of the respondents themselves their in-clusion in income and consumption is rather weak, and to a large extent dependent on other household income. More generally, the respondents expressed dissatisfaction with their eco-nomic inclusion. They considered their current jobs as the best they could do given responsib-ilities for their children, but many respondents stressed that they considered their present situ-ation as temporary: they intend to move to ‘better jobs’ as soon as their responsibilities at home get less demanding. This shows that, in trying to combine paid work and raising chil-dren, these respondents feel restricted in their autonomy with respect to choosing the job they would really like; an issue we will return to in one of the following sections. This situation

9 On this issue, also compare the results of the Spanish case studies discussed in chapter 8. 47

made them perceive their current labour-market participation as a ‘stop-gap’. Particularly the respondents working in small companies expressed that inclusion in employment rights and benefits would improve their inclusion, particularly paid holidays and sick pay. At the same time, they felt that their employment was more informal and organised on a more friendly basis, which made it difficult in their perception to ask their employers for inclusion into these rights.

Among the Danish employed, satisfaction with their present standard of living is wide-spread as we already saw in the previous chapter: 97% of respondents are satisfied or even very satisfied. Also, having or expecting economic problems is scarce among the employed; even though almost half of the employed feel that their income inhibits their self-expression. Thus, we can conclude that, at least on the basis of the indicators that were used, the Danish employed feel relatively well included in the economic domain, certainly when compared to the unemployed and activated people. Nevertheless, the British case of part-time workers should raise our awareness of the fact that under the statistical generalisation of ‘the em-ployed’, a large variety may be hiding.

Social networks are often mentioned as another important meaning of work or, put differently, as another human need satisfied by labour-market participation. The Danish case study con-cludes that the social network employed people have as a result of their jobs is of the utmost importance. About half of the employed partly or totally agree with the statement that unem-ployment would make them socially isolated. Even though for them this is a hypothetical situ-ation, and even though the other half of employed does not agree with the statement, the data reveal that a significant part of employed people’s social contacts take place on the job, and that these social contacts are seen as meaningful. Compared to the unemployed and activated, the employed are most satisfied with their social network and feel lonesome less frequently. Using objective and subjective indicators of social inclusion and comparing the employed again with the same groups, the employed are included most, but, as we saw in the previous chapter, differences between the groups are fairly small. Satisfaction with social networks was also found among the British part-timers. Rather than being concerned with a lack of social participation, the British respondents seemed to be concerned with getting more time for themselves and also more time to spend with their partners.

With respect to the issues of status and respect, the British part-timers were quite clear in stat-ing that part-time workers should not be treated differently from full-time workers. Some re-spondents had the impression and experience that their part-time work was not valued by oth-ers, for example by employers or partners. For these women, taking a full-time job may be a future option to increase status and respect, but currently this option is not feasible, as we have already seen.

Furthermore, the part-timers emphasised that paid work enabled them to construct an identity outside of motherhood, even though their labour-market participation is closely con-nected to motherhood responsibilities.

Another issue brought forward by the British respondents relates to autonomy. A first aspect of autonomy concerns labour-market participation as such. All of the women but one had been working full-time prior to having children. When they started working part-time, a small majority of them had to change the sector they were working in, in order to find jobs offering the hours to fit childcare or because their ‘old’ job did not offer part-time work. In other words, in trying to combine paid work and childcare, the respondents were confronted with

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constraints reducing their capacity to freely chose the type of part-time work they wanted to participate in. Thus, many respondents saw their current job as a temporary job.

Another aspect of autonomy relates to the flexibility in working hours. The majority of respondents portrayed the operation of flexible hours as a two-way reciprocal relationship between themselves and their employers. In most cases, this worked in the respondents’ fa-vour, even though many respondents were able to cite examples where flexibility benefited their employers more than themselves, for example relating to working overtime or when re-spondents did not have fixed working hours.

Finally, for a majority of respondents, autonomy at work was quite small: there is little scope for individual input into their daily work. Even though a large minority expressed that this decreased their work satisfaction, it was generally accepted by most respondents that their paid work was unlikely to offer much scope for personal autonomy.

In conclusion, some final remarks can be made with respect to respondents’ experiences of political inclusion. From the Danish case studies we learn, that two-thirds of the employed think that they have sufficient influence on matters that mean something to them. This is slightly more than the satisfaction reported by the unemployed, but slightly less than reported by the unemployed voluntary workers. Combining subjective and objective measurements into an indicator of political inclusion, only 13% of the employed can be considered politic-ally excluded, which puts them in the same position as the unemployed voluntary workers.

In the British case study, political inclusion was investigated with respect to trade union involvement. As we noted before, part-time workers in small firms were reluctant to ask their employers to include them into employment rights. One might argue that the absence of trade union protection and representation in small firms is one of several factors preventing the equal treatment of part-time employees. At the same time, respondents expressed that the informal and friendly nature of their employment makes their firms inappropriate for trade union intervention. These attitudes towards unionisation will act as an additional barrier for trade unions to transform formal employment rights into substantial rights for part-time work-ers in small firms.

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8. Employed in the secondary labour market

8.1 IntroductionIn five of the six INPART countries, case studies have been carried out into active social policies that make use of secondary labour-market jobs. These policies may vary consider-ably. Two important differences are, first, the degree to which the jobs offered in the context of the programmes deviate from regular labour-market participation; and second, the degree to which participation is temporary (and considered as a stepping-stone towards regular la-bour-market participation) or permanent (and considered as the final solution). Against this background, we can distinguish the following types of policies on the basis of our case stud-ies. Permanent regular jobs with start-up subsidies. The Spanish Capitalisation of Unemploy-

ment Benefits scheme is a clear example of this type. Beneficiaries of the scheme receive their unemployment benefits as the initial capital for establishing social companies. The permanent character of participation depends, of course, on whether the social company manages to be successful. The Danish scheme supporting people in starting their own business is another example of activation policies that are directed at creating regular em-ployment.

Permanent jobs, gradually developing from additional into regular jobs. The Belgian In-sertion Enterprises are an example of this type. Starting as additional jobs financed by wage subsidies, after a certain period of time workers’ productivity should match regular labour-market productivity and wage subsidies are withdrawn.

Permanent additional jobs. The Dutch Melkert-1 scheme and the Belgian Social Enter-prise are examples of this type of secondary labour-market jobs10.

Temporary additional, work-experience oriented jobs. Programmes of this type are primarily work-experience oriented: they are designed to make people ‘fit’ into regular la-bour-market jobs. Duration of participation within the schemes may differ. In our case studies, the Danish work-oriented schemes belong to this type; so do the Belgian work-ex-perience projects and the Portuguese POC.

Apart from these distinctions, the schemes also differ with respect to their target groups. One clear example of this is the duration of unemployment of the target groups. The two ‘ex-tremes’ among our case studies are the Spanish Capitalisation scheme, for which unemployed people can apply as soon as they get unemployed (provided they are entitled to unemploy-ment benefits), and the Belgian Social Enterprise, mainly targeted at low-skilled people that have been unemployed for at least 5 years.

8.2 Inclusion into and exclusion from domains of participationIn this section we will go into the more ‘objective’ dimension of participation. Using regular labour-market participation as the ‘standard’, it is quite clear that the participants in the Span-ish scheme are most strongly included into the labour market. At the same time, they are con-fronted with high risks, since they have to restart building up unemployment benefits rights when using the capitalisation of unemployment benefits scheme to establish their company. When their company fails at an early stage of its development (that is, before gaining unem-ployment benefits rights once more) they will become unemployed without having any unem-

10 Dutch government likes to qualify Melkert-1 jobs as regular jobs. See chapter 4 on this issue.50

ployment benefits entitlements. This risk is especially high for older people. For them, capit-alising their unemployment benefit was a pragmatic choice to remain employed in a labour market that has changed dramatically because of the introduction of new technologies and of-fers them little alternative job opportunities. Thus, capitalising their benefits is a kind of ‘last-resort opportunity’ to continue working in the same sector. For young people, the situation is different, especially when they have higher educational levels. For them, working in social companies (either as associated or non-associated worker) is just one of the labour-market op-tions they have. In case the company fails, their chances to find another job are much better.

For the other schemes, it is more difficult to deal with the issue of inclusion in the eco-nomic domain. In a sense the participants in permanent jobs might be considered more eco-nomically integrated, but at the same time they are only integrated in a more marginal labour-market segment. People in temporary schemes may be seen as weakly integrated, but when these schemes are successful and manage to get people into regular labour-market jobs, their integrative potential may be higher than that of the permanent additional jobs, although this depends on the kinds of jobs they will find in the regular labour market, of course. In this re-spect (functioning as a stepping stone towards regular jobs), we have only limited data on the successfulness of the schemes; we will deal with participants’ views on this issue in the next section. The data we have come from the Portuguese case studies, in which, when interview-ing the respondents for the second time, 75% (15 respondents) had completed their participa-tion. 60% were still unemployed, 4 found fixed-term contracts on the regular labour market, and 2 were self-employed in the framework of a special activation programme. The latter points at a risk that we also found in other countries, namely that people become trapped in an ‘activation recycling’ process: leaving an activation scheme only to enter another. To illus-trate this risk from another point of view: almost half of the Belgian respondents reported that they had enrolled in some training or work-experience scheme before their current participa-tion in an activation programme. Also, almost half of the respondents in the Dutch Melkert-1 case had been participating for 2-5 years in another activation scheme, the Job-pool scheme, before entering the Melkert-1 scheme.

As far as inclusion in the sub-domains of income and consumption is concerned, the situation is again quite different for the various schemes. The respondents in the Spanish scheme have the most opportunities to improve their income situation. Most of them will start at lower income levels than they were used to have when starting the new company, but as soon as it is successful they will be able to improve their income situations. There are, of course, income differences within the social companies, for example, between associated workers in managerial posts and younger non-associated workers. However, the latter often live with their parents and have a high level of consumption. In most of the other schemes, in-come improvement is difficult, either because the period of participation is short and the scheme offers only temporary income improvement (for example the Portuguese POC scheme), or because income ceilings exist (the Danish public sector schemes, the Dutch Melkert-1 scheme). Thus, in the long run income improvement options in the temporary or permanent additional job schemes may be found only in the regular labour market. Neverthe-less, in most cases entering the secondary labour-market programmes implies some primary income improvement for participants, although the exact income consequences depend on poverty trap mechanisms that people may be confronted with. In spite of this, most house-holds still belong to low-income groups. For example, over two-thirds of the households of the Belgian respondents make less than 1150 Euro a month, 80% of the Portuguese house-holds of the respondents (composed of, on average, 3.35 persons) make less than 918 Euro a month. Debts among these households are frequent, for example, half of the households of the

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Belgian respondents were confronted with debts, mainly related to purchasing consumable goods or services.

What can we say about respondents’ inclusion in the social domain? From an ‘objective’ point of view one might expect that social participation increases since participation in the scheme extends social networks. At the same time, status differences occur between various ‘types’ of workers on the shop floor (for example, additional workers versus regular workers), which may influence experiences of social participation, as we will see in the next section.

Looking at informal social networks, we already noticed important differences in household composition. Whereas 40% or more of the respondents in the Northern European case studies are single or single parents, this proportion is much lower among the Southern European respondents (about one fifth in Spain and absent in Portugal). The absence or pres-ence of other household members is a clear indicator of social participation, of course. In Por-tugal, the family is very important in providing support to the respondents: half of them re-ceive financial support from their family, and the same proportion receives other forms of ma-terial support, emotional support or support in subsistence. Friends were resources of support as well, although to a much lesser extent and focusing on immaterial rather than material sup-port. Other social relations seemed to be less frequent; 35% of the respondents had no social relations outside the circle of family and friends. In Spain, the family is very important as an area of social participation as well. Particularly for older workers that have established their own family, social participation outside work may completely concentrate on the family. Apart from cultural habits, time constraints are a determining factor here as well: associated workers spend long working hours in their company, on the one hand because they feel very much involved with the company, on the other because there is high pressure on them to make the company successful. The importance of cultural habits in patterns of social particip-ation also becomes clear when comparing the respondents from the two areas in Spain where the case studies were conducted, i.e. Barcelona and Bilbao. In Bilbao, the peer group or cuad-rilla constitutes an important element in people’s social participation. All respondents from Bilbao were part of such a peer-group. Looking at the Northern European countries, informal networks of family or friends seem to be quite important as well. Almost three-quarters of the Belgian respondents reported to receive full or considerable support in cases of need from family and friends. Almost 60% of the respondents stated to have regular contacts with friends or family. Among the Danish activated people, only one-fifth to one-third of the re-spondents reported to have contacts with non-cohabiting parents, children or friends less than once a week. Compared to the Danish employed, the activated people seem to have more fre-quent contacts with friends and less frequent contacts with relatives.

Social participation in more formal social networks is, of course, closely related to participation in the cultural/leisure and political domains. We will return to these issues later on in this section. Here, it suffices to say that informal social participation is far more wide-spread among our respondents than formal participation (apart from work).

Concerning the domain of culture/leisure, the Danish case studies show that, on average, there are only minor differences with respect to the degrees to which the employed, activated, unemployed and volunteers are involved in leisure activities, even though there are differ-ences when looking at various leisure activities separately. Compared to the employed, activ-ated people are involved in sports/exercise less frequently and visit cinemas, theatres, concerts et cetera less frequently; but they are involved in hobbies slightly more frequently. As far as the Spanish respondents are concerned, they resemble ‘regular’ employees most. Cultural par-

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ticipation among the Spanish respondents seems to be more widespread than among the re-spondents from the other case studies. Their better financial situation, compared to other people involved in activation programmes, and their, on average, higher educational levels may be part of the explanation for this difference. Differences among the levels and types of cultural participation among the Spanish respondents are attributed to educational levels, fam-ily situation (for example, the presence of children) and people’s professional occupations.

For the other countries, we cannot make comparisons with employed people, but we can compare between the respondents of the other case studies. In the Portuguese case, for ex-ample, respondents from the POC scheme were involved in formal cultural participation (that is, cultural activities organised by local associations) more frequently than the respondents from the case study into the training and education programme (see chapter 10): 50% versus 30% were actively involved in these activities or went to watch these activities. These differ-ences, however, are not attributed to the different activation schemes the respondents are par-ticipating in, but rather to different environments people live in: POC respondents more often live in a rural environment, in which cultural activities take place more frequently. Thus, the environment people live in may act as a constraint on cultural participation. Other constraints identified in the Portuguese case studies are the persistence of patriarchal relations (all re-spondents in the case studies were women), lack of time, economic hardship and the particu-larist attitudes within associations. Economic hardship also seems to influence cultural parti-cipation of the respondents in the Dutch Melkert-1 case study. Some respondents claimed that they had lost their entitlement to the free municipal pass which gave them discount on fees for cultural activities. Respondents in the other Dutch case study, who were entitled to this free pass, mentioned it as facilitating their cultural participation. The Belgian case studies, finally, show lower levels of active involvement in leisure associations among respondents in work-oriented schemes compared to the respondents in the training programmes: 37% and 30% re-spectively. The same can be said about people with high levels of education in comparison with those that did not reach an upper secondary school degree. No relation was found, how-ever, when levels of economic resources were examined.

In general, political participation among the respondents seems to be at a low level. For ex-ample, political party membership is scarce: 10% among Portuguese respondents, 3% among the Danish activated people, about the same among Belgian respondents and nil among Dutch respondents. Whereas among the Portuguese respondents political participation among the POC-participants is at a higher level than among respondents from the training programme (for example, almost three quarters of the POC-participants report that they always vote at elections, against less than 15% among the trainees), the situation among the Belgian re-spondents is the reverse: political participation is at a slightly higher level among participants of training schemes. Trade union membership is somewhat more common, except Portugal where no trade-union members were found among the respondents. 13% of the Danish activ-ated are trade-union members, 5.8% of the Belgian respondents and 16% of the Dutch Melkert-1 respondents (all of them joined the union after they started working in the Melkert-1 scheme). There is some involvement in other political sub-domains, but rates of participa-tion in these sub-domains are at a low level as well. Comparing these figures with the Spanish respondents whose labour-market participation is most ‘regular’, we see that political particip-ation among them in terms of party or trade-union membership is low as well, and in both cases well below 10%. As far as the respondents from the area of Bilbao are concerned, polar-ised political relationships in the Bask country made respondents reluctant to talk about their involvement in politics openly during the interviews.

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8.3 Experiences of inclusion and exclusionHaving discussed inclusion into and exclusion from different domains in the previous section, we will now go deeper into the more ‘subjective’ dimensions of inclusion and exclusion, also paying attention to respondents’ views on the effects of participation in the secondary labour market.

First of all, we saw that the schemes discussed in this chapter differ with respect to the degree in which they offer participants temporary or permanent employment. In the case of the temporary schemes, one can raise the question whether the respondents expect positive ef-fects of the schemes with respect to labour-market opportunities. When looking at the Danish activated people, we see that even though half to two-thirds of participants in the programmes think that participation in the scheme has improved inclusion in the domain of work, they are quite pessimistic with respect to their ability to find another job: a majority of the people in job training or pool-job schemes think that this will be difficult. The pool-job participants also report less frequently that participation gave them a brighter view on the future: 41% reported so, against about two-thirds of the participants in the job training schemes. The participants in the scheme that offers them support in starting their own business are by far the most optim-istic: a majority of them think they will succeed. As far as the Portuguese respondents are concerned, we already saw that for most of them, participation in the POC-scheme was not followed by a job. Nevertheless, most of the respondents are positive about the temporary nature of the programme. Furthermore, as we will see below, participation was evaluated pos-itively from a number of other points of view. Satisfaction with the programme despite the fact that it did not turn out to resolve the unemployment problem permanently, may be related to prior experiences on the labour market: a succession of bad jobs combined with spells of unemployment make the precariousness of the POCs more acceptable. Among the Belgian re-spondents, even though 82% of them considers the work-directed activation schemes they are participating in, useful to get a job, 8 in 10 respondents in these schemes think it will be diffi -cult to find a job in the future. About 37% of the respondents is afraid of finding themselves trapped in third sector programmes, entering another scheme after having finished the current one. These rather pessimistic expectations contrast with the fact that 42% of the participants in work-experience projects and 48% of participants in insertion enterprises would not like to work in the same workplace forever.

Thus, participants in the temporary projects, even though satisfied with their participa-tion for a variety of reasons (see below), are not very optimistic about the main aim of these projects: providing a stepping stone towards regular labour-market participation. At the same time, we also see dissatisfaction among participants in permanent additional job schemes: the Melkert-1 scheme in the Netherlands and the Social Enterprise in Belgium. For reasons we will elaborate later, 72% of the respondents in the Dutch Melkert-1 scheme want a regular job and only 24% said they do not necessarily want a regular job. Some people had this ambition from the very start of their Melkert-1 job: they see the scheme as a stepping-stone towards a regular job, even though the scheme is not designed that way. Others develop their regular job ambitions after some time of participation in the Melkert-1 scheme. Yearning for another job is common among participants in the Belgium Social Enterprise as well: 30% of the parti -cipants in this scheme regularly or frequently yearns for another job, and the tendency is that this happens more frequently among participants who have been in the scheme for a longer period. Remarkably enough, yearning for another job is more frequent among Social Enter-prise participants than among participants in the other work-oriented schemes, even though the latter are temporary schemes.

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The Spanish respondents seem to be most satisfied with their current situation. For the associated workers (those who did capitalise their benefits; three quarters of respondents), dedication to work and the company is high, not only because they invested their money into it but also because of the risks attached to failure of the company, as outlined above. Investing their capital into the company (both in terms of money and in terms of time) may put stress on the workers and their families. Nevertheless, risk profiles are different for older and younger associated workers. For the older workers, the capitalisation of unemployment benefits scheme enabled them to keep working in the same job in more or less the same company, now owned by the workers themselves. At the same time, their alternatives in the labour market are very limited. This is different for younger workers, especially those with higher educa-tional levels. Therefore, younger workers may have more freedom of choice in deciding whether or not to capitalise unemployment benefits (assumed they are entitled to do so). Most of them enter the social companies as non-associated workers after the companies have been created, which means they are tied less to the company in case of an alternative job offer. For some, their position in the social company is transitory: it is a step towards a labour career outside the company. Those younger workers that are associated workers are involved differ-ently: they choose to buy shares in the company, although they have alternative options in the labour market. Their involvement in the company and satisfaction are higher than among younger non-associated workers. As far as the non-associated older workers are concerned, their involvement with the company is high since even though they did not invest the same capital into the company as the associated workers, their employment opportunities depend very much on the way the social company develops, as their chances in the open labour mar-ket are reduced. Being an associated worker has, of course, quite some implications. For ex-ample, being one of the owners of the company gives the workers different responsibilities to-wards the company than they were used to11. Some associated workers see this as an improve-ment, but some feel not very happy with the new responsibilities and pressure. Nevertheless, ownership is an important inclusive factor for the associated workers. This is especially so for those who have been involved in the establishment of the social company from the beginning. At the same time, this involvement has a price, since it means that people may have working days of 12 hours or more, also during weekends. Inclusion in the company thus produces lim-its to the ability to be included in other domains. But for most respondents, this is a price they are willing to pay; even though for some, this may be a reason to want to leave their jobs.

In most cases, entering an additional job scheme implies an improvement of income, even though this may be quite small in some cases. Respondents’ evaluations of their income situ-ation are various. The fact that participating in a POC entitled them to a 20% rate above the value of unemployment benefits was considered by most of the Portuguese respondents as an important contribution to the family budget. Among the Danish respondents, even though a large majority reported to be satisfied with their standard of living, the impact of participation in an activation scheme on people’s income situation seems to be small. Only about one fifth to one third of the respondents claims that their income situation has improved, whereas about the same proportion (with the exception of participants in individual job training schemes) re-port that their situation has deteriorated. Age seems to be an important factor here, since people under 20 report improvements about twice as frequently as the other age groups, al-though reports on deterioration of the income situation are more frequent among the young as

11 It should be pointed out that being an associated worker does not automatically imply having a management post in the company. Vice versa, non-associated workers can be hired for management posts, for example, to get people into the company that have the knowledge and skills to run a company.

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well. As far as the Belgian respondents are concerned, one quarter still find it very difficult to make ends meet financially, and almost half of them find this fairly difficult. Though diffi-culties in making ends meet can be found in all income categories, they are mainly concen-trated in the lower-income groups. Among the Dutch Melkert-1 respondents, we found quite some dissatisfaction with respect to their income situation. Even though respondents value highly that they have reached economic independence and are no longer dependent on social security agencies, most of them develop feelings of dissatisfaction when income improvement turns out to be quite limited over the years. When, after an average period of 5 years, the 120% of minimum wage income ceiling has been reached, no further income improvements are possible. For example, from then on, working overtime cannot be paid in cash anymore and has to be paid in days off. So, even though the Melkert-1 scheme offers permanent jobs and job security, income improvement opportunities come to an end when Melkert-1 workers have reached the income ceiling.

For the Spanish respondents, the situation is again different. Most of them, after estab-lishing the social company, earn lower wages than they were used to. And even when they start earning higher wages and approach the level of their old wages, which happens after two years of working in the social company usually, working hours are longer than before. Never-theless, this what one might call ‘objective’ deterioration of respondents’ quality of life when their current situation is compared with the old situation, is not perceived as such by the re-spondents themselves. One of the important reasons for respondents’ satisfaction are the feel-ings of inclusion brought about by being able to manage their own company. Naturally, satis-faction with income situations also differs with the degree in which people relate quality of life directly to their economic situation.

The latter, of course, refers to another issue: autonomy. For the Spanish respondents, at least the associated workers among them, the sense of autonomy they have makes them more satis-fied with their current jobs than with their previous jobs. Among the group of associated workers there may, of course, be quite some differences with respect to experiences of autonomy, for example related to the fact whether they do or do not occupy managerial posts in the company. Having a managerial position may be partly related to the educational level, but prior work experience can play an important role as well in being asked to take on mana-gerial responsibilities. Finding a balance between the equality among associated workers in terms of their ownership of the company and the differences that may arise because of the dis-tribution of responsibilities over different groups of workers, may be a tricky issue these com-panies are confronted with and may even threaten their existence in the long run. When, after a couple of years, the social company has established itself economically, the spirit of being ‘pioneers’ that is characteristic among associated workers who have been involved since the start of the company may fade away and make way for the ‘old’ private company mentality. More generally, in their previous jobs, associated workers were not used to the entrepreneurial mentality that is expected from them in running the social companies.

In the other case studies are, of course, other elements of autonomy at stake than in the Spanish case studies. For example, some of the respondents of the Dutch Melkert-1 case were satisfied with the fact that they have a great amount of freedom and room to make decisions with respect to the structuring of their work and are able to ‘direct’ their work personally, for example, regarding work content, scheduling of working hours et cetera. In most cases, how-ever, people turned out to have little autonomy at work which may become an important source of frustration. Another important element in this context is the fact that some respond-ents report that their capacities are being underutilised: they think that they can do more than

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they have to do, but they are not allowed to do so. Particularly in a scheme like this, in which participation is permanent, people feel that they want to be able to ‘grow’ in their jobs. They develop their social and functional skills and abilities, which is seen partly as a positive effect of participating in the scheme, but then feel frustrated in not being able to put the newly ac -quired skills to use in new tasks or responsibilities. Together with the limits on income im-provement of this scheme, underutilisation of abilities makes people long for a regular job.

In the Portuguese case study, some respondents also complained that there was no room to match the participants’ qualifications and the occupational programmes. As was also noted in the Dutch case study, agencies administering these activation schemes seem to em-phasise realising placements rather than being concerned about good fits of people and places. This also seemed to be a problem for the Belgian respondents, of whom 44% reported that their job did not correspond to their qualifications and skills.

Another important issue, especially where participation in additional jobs is concerned, is to what degree these jobs meet people’s needs of respect and status. For participants in addi-tional job schemes, targeted at low-productive, long-term unemployed people, may be con-fronted with stigmatisation. First we will deal with the issues of respect and status as such, later in this section we will discuss how this influences social participation.

Looking at the Danish case studies, it seems that the pool-job participants are again worse off. 51% of them have got more self-respect since participating in the scheme, com-pared to 60% of job training participants and 67% of individual job training participants. In the eyes of others, the situation seems to be even less positive: 33% of participants in the pool-job scheme have gained more respect from others, compared to 47% of job training par-ticipants and 62% of individual job training participants. Insofar feeling less dependent on others is an element of status as well, participation in the scheme does little to achieve this for the job training and pool-job participants: only one quarter of the respondents feel that they have become less dependent on others. Nevertheless, almost two-thirds of the participants in all three schemes experience a higher degree of being part of society since they have started participating in the scheme. That different schemes may have different effects on people also become clear when we look at the Belgian respondents. Participants in work-experience pro-jects are more positive about the self-esteem they gained (80% think they have more self-es-teem now) and the recognition from their social environment (62% point at positive effects) than participants in the insertion enterprises (58% and 31% respectively) or the social enter-prises (62% and 41% respectively). Issues of status and respect also play a role for many of the Dutch Melkert-1 workers. Melkert-1 workers work together with regular workers, which makes them more sensitive to status differences than additional workers working with other additional workers only12. These status differences can be of all sorts, ranging from income differences (the ‘income’ ceiling applying to Melkert-1 workers but not to regular workers, for example) to the fact that Melkert-1 sometimes wear different clothes than regular workers or have a separate canteen. Status differences may be experienced even more strongly when Melkert-1 workers carry out the same tasks as regular workers but without being treated the same. The same observations were made in the Portuguese case study. In some cases, employ-ers resorted to the POC programme to recruit cheap labour. In these cases, regular workers and POC workers were engaged in the same kind of work, with the same responsibility, but with large disparities in wages and working conditions. Finally, some Melkert-1 workers complain about a lack of political respect or recognition. On the one hand, politicians emphas-

12 One might, of course, also argue that contexts in which additional workers work together with regular workers offer less opportunities for stigmatisation.

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ise the social usefulness of the work that is being done by Melkert-1 workers. On the other, this work can only be carried out in the context of a Melkert-1 job, which, according to some respondents, will never make it a ‘real job’. Furthermore, they think it is unfair that their ‘use-ful’ jobs are not paid decently.

Let us now look at the issue of social participation. In more general terms, we know from the Danish case study that two thirds to four fifths of the respondents did not report feelings of loneliness. Nevertheless, feelings of loneliness and lack of emotional support were more fre-quent among younger respondents. As far as the effects of secondary labour-market participa-tion on social life are concerned, around 40% reported that their social life had improved since their participation in the programmes. Satisfaction with social networks is very high among the activated, slightly higher than among the unemployed, but slightly lower than among the employed. Effects on social networks seem to be evaluated even more positively by the Belgian respondents: 62% of them reported positive effects of participation on social networks, which makes them slightly less positive than the respondents from the training schemes (68%). Comparing the different work-oriented schemes, we see that respondents in the work-experience projects are most positive, whereas participants in the social enterprises are less positive. With respect to the Spanish respondents, we already noted that their involve-ment with their companies (also in terms of the time invested in work), and the priorities of work and family may have serious repercussions for social participation in other sub-domains. Of course, for younger workers that have not yet established a family, options are different: they have more opportunities to be engaged in social participation outside work and family, either in a formal or informal way. Among workers with families, the strategy to cope with limited time is generally to reduce time spent on formal forms of social participation in organ-isations et cetera. Informal social networks are prioritised by the workers in the Spanish sample. In Bilbao, for instance, all workers are involved in peer groups or cuadrillas and de-veloped activities in this context. The majority of workers in both cities did not belong to or participate in formal associations.

Let us now have a closer look at various sub-domains of social participation. First of all, we shall look at social relations at work. As was mentioned before, the different pro-grammes we discuss in this chapter can have different consequences for the social relations participants are involved in. For example, in the Spanish programme there is no distinction between ‘additional’ and ‘regular’ workers. The only relevant distinction related to the capit-alisation of unemployment benefits scheme is the distinction between associated and non-as-sociated workers. In some of the other programmes (the Portuguese POC, the Danish job training programmes, the Dutch Melkert-1 scheme), additional workers work together with regular workers. There are also schemes, such as the Belgian Social Enterprise, that are ex-clusively additional workers’ schemes.

In the Dutch Melkert-1 scheme, social relations at work constitute a problem for part of the workers. These do not concern the relations to other Melkert-1 workers, which are eval-uated positively: the feeling among Melkert-1 workers is good, they can discuss things to-gether and form a closely knit group. 36% of the respondents, however, experience diffi-culties in relations with ‘regular’ colleagues: condescending and stigmatising comments are made, and they are treated with contempt and asked to do inferior tasks. Also, feelings of not being taken seriously are being reported. Some have the impression that they have to fight to gain some respect or have to work harder than others to show that they are good workers. Those respondents not reporting problems with regular colleagues are usually employed in smaller, less hierarchically organised welfare or cultural organisations. Sometimes, they at-

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tribute feelings of being treated with respect and as equals to the fact that they are doing ‘reg-ular’ rather than ‘additional’ work. Officially this is not allowed, but informally, it does hap-pen. The Belgian respondents were asked about their experiences with integration into the group and the atmosphere at the workplace as well. In general, 72% of the respondents were positive with respect to their integration into the group, and 58% were positive with respect to the atmosphere at the workplace. Particularly with respect to the latter, there is a clear tend-ency that long-term participants evaluate the atmosphere at work less positive; in the Dutch case we observed less positive experiences after a longer period of participation as well. Once again, the Belgian respondents in the work-experience projects are more positive than the par-ticipants in insertion enterprises and social enterprises, the latter being evaluated most negat-ively in these two respects. From the Danish survey we do not have specific data on respond-ents’ integration at work. However, from the interviews it became clear that the activated people were generally satisfied with their inclusion within an activation scheme, which was partly ascribed to the enlarged social networks in which they are functioning now. In the Por-tuguese case study, it was reported that participation in the programme provided a way out of isolation. Contacts and sociability, and sometimes support at work from colleagues at the workplace, were mentioned as positive aspects of participation. Finally, the situation in the Spanish social companies is quite different from what we discussed above. Here, social rela-tionships at the shop floor are very much influenced by the way associated workers manage to deal with their new entrepreneurial role and with the way responsibilities among the workers are divided and shared.

A second aspect of social participation concerns the informal social networks of fam-ily, friends et cetera. We have already pointed at the importance of the family in Spain and Portugal, and of the peer group in the Bilbao case study in Spain. We also noted that, espe-cially for the associated workers in the Spanish case studies, social participation outside work became more concentrated on the family (in cases in which respondents had established a family) and friends, in that order of importance. Time constraints can put pressure on family relationships, and for some workers these may cause them to yearn for a job that takes less of their time. Others feel that the priorities of work and family leave them too little time to spend with their friends. From the Belgian case studies we learned that most of the respondents have regular contacts with parents, relatives, friends, et cetera. At the same time, at least half of the respondents also reported that they would like to have more frequent contacts with parents, relatives and friends, which may indicate that they are not completely satisfied with their in-formal social participation. The respondents of the Dutch case study into the Melkert-1 scheme evaluated the impact of participation on informal social relations in different ways. Some emphasised positive elements: having a job and no longer being dependent on social as-sistance resulted in less dissatisfaction. Increasing self-confidence and feeling relieved from feelings of shame or marginalisation related to unemployment may positively influence people’s social interactions with others. Others, however, meet with negative reactions from their social environment, for example, related to the low status or the low income of Melkert-1 workers. For some respondents, this resulted in not talking about their work or not mention-ing that they were employed in the context of the Melkert-1 scheme. In some cases, participa-tion in the Melkert-1 scheme turned out to have a negative influence on social participation more indirectly: people with health problems may feel exhausted when work is done, not leaving them the energy to engage in social relations outside work.

Participation may also be important for participants because it contributes positively to their personal development. The case studies reveal several instances in which respondents men-

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tioned positive effects of participation in this respect. For example, most of the Belgian re-spondents felt more positive, were less confronted with boredom or feelings of uselessness, and were better able to contribute to society. Once again, participants in different schemes evaluate participation differently: work-experience projects are evaluated more positively on most of these issues by their participants than the social enterprises. A majority of the Danish respondents evaluate their participation positively with respect to issues as feeling more re-sponsible, having a more excited life, having new possibilities for self-expression, and feeling part of society. But also in the Danish case, some schemes are evaluated more positively than others, the overall tendency being that pool-job participants are most critical about the impact of their scheme on a variety of issues. Among the Danish respondents, there is also a tendency for older participants to be less positive than younger participants. The Dutch respondents mention several positive elements as well, such as increasing self-confidence and assertive-ness and increasing social and functional skills. At the same time, a majority of respondents were critical with respect to the degree of personal development offered to them in the context of the scheme. Tasks are experienced as being too simple, as unchallenging, and as offering little opportunities for development. Some complain that their qualifications and work experi-ence are not being used. In short, they report that competencies and skills are being underutil-ised and participation ambitions not being realised. Therefore, they experience that personal development gets blocked, especially after some period of participation in the scheme. This underutilisation is (besides income improvement and improvement of status) an important reason for respondents to want to find a regular job: they want to find new challenges and re-sponsibilities and feel that they are not able to find these in the Melkert-1 scheme. In some cases, these ambitions are in fact realised within the scheme, by an informal extension of tasks. However, since an extension of tasks makes the differences between Melkert-1 workers and regular workers smaller, income differences become increasingly unfair in the respond-ents’ perception.

In general, Melkert-1 workers experience a lack of support, either in improving their position as Melkert-1 workers or in escaping from the limitations of the scheme by finding a regular job. The same experiences may be the reason for the relatively negative evaluation of the Belgian Social Enterprise, where people are given permanent jobs that offer little prospect for better opportunities in the future. Lack of support or guidance was also mentioned as a problem by some of the POC respondents. We have mentioned already the fact that there is not enough room to match people’s abilities with job characteristics. Both Dutch and Por-tuguese respondents reported experiences that once placed in the scheme, no one cared for them anymore.

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9. Participation in unpaid work

9.1 IntroductionThe heading of ‘unpaid work’ covers a large variety of activities such as voluntary work in institutions, taking care of children or relatives, mutual help, and do-it-yourself activities. The three case studies that dealt with participation in unpaid work cover two forms of unpaid activities. The Danish and Dutch case studies deal with unemployed people that are participat-ing in unpaid, voluntary work in an institutional context. The unpaid work under investigation in the British case study is organised in a more informal way: this case study focuses on un-paid work (and, to a certain degree, informal paid work) that employed and unemployed people engage in to get things done in their own or others’ households. We will discuss here the results of these two ‘groups’ of case studies separately.

9.2 Voluntary workThe Dutch and Danish case studies deal with a group of unemployed people participating in voluntary work. In the Dutch case, this participation takes place in the context of active social policies, the so-called Social Activation scheme. For the Dutch respondents, this means that, apart from being involved in unpaid work, they are also offered opportunities for guidance, support, following courses, et cetera, and may receive a bonus in the form of a financial in-centive and a temporary release from the obligation to look for a paid job. These ‘extras’ may, as we will see, have an inclusionary potential of themselves, separate from unpaid activities. Related to the different contexts of both case studies, the two groups of unemployed respond-ents are quite different as well. The Danish respondents are typically short-term unemployed and do not necessarily have major difficulties in finding an ordinary job. Compared to the group of activated people in Denmark (see chapters 8 and 10), the unemployed volunteers are at the upper level of competence and potentials for social inclusion. On the other hand, the Dutch respondents are very underprivileged as far as labour-market opportunities are con-cerned. They are at risk of being excluded, not only from the labour market but also in other respects. They are very long-term unemployed (for example, 40% of the respondents in the Dutch case study have been dependent on social assistance for more than 10 years), low-skilled, confronted with physical or mental heath problems, et cetera.

9.2.1 Exclusion from and inclusion in domains of participationAs far as inclusion in the economic domain is concerned, the situations of the two groups are at the same time both similar and different. The situations are similar in the sense that both groups are excluded from labour-market participation, and both are dependent on benefits. Financially, the Dutch respondents are slightly better off in the sense that in return for their voluntary work, they receive a financial bonus of maximally 540 Euro a year, which, how-ever, is supposed to be a reimbursement of expenses made in relation to participation in un-paid work. At the same time, exclusion from work is much more severe among the Dutch re-spondents, reflected by the duration of their unemployment. Although 80% of them have been looking for a job for years in some cases, they have not been successful. Partly because of these negative experiences with job searching, most of them quit looking for a job after some time. Related to economic exclusion, most respondents point out their exclusion from support by job and welfare agencies concerning guidance in job searching or other strategies to im-prove labour-market opportunities. Nevertheless, participation in the Social Activation

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scheme may open up new resources for labour-market inclusion, for example because parti-cipants get involved into new networks, acquire qualifications, et cetera. In this context, in the 6 to 18 months period between the two interviews with the respondents, 4 of them managed to find a job. In at least 3 of these 4 cases, there was a clear link with participation in Social Ac-tivation: 2 respondents were offered a secondary labour-market job in the institutions they were doing voluntary work, and the third was offered a regular job while taking a Social Ac-tivation course.

As far as participation in the social domain is concerned, we already saw in the chapter on the unemployed that unemployment does not necessarily mean passivity. Most respondents in the Dutch case study did develop some sort of participation in activities, most of them related to raising children or taking care of ill or older people. Some respondents had started participa-tion in voluntary work prior to entering the Social Activation scheme. Five respondents spent their time on domestic activities or hobbies only. For these respondents, starting participation in Social Activation meant an extension of their own activities with activities that take place outdoors. For the respondents that were doing voluntary work prior to entering the pro-gramme, becoming involved in Social Activation implied a recognition of these activities and access to new opportunities. The Danish case study also shows that unemployed volunteers not necessarily limit their activities to voluntary work. For example, 14% of them had been involved in helping friends in the last 3 months, and a group of similar size had been involved in do-it-yourself activities. Nevertheless, these percentages are quite small, of course, and at a lower level than the levels of participation in the same activities of employed, activated and unemployed respondents.

This does not necessarily imply that the volunteers are, from an objective point of view, more socially isolated. For example, less than the unemployed and activated people, they love on their own without partner. Furthermore, they report scarce contacts with parents, children and other family members they are not cohabiting with and with friends less fre-quently than the employed, activated and unemployed. Thus, in these respects, the volunteers seem to be relatively well included, at least compared to the activated and unemployed.

Returning now to the Dutch respondents, it is quite obvious that participating in the Social Activation scheme enhances their social networks: they meet other Social Activation participants, other volunteers, workers in the institutions they volunteer et cetera. Sometimes, social relations at work develop into relations outside work. Furthermore, some respondents have rather frequent contacts with their Social Activation consultant, which, if the participants wish so, may support them in functioning in other social networks. Participation in Social Ac-tivation may also harness participation in social networks outside work for a variety of reas-ons that will be discussed in the next section. Nevertheless, since financial resources remain scarce, engaging in social contacts is still constrained. One might even state, that since people become more ‘eager’, ‘fit’ and ‘ready’ to enter into social relations, financial constraints be-come more important.

Of the Danish volunteers, 50% have been active during the last year in a variety of political groups or associations, which makes them more actively involved in politics than the unem-ployed and activated people. Compared to the employed, volunteers are far less frequently actively involved in trade unions, but more often in tenants’ organisations and public institu-tions. Even though the numbers of respondents in both case studies are small, it seems that the Dutch respondents are less politically involved than the Danish volunteers. 35% express an interest in politics, and 55% say they vote at elections, which is below national turnout fig-

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ures. Some migrant respondents told us that their political involvement decreased after they left their country of origin and settled in the Netherlands. One could be inclined to ascribe these differences between the two groups of respondents to differences in economic exclu-sion, but we are not able to substantiate this hypothesis.

As was already noted, differences in involvement in leisure activities of the Danish employed, unemployed, activated and volunteers are quite small, although the patterns of activities people are involved in may differ. Compared to the other groups, the volunteers re-port less frequently that they have some special leisure activity. In this sense, they are more excluded from leisure than the other groups.

9.2.2 Experiences of inclusion and exclusionWhat are the unemployed voluntary workers’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion? In this section, we will show to what degree voluntary work satisfies their needs or produces experi-ences of exclusion.

First of all, from the Dutch respondents we know that some of them entered the Social Activation scheme with the explicit intention to use it as a stepping stone towards labour-mar-ket participation, whereas for others, the wish to participate in the labour market was more lat-ent or even absent. Four respondents had found a job at the time of the second interview. At that time, five others told us they would like a paid job (mainly to improve their income situ-ation), whereas 11 others expressed the wish to remain participants of Social Activation for the time being. Those who do not aim for integration into paid work, mention several reasons for that. They feel comfortable in Social Activation and some express not to be ready yet to make a move towards a paid job. Some also point out that they have little chance of finding a job and they expect that they will only be able to get jobs that bring no income improvement, have a low status or are less interesting than voluntary work as far as work content is con-cerned. As far as their income situation is concerned, people welcome the remuneration of ex-penses they receive, especially when this exceeds actual expenses. At the same time, some think that the remuneration is quite low given the time they invest in voluntary work and the responsibilities they have at work.

As far as the Danish volunteers are concerned, we observed that of the four groups compared in the Danish case studies, voluntary workers are most frequently dissatisfied with their present standard of living and report most frequently that their income situation inhibits their self-expression. The picture is dispersed, though, since the volunteers also more often claim to be very satisfied with their present standard of living: they seem to be more out-spoken on this issue than the other groups. Anyhow, we do not know whether dissatisfaction with the standard of living makes volunteers long for a paid job. We do know, however, that compared to the other groups, they emphasise the immaterial meanings of work (respect, work content) stronger than material ones (money, self-support).

Respect, status and recognition turned out to be important needs for the Dutch respondents. In some respects, Social Activation may meet people’s needs: feelings of shame may diminish, people have something to talk about in social interactions, they receive recognition for the usefulness of their work (for example, because they are released from the obligation to look for jobs and because they receive a remuneration), and some point at the respectful way they are treated by Social Activation consultants. At the same time, Social Activation has little to offer in this respect to people for whom status and respect are strongly related to independ-ence and income, since Social Activation does not put an end to welfare dependency and does hardly improve people’s income situation. Furthermore, sometimes respondents have negative

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experiences in their interactions with employees at the institutions where they are working as volunteers.

With respect to the needs for autonomy and independence, we again observe both pos-itive and negative experiences among the Dutch respondents. Here we clearly see that some experiences are directly related to being a participant in unpaid work, whereas other experi-ences are primarily related to the social policy context of the Social Activation programme. Related to unpaid work, people experience autonomy because of the flexibility unpaid work offers them (for example, to combine raising children with outdoors’ participation, or to ad-just participation to one’s health situation) or lack of autonomy due to the fact that unpaid work does not change their income situation. Related to the policy context, people experience autonomy in the fact that participation is voluntary and that they are able to determine their activation pathways, although some felt pressure from the welfare agency to start participa-tion. Experiences of autonomy and independence were also expressed in relation to the re-lease from the obligation to look for a job, although this is of less significance to people who use Social Activation as a stepping-stone towards labour-market participation.

An important element of experiences of exclusion and inclusion relates to people’s involve-ment in social interactions and social networks, either inside or outside work. What are people’s experiences on this issue?

The Danish volunteers associate not having a job with the risk of social isolation less frequently than the employed and activated people. This is not necessarily true for all Dutch respondents, of whom some have been confronted with experiences of social isolation during unemployment. Once again, one should bear in mind that the Danish and Dutch voluntary workers constitute quite different groups. The Danish volunteers state to be confronted with experiences of feeling lonesome less frequently than the unemployed and activated, though differences are small. Of all groups involved in the Danish case studies, voluntary workers are most satisfied with their social networks. Using objective and subjective indicators to con-struct an index of inclusion in social life, the Danish voluntary workers are the most included of all groups, even more so than the employed.

For the Dutch respondents, inclusion in social life seems to be more problematic than for their Danish colleagues. Even though most respondents have positive experiences with participation in networks at work, some point out that engaging into social relations requires quite some effort; acquiring social skills for some is an explicit effect of their participation in Social Activation. Here again, we should point out that there is a ‘dual’ context for these learning processes: on the one hand, the context of people’s unpaid activities, on the other, the context of the support and guidance they receive from Social Activation consultants. Newly acquired skills and status may, of course, also influence social relations outside work in a pos-itive way. We have already pointed out that because of this, financial constraints on engaging into social networks may be experienced more clearly. This partly explains why 20% of re-spondents still experience shortcomings in their social participation. Furthermore, one third of the respondents are not fully satisfied with the extent or quality of social networks. For some of them, this is related to not having a partner or ‘mate’.

In the Dutch case study we observed that participation in Social Activation (being engaged in unpaid activities and being involved in a guided activation process) may satisfy some other needs as well: Personal development. As we also saw in other case studies, many people like to particip-

ate in an environment that is somehow challenging to them and offers them opportunities

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to use and develop skills and capacities. When people’s participation environment meets their needs on this issue, this may contribute to experiences of inclusion. In addition to this, several Social Activation respondents report that they have increased self-confidence, perseverance and assertiveness. During the course of participation, personal development may increase their abilities to deal with problematic situations and may also influence their goals and orientations, for example with respect to labour-market participation. Nev-ertheless, we also found instances where critical events (in the private sphere, at work or in relations with welfare institutions, for example) may destroy all activation gains in one stroke.

Participation in voluntary work may put an end to boredom. Having regular activities at certain times every week gives people something to look forward to.

Many respondents were confronted with health or social problems, which may contribute to, or be caused by, experiences of exclusion. Participation offers a way of coping with these problems and can even decrease them.

In the chapter on the unemployed, we pointed at the issue of ‘self-exclusion’ as a strategy to avoid risks. Some of our Dutch respondents have been developing this kind of strategy. If attempts at enhancing their social integration are accompanied by offering them security and protection (by consultants, at the work place), they can be persuaded to enter a pro-cess of activation.

Finally, we have some data from the Danish case study with respect to voluntary workers’ ex-periences of inclusion into the political domain. The volunteers are more satisfied than the other groups about their influence on issues they consider relevant. Together with their relat-ively high level of political involvement, this makes them politically included to a degree that is comparable to that of the employed and is higher than that of activated and unemployed people.

9.3 Informal workAs we mentioned before, the British case study deals with different kinds of unpaid and, to some extent, paid activities. Instead of looking at voluntary work in an institutional context, the British case study focuses on the way a variety of more or less ‘domestic’ tasks is com-pleted: caring, gardening, car maintenance, domestic production, routine housework, home improvement and house maintenance tasks. Furthermore, the case study not only looked at the unemployed, but also at employed people. About one fifth of the households that were invest-igated had no earners, 28% were single-earner households and half of the households had multiple earners. Related to these different socio-economic statuses, the households belong to different income groups. About one third of the households have a gross household income of 18,475 Euro a year, 43% have an income between 18,475 and 36,950 Euro and a quarter of households makes more than 36,950 Euro a year.

Most of the tasks under investigation (88.3%) were taken care of in an informal way: household work and do-it-yourself, mutual aid and informal exchange. The remaining 11.7% were completed using formally–employed labour. However, not all tasks surveyed were actu-ally completed: on average, the households completed only about half of all tasks, even though many households wanted the uncompleted tasks to be carried out.

Interesting for our purpose are the differences in engagement or inclusion into in-formal work between different socio-economic groups. It turns out that informal economic activity is slightly more concentrated in higher-income households. For example, not only did the higher income households manage to get more tasks completed (an average of 23.5 com-

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pared to 18.3 among lower income households), they also rely more on informal work. While constituting 31.2% of the surveyed households, they conduct 35.8% of all informal activity (for the lower income households, the percentages are 25.6% and 24.9% respectively). Thus, in terms of economic inclusion (formal and informal), these results show that two types of households can be discerned, the ‘work busy’ households and the ‘work deprived’ house-holds. Social disparities in informal work are not only related to household income. The res-ults also show that most of the tasks being completed through informal activities are done by women, pointing at –at least in the households where women also have a paid job- the ‘triple burden’ phenomenon these women see themselves confronted with.

Household work and do-it-yourself (DIY) are the most frequent forms of informal activity. Nearly three-quarters of the tasks are done in this manner. In the vast majority of cases, this coping strategy is used out of preference (86%). Only 14% of this work is conducted purely for economic reasons. Reasons for preferring the tasks being undertaken this way are ease, choice (higher quality or individualisation of the end product) and pleasure. In general, the study reveals that people participate in informal work because they see it as a way of enga-ging in meaningful and productive activity for the benefit of both themselves and others.

In this context, we might refer to the single mothers in the British part-time and the Dutch Social Activation case studies. Some of these women prefer to raise their children themselves, rather than bringing them to childcare facilities. Other forms of participation (paid work in the British case, unpaid work in the Dutch case) are constructed around the mother role. At the same time, it should not go unnoticed that one of the motives these wo-men have for developing other forms of participation is to extend social networks and to be-come engaged in other than ‘home-based’ activities. Thus, whereas raising children as an in-formal activity may offer a meaningful social role, it can also lead to experiences of exclu-sion.

Despite the fact that many tasks are undertaken informally out of preference, most households in the British case study perceive limits as to how much work they can do on this basis. These limits obviously vary between households and are determined by the availability of tools, skills, knowledge and time. Lower-income households are more likely to run up against these limits: they are less likely to possess the combination of money, tools, know-ledge, practical skills and physical ability (lower-income households are more likely to be composed of a sick/disabled or retired person). Apart from that, since lower-income house-holds more often live in rented accommodation, they are also less likely to have the respons-ibility for carrying out certain tasks.

Mutual aid is a far less frequently used strategy than household work or DIY to get things done: only 2,1% of the surveyed tasks are undertaken as mutual aid. There are two major reasons why people do not use this form of labour. They do not want to feel that they owe others a favour or that others owe them a favour and they do not want to accept charity. In-stead, they on the whole prefer either to do the task themselves or to pay (formally or inform-ally). The exception concerning the giving and receiving of unpaid help is kinship exchange, a phenomenon we also found, for example, in the Portuguese case studies and in the Dutch case studies (particularly among certain migrant groups). In the British case study, it was only in lower-income households that mutual aid was justified explicitly in terms of either reciprocity or kinship obligations. It was only in households unable to pay for such favours that rational-isations for their receipt of unpaid reciprocal aid and kinship obligation were couched in terms of traditional notions of solidaristic communities helping each other out. Higher-income

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households view mutual aid, similar to other forms of work, as a way of getting work done for some form of exchange, thus using more market-oriented rationales. Summarising, the re-search findings with respect to mutual aid reveal that the old-fashioned idea of tight, self-suf-ficient communities helping each other out appears to be only marginally relevant to today’s situation. People do not want to use mutual aid and only do so when they cannot do the job themselves, cannot afford to pay somebody, or when the social relations involved militate against payment. Of course, mutual aid does not necessarily focus on instrumental or material support, but may involve social or emotional support as well. Many of the respondents in-volved in formal or informal organisations, associations or groups consider the emotional and social support they receive as the principal benefit to be gained from belonging to them.

The final form of informal activity that has been studied is informal exchange. Informal ex-change here involves exchange of gifts as well of money, and may involve various relation-ships between customers and suppliers, including both formal firms or self-employed people being the suppliers and relatives, neighbours, friends et cetera. Of course, using the last type of suppliers heavily depend on the composition of consumers’ social networks. The motives of consumers to make use of informal exchange are not limited to financial considerations (60% of informal exchange is related to having things done more cheaply). Other motives, es-pecially when friends, relatives et cetera are called upon as suppliers, involve community-building and redistributive reasons. Suppliers use a diversity of motives as well: money (30%), helping out (30%), pleasure in doing the task (25%) and developing skills (15%). Thus, there seems to be more going on in the world of informal exchange than is reflected in popular discourses on fraud.

Informal work is clearly a way for these households to satisfy their needs and to maintain a reasonable quality of life. In this respect, and given the preference people express to take care of things this way, informal activities certainly have an inclusionary potential. Furthermore, a vast majority of households would like to engage in more unpaid informal work. However, there are various barriers that keep people from doing so. In the order of their importance, the case study identified the following barriers. Lack of time is the most important barrier, mentioned by over half of the respondents.

This barrier is, of course, more important for high-income households than for low-in-come households, but nevertheless, 36% of the low-income and unemployed households mention lack of time as well. This may be related to the time these people have to spend –or feel they have to spend- on looking for a job in the context of welfare-to-work policies.

Second comes lack of money, skills, confidence, physical ability and equipment; in other words, lack of economic capital and human capital. As far as economic capital is con-cerned, lower-income households express that they would spend more time on informal work if they had more money, rather than spending less time on these activities and hiring paid workers to do the tasks.

Finally, there are social network barriers, institutional barriers and environmental barriers. Social network barriers are particularly important in the case of mutual help. Low-income households and the unemployed have few people that they know well enough to either ask or be asked to do something. Institutional barriers are important to the unemployed as well, as we already observed above when talking about voluntary work in Denmark and the Netherlands. Many unemployed may feel inhibited in doing informal exchange and mutual aid for fear of being reported to the authorities. Finally, environmental barriers are locality-related constraints and hamper mutual aid and informal exchange due to a per-

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ceived lack of trust, community and sense of well-being around them.

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10. Education and Training

10.1 IntroductionEducation and training or investing in human capital are considered to be important in im-proving unemployed people’s chances in the labour-market. Thus, when, in the context of the INPART project, we start looking at the inclusionary potential of education and training, we will have to pay attention to people’s own perceptions and experiences of their labour-market chances in relation to the education and training programme they have been following. At the same time, we can see training and education as types of participation in themselves, provid-ing participants with social contact, status (trainee, student), useful activities et cetera.

We will deal with three case studies in this chapter. In all of them, the emphasis is on education and training, although the programmes may involve elements of work, for example work-experience. First, there is the Belgian case study, which in fact is a combination of three different education and training programmes: alternating learning, vocational training and training enterprises. Then, there is the Portuguese case study, which deals with a programme focused on women, entitled New Administrative Tools. Finally, there is the group of Danish activated unemployed people that are involved in professional education programmes. More general data on the group of activated people –specifically related to the more ‘objective’ as-pects of inclusion and exclusion- have already been presented in chapter 8, so here we will confine ourselves to data available on this specific group of activated people.

10.2 Inclusion into and exclusion from domains of participationSince all participants in the programmes mentioned above are unemployed, they are excluded from labour-market participation. As far as their income situation is concerned, the Belgian and Danish respondents will either receive some sort of social benefit which may be increased with a small amount (a remuneration in the case of the Belgian Training enterprises, a trainee allowance in the Danish case) or a minimum wage for young people (in the case of the Bel-gian Alternate learning programme). A household may, of course, receive other incomes, for example, in the case of the young Belgian respondents living with their parents. In the Por-tuguese case, the situation seems to be more complicated, partly because of social security provisions available, partly because households are less frequently composed of single people compared with the Northern countries. Thus, household income may be coming from work, from social security benefits or, most frequently, from a mix of both. Income from work may also involve informal paid work: about one fourth of the respondents were either frequently or seldom engaged in this type of work. In most cases, a household is monthly net income does not exceed three times the Portuguese National Minimum Wage, which amounts to 918 Euro a month. This qualifies the households as low-income households, especially when one con-siders that the households in the case study on average consist of over 4 people. This is reflec-ted in their consumption patterns: durable goods in the households are limited to those con-sidered to be essential, and indebtedness is a current phenomenon. Of course, especially in the Portuguese case, households may have non-monetary income resources as well. For example, given the fact that the Portuguese case studies partly involved respondents living in a rural en-vironment, quite some households made additional non-monetary income through small-scale farming.

At the time of the interviews, the Belgian and Danish respondents were still engaged in their programmes so we have no ‘objective’ indicator as far as their labour-market particip-

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ation after completing the programme is concerned (in the next section, we will discuss people’s perceptions with respect to the improvement of labour-market chances). In the Por-tuguese case study, respondents were approached for a second time, after completion of the programme. At that time, half of the respondents were doing another professional training course, four had subsidised jobs in the context of the Occupational Programme (see chapter 8), five were unemployed and only one had found permanent employment in the regular la-bour market.

As far as participation in the social dimension is concerned, we did not find evidence of large-scale social isolation among our respondents. For example, of the Belgian respondents, almost three quarters received social support from their networks, almost 60% had regular contacts with family and the same proportion of respondents had regular contacts with friends. Never-theless, the last figures also show that quite a large minority claim not to have regular contacts with family, or friends. The Portuguese respondents point at the importance of daily family relationships and, to a lesser extent, of relationships with friends for their social integration. Many respondents state that they receive material and immaterial support from relatives and friends, even more than the Portuguese respondents of the Occupational Programme, which may be related to the more intense financial precariousness of the former group. At the same time, social integration within informal networks is stronger than inclusion into formal net-works. Only one quarter of respondents told us that they were involved in local associations of a social nature.

Being engaged in voluntary work may be conceived as another form of social inclu-sion in more formal networks. Among the Portuguese respondents, participation in voluntary work is quite limited, which may be partly explained by the relative lack of relevance of vol-untary work in Portuguese society. Among Belgian respondents, participation in voluntary work is more common: 29% of them are involved in some kind of voluntary work, a slightly higher proportion than we found among Belgian participants in the work-oriented pro-grammes. At the same time, participation in voluntary work seems to be strongly related to educational levels: participation among respondents with primary educational levels is more than a factor 3 lower than among respondents with university or similar levels of education. As far as participation in informal paid work is concerned, the situation is quite the reverse. Almost half of the Portuguese respondents participate in this type of work frequently or sel-dom, against about 16% of the Belgian respondents.

The borderline between social inclusion into formal networks and inclusion into the political, religious and cultural domains are, of course, not very strict. Starting with the domains of cul-ture, leisure and religion, we find that one fifth of the Belgian respondents is actively involved in leisure associations. Active involvement in other kinds of associations is at a much lower level. At the same time, we can observe that participation in this kind of associations is at a higher level among participants in training measures than among people participating in work-related activation programmes. In the Portuguese case study, the distinction between formal and informal forms of participation was again made, the former relating to cultural activities promoted by local associations, the latter to non-institutional manifestations of pop-ular culture. Among the respondents, formal cultural participation was at a low level, and in-volvement in informal expressions of culture was even more scarce. In chapter 8, we have already mentioned the barriers to cultural participation that were identified in the Portuguese case studies. As far as religious participation is concerned, the same conclusion applies to these respondents as was mentioned in chapter 8 with respect to the participants in the Occu-

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pational Programme, namely that it was of little significance to their daily lives.

Finally, a word on political participation. Participation in this sphere is limited among the re-spondents. Of the Belgian trainees, about 4% were actively involved in a political association and 6% in a trade union. The Portuguese respondents show even lower levels of political par-ticipation, lower also compared to the other Portuguese case study: none of the respondents were members of a political party or trade union, and 35% of the respondents stated that they had never voted at elections. One might explain this as a total lack of faith in the capacity of the political powers to solve their problems. Finally, Danish respondents’ active involvement in trade unions and political parties is low as well: 3% and 6% respectively. At the same time, and looking at political activity from a less narrow point of view, about one third of the Dan-ish respondents are active in an association and almost half of the respondents have tried to influence decision makers.

10.3 Experiences of inclusion and exclusionThe case studies described in this chapter all deal with training and education measures aimed at increasing participants’ labour-market chances and, thus, at stimulating their inclusion into paid work. Our case studies were not designed to evaluate the effects of these measures; the only indication we have in this respect is the one on the Portuguese respondents, of whom 5 after completing the programme managed to find a temporary additional job or regular la-bour-market job. But even then, we cannot be sure whether this effect can be interpreted as a success of the education programme they followed.

Nevertheless, we have some data on people’s own perceptions in this respect. In gen-eral we may say that a majority of the respondents think or expect that participation will con-tribute to their inclusion in paid work in a positive way. For example, half of the Danish activ-ated people in educational projects think it is easy to find a job in their trade, whereas a group of similar size think this will be difficult. As might be expected, expectations become less op-timistic among older age groups. Furthermore, three quarters of the respondents claimed to have a brighter view on the future since being activated, which makes them the most optim-istic group among the activated people in the Danish case study. Finally, half of the respond-ents think that participation in the activation scheme has improved their integration into work, whereas one-third do not perceive any changes in this respect. The Belgian case study found similar results: over 60% expressed that they had become more hopeful with respect to the fu-ture or the success of new challenges; this makes them more positive than the participants in work-oriented programmes in Belgium. Furthermore, about the same proportion of respond-ents thought their attitude towards work had changed. Finally, also the Portuguese respond-ents experience their participation as highly positive as it provides them with new information and knowledge regarding a privileged area of the labour market: computer technology. At the same time, problems in finding training posts for the participants in the scheme may jeopard-ise its effects in terms of employability. For example, sometimes people get training posts that do not enable them to practise the skills they have been acquiring, and often, the institutions offering the posts are not able to hire the trainees as employees once they have completed their participation in the scheme. More generally, the positive expectations people have may turn into frustrations when these expectations are not fulfilled. In the Portuguese case, the re-spondents were much more positive during the programme than when interviewed after the programme, when many of them had not been able to find a paid job. Among the Belgian re-spondents, we found a considerable group of over one-third of the respondents who, to a smaller or larger extent, fear that they will have to remain in activation programmes. This is

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not surprising when we realise that almost half of the participants had enrolled in an activa-tion scheme before.

Participation may contribute positively to people’s experiences of inclusion with re-spect to income and participation. For example, the training benefit that the participants in the Portuguese training programme receive is considered a way of relieving their economic diffi-culties. Of the Danish respondents, two thirds express to be satisfied with their present stand-ard of living, making them belong to the less satisfied among the activated people in this re-spect. At the same time, 95% of respondents feel that income sets limits to their ways of life, which is the highest percentage among the activated. Participating in the scheme seems to have changed these experiences only to a small degree, as only a quarter of respondents claim that their situation improved since they have started their participation, whereas 51% did not experience any changes.

The second theme we will discuss in this section concerns people’s experiences of social in-clusion and exclusion. First, we will make some general comments on this issue, and then we will try to answer to what degree participation in the training or education programme has res-ulted in any changes in their experiences.

Once again, experiences of exclusion from social participation do not seem to be very frequent. For example, two thirds of the Danish participants do not feel lonely, and only a very small group experiences lack of emotional support in situations of sadness or personal problems. Nevertheless, some groups seem to run a higher risk of experiencing social exclu-sion than others: young people, older people and, surprisingly enough, higher educated people. This may have to do with standards different groups of people set themselves where social inclusion is concerned. For example, experiences of inclusion of the Portuguese re-spondents in social networks does not take away the fact that these networks are not very ex-tended. Among the Portuguese respondents, 20% reported experiences of social exclusion re-lated to racial discrimination or stigmatisation of poor people or people belonging to the lower classes.

Does participation in the activation programmes support experiences of inclusion in social networks? In the Portuguese case, improving participants’ sociability was an explicit objective of the programme. In other words, in this programme, inclusion is not only defined in terms of labour-market participation. The respondents’ experiences show that the pro-gramme did indeed contribute to their ability to strengthen social networks, either in a quantit-ative or qualitative way. This effect is partly attributed to the extremely positive work rela-tions as well as to the very good personal relationship between trainees and the institution which implemented the measure. Nevertheless, respondents made some critical remarks about the heterogeneous composition of the group in terms of age and educational levels. However, this seemed to have less negative impact on the social relations within the group than on the learning process itself. Respondents in the other case studies report positive effects with re-spect to social participation as well. 56% of the Danish respondents expressed that participa-tion in the activation scheme has improved their social life, whereas only 8% report negative effects. The Belgian respondents report in much the same direction: two thirds stated that par-ticipation enlarged their social networks. Furthermore, three quarters of the respondents have positive feelings about the integration into the group, whereas almost 70% report a positive atmosphere at the activity. Nevertheless, the various types of educational and training pro-grammes show different results in these respects, the alternating learning programmes being evaluated most negatively.

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The meanings of participation in the programmes do not remain limited to the elements men-tioned above. For example, about three quarters of the Danish respondents told us that their self-respect had increased during participation, that their view on the future had become brighter, and that their abilities are being utilised to a larger extent. Compared to the activated people participating in work-oriented programmes, these meanings of participation were men-tioned more frequently by the respondents in educational programmes. Other positive mean-ings of participation, mentioned by at least half of the respondents, were more possibilities for self-expression, more responsibility, leading a more exciting life, being more respected by others, feeling part of society and experiencing more structure in everyday life. Thus, as we have also concluded in chapter 8, participation in activation schemes improves the quality of life in several aspects. The Belgian respondents point out various immaterial meanings of par-ticipation as well. Being more active and having good feelings in general were mentioned most frequently by about three quarters of the respondents. Feeling useful in society, receiv-ing recognition from the social environment and having new values and priorities in life were mentioned less frequently by about 50% of the respondents. Compared to the participants in work-oriented schemes, being positive about the future and, somewhat surprisingly, being act-ive were mentioned more frequently by respondents participating in training schemes. On the other hand, people in training activities less often think that their participation contributes to feelings of usefulness in society compared to participants in work-oriented schemes. Addi-tional positive meanings of participation mentioned by the Portuguese respondents were, again, feeling useful and the ability to promote their capacities.

From the Danish case study we have some data on the impact of participating in policy pro-grammes on people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion regarding the political and cul-tural domains. It is quite clear from these results that participation in educational programmes has only minor effects on the quality of leisure time: 13% of respondents reported an im-provement, and an even larger group (28%) reported that the quality of their leisure time has deteriorated since they have started participation in the programme. The impact on political inclusion is even smaller: 13% state that the effect is positive, for most of the other respond-ents, participation in the programme has had no impact at all. At the same time, the positive impact on political inclusion for participants in educational programmes is twice as high as among the activated people in general.

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Part 3

Conclusions

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11. Conclusions

11.1 IntroductionIn the concluding chapter of this report, we will formulate some general conclusions based on the case studies we have presented in the previous chapters. First, we will comment on the central concepts of this study: social inclusion and social exclusion. Then, some conclusions are presented with respect to the relationship between participation and inclusion, first from a general point of view, then for the various types of participation we have been investigating in the case studies. Subsequently, some conclusions with respect to the domains of participation will be drawn. Finally, we will say something about the different policy approaches that we have encountered while conducting the case studies.

Together with the conclusions of the other INPART work packages, the conclusions presen-ted in this chapter will form the foundation on which we will formulate policy recommenda-tions in the final report.

Before preceding we would like to recall our earlier statement that the conceptualisation and operationalisations of inclusion/exclusion should be seen as ‘working’ conceptualisations and operationalisations. Even though we have tried to develop a more sophisticated conceptualisa-tion of inclusion and exclusion by distinguishing several ‘domains of participation’ and by combining an ‘objective’ and a ‘subjective’ approach to inclusion/exclusion, there is still a need for further elaboration of the concepts and of thinking through the consequences of con-ceptualisation for doing empirical research into the topic. This need of elaboration relates among others to: The still somehow unsatisfactory distinction between an objective and a subjective ap-

proach to inclusion and exclusion; The notion of ‘domains of participation’, which is helpful but at the same time involves

the risk of an endless list of ‘domains’ and ‘sub-domains’ of society; The relations between the domains and sub-domains and the issue of the dominance of

certain domains in bringing about an accumulation of situations and experiences of inclu-sion/exclusion, were dealt with in our case studies to a limited extent only.

11.2 The concepts of inclusion and exclusionInclusion and exclusion are the key concepts in the research on which we report in this docu-ment. We will, therefore, start our conclusions with some comments on these concepts.

First of all, the introduction of the concepts of inclusion and exclusion have often been inter-preted as distracting attention from the concept of poverty and from issues related to people’s income. Levitas, for example, who is arguing from the perspective of the RED discourse, sees this as one of the main weaknesses of the SID discourse. Even though ‘broad’ interpretations of the concepts of inclusion/exclusion (the same goes, of course, for the concept of poverty) may be used, in which case they become almost synonymous, inclusion and exclusion focus our attention on participation whereas poverty draws attention to financial hardship.

In our research, we have tried to avoid using one-sided, ‘participation-biased’ concepts of social inclusion and social exclusion. We have dealt with both issues of income and parti -cipation by looking also at income and consumption as 'sub-domains' of economic participa-

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tion and by paying attention to people’s financial and consumptive needs. From our case stud-ies, it is quite clear that the issues of participation and income deserve separate attention (in research, but also in politics). Despite the fact that both issues are closely related, they cannot be reduced to each other. A lack of participation or social isolation is not necessarily only a problem of financial hardship, and financial hardship is not necessarily a problem of a lack of participation, as the situations of the ‘working poor’ and the ‘active unemployed’ illustrate. In other words: people’s participation problems cannot always be solved by merely providing them with more income, and people’s income problems are not automatically solved by pro-moting their participation. Financial hardship does, of course, often constitute a barrier, for example, to participation in the social and cultural domains. Our case studies have revealed several instances where this is clearly the case. In other words, financial hardship may trigger an accumulation of situations of exclusion. However, we also saw that financial hardship may have different impacts on participation levels of different groups of people and in different domains of participation. At the same time, we have identified several other barriers to parti-cipation or, more positively, several other resources that may improve and stimulate participa-tion. Generally, it is impossible to identify one or several resources that have a fully determin-istic impact on participation in the sense that they are to be seen as conditiones sine qua non. This does not exclude the possibility, of course, that a lack of certain resources may have drastic effects on participation in specified cases or for specific groups. Income may be one of these resources, but so may health, time (in the case of single parents, for example) and more ‘psychological’ resources such as self-confidence and worthiness. However, all in all the life situations and circumstances of underprivileged, socially excluded or marginalised, poor or unemployed people are normally so complicated and multifaceted that trying to identify ‘the single, critical cause’ of their hardship may seem convenient, but will not be very adequate.

What might be the policy relevance of these general observations? As a provisional conclusion, which will be elaborated below, we present the following. Passive social policies are being criticised for being one-sided in emphasising income provision and neglecting parti-cipation opportunities. Current active social policies, which have been developed as an an-swer to this criticism, may end up being criticised for the reverse one-sidedness: emphasising participation and neglecting income, or more generally, resources. Against the background of the above considerations, we would like to emphasise the importance of developing em-powering or, using a less politicised phrase, enabling policies, supporting people in both over-coming financial or economic hardship and in promoting their participation. Given the di-versity of people’s life situations and social circumstances, these policies will have to incor-porate universal/generic, target-group directed and individualised, tailor-made measures.

Secondly, the concept of social inclusion has also been criticised for the exclusive role it at-tributes to paid work. Paid work is considered to be the only form of participation that should be pursued in the context of social policies stimulating social inclusion and combating social exclusion. The fact that other types of work or participation may not only be socially useful but may also contribute to people’s integration into society, is often neglected. This criticism of the conceptualisation of the concept of participation in the context of social inclusion policies has been the main starting point of our research, and we will say more about it in the following sections of this chapter. At this point, we would like to emphasise that our case studies show that there are more roads towards integration than regular paid work only. Without implying that these roads are equal in terms of the opportunities for social inclusion they provide (they are not), there is no a priori reason why the ‘enabling policies’ should not be based on a broad concept of participation.

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Thirdly, although the concepts of exclusion and inclusion are widely used in scientific, polit-ical and public discourse, their precise meaning is quite unclear and their conceptualisation highly controversial. In our research, we have used both objective and subjective approaches in our conceptualisation. It should be pointed out that both approaches are normative. In ob-jective conceptualisations, scientists, policy-makers or policy-administrators set standards for inclusion; those who do not meet these standards are considered to be excluded. The advant-age of this approach is that it is relatively straightforward: by measuring, for example, people’s labour-market participation, income situation, number and frequency of social con-tacts et cetera, and comparing the results with the specified standard, we can decide whether they are included into or excluded from the domains of work, income and social participation respectively.

However, the most obvious weakness of the objective approach is its assumption that people in a society share a specific set of needs that goes uncontested. Reality is very different from this. Thus, the standards used in ‘measuring’ inclusion and exclusion are not as objective as they are presented to be: they reflect norms of certain groups, not necessarily coinciding with the needs of the people whose inclusion and exclusion are being ‘measured’. In order to take account of these differences, a subjective conceptualisation of exclusion and inclusion are introduced. Here, people’s own standards are taken as points of reference in defining their situation in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, two people in the same ‘objective’ situ-ation can be assessed differently from a ‘subjective’ point of view, depending on the stand-ards they set. Of course, this subjective approach has disadvantages as well. It might result into a situation where people’s standards are taken as given, without contextualising them by taking into account their social background, experiences, opportunities, the social con-sequences their standards may have, et cetera. Thus, setting standards may be partly individu-alised, but can never take place either completely top-down (at least, in a democratic society) or bottom-up: ideally, they should be defined in a dialogue between clients and consultants.

Translated into social policy approaches we may say that current activating social policies often start from an ‘objective’ point of view, defining people’s problems and needs and the ways to solve these problems and fulfil the needs without taken into account people’s own definitions of their situation, needs, problems et cetera. Fully recognising the fact that each intervention in the context of activating social policies is normative and the pluriformity of norms and values these interventions can be based on, standards of inclusion should ideally be defined in a discursive context, in which –in the framework of social policies- clients and consultants put forward and legitimise their standards in order to negotiate on the formulation of norms and values that guide social interventions. In this discursive context, the distinction between an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ approach makes way for intersubjectivity.

11.3 Participation and inclusionOne of the clearest conclusions we can draw from our case studies is, firstly, that there is no clear dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion, and secondly, that equating inclusion with having a regular paid job is as much a simplification as is equating unemployment with exclu-sion. Of course, we did find instances where employment is related to inclusion and unem-ployment to exclusion, but the overall picture is much more complicated than this. To determ-ine the relationships between participation/non-participation on the one hand and inclusion/exclusion on the other only, paying attention to types of participation people are involved in is not sufficient. Interrelations between the following sets of factors are important to understand how participation and inclusion are related:

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Characteristics of the type of participation involved: are we dealing with paid or unpaid activities? Do the activities concern regular or additional/subsidised jobs? Are they stable or precarious jobs, permanent activities or activities aimed at improving labour-market participation?

Characteristics of the policy context in which participation takes place, where the policy context may refer both to social policies and to employment policies: are activities sup-ported or opposed by policies? What securities and insecurities are people confronted with? What resources are offered to people in terms of income, guidance, future perspect-ives? What stigmatisation risks are involved and how are they dealt with?

Characteristics of the participants: their social situations, cultural orientations and life his-tories, the needs people have in terms of income and consumption, autonomy, status and respect, personal development, et cetera. These characteristics are, of course, related to so-cial and demographic characteristics (gender, age, educational achievement, household composition, ethnic background et cetera) but can never be completely reduced to them.

Consequently, we can answer the question to what degree participation contributes to inclu-sion only by taking into account all these factors. This also explains the fact that our case studies show quite different experiences of inclusion and exclusion within the same type of participation. Different types of participation and different policy contexts in which participa-tion takes place can meet people’s needs to different degrees. Thus, one cannot deal with the issue of the inclusionary potential of types of work in isolation: in assessing the inclusionary or exclusionary potential of types of participation, all factors mentioned above should be taken into account. In other words: the fit between characteristics of the type of participation, characteristics of the policy context and people’s needs is crucial.

Nevertheless, our case studies also show that different types of participation offer opportunity and risk structures that are very important in shaping their inclusionary of exclusionary poten-tials. We have been able to identify the following: Income. Types of participation outside the regular labour market normally offer only lim-

ited income improvement opportunities or no income improvement opportunities at all. This implies that these types of participation have little to offer to those people for whom increasing income and consumption levels are important needs, and for those people who perceive remuneration as an important symbolic expression of society’s recognition of the usefulness of their activities. More generally, even though income is not a sufficient con-dition for inclusion, we have seen that it is an important resource to improve social inclu-sion in other domains, specifically the social and cultural domains.

Status. Different types of participation offer participants different status resources. Status resources are partially structured by social and employment policies, and resulting status differences may be reflected in social interactions, for example, between different ‘kinds’ of workers in work situations. Status differences may be sources of stigmatisation, redu-cing the inclusionary potential of forms of participation.

Career opportunities. Participation often involves processes of development in which people acquire new skills and competencies, develop new ambitions and needs to engage in new challenges. Types of participation can vary considerably in the degree to which they encourage these developments and offer opportunities to meet career needs of parti-cipants, either by adapting placements/jobs to new needs or by supporting people’s out-flow into other types of participation.

Future perspectives. More generally, types of participation may open up or block future

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perspectives of participants. In some cases, types of participation are designed explicitly to improve future perspectives, for example by being stepping-stones towards regular la-bour-market participation. In other cases, participants themselves use types of participa-tion to increase their future perspectives. However, the degree to which participants are actually offered resources, guidance, support and training opportunities to enhance future perspectives, varies widely. Thus, types of participation may act as springboards, but may also be dead-end activities, trapping people in an endless recycling process of activation.

Opt-out and failure provisions. Types of participation, and particularly those developed in the context of activating social policies, may or may not offer people opt-out or failure provisions. ‘Opt-out’ refers to the issue whether people are allowed to refuse activation offers, for example, because they consider the offer as not meeting their needs. In the con-text of ‘welfare-to-work’ and ‘workfare’, obligatory activation programmes have, of course, become more and more widespread and accepted, transforming activation offers into offers that cannot be refused. Failure provisions refer to the options available to people who do not consider their participation successful. Can they stop participating, take up their benefit rights and try different activation offers? Or are benefit entitlements re-duced, will they be sanctioned and not be entitled to other activation offers?

Flexibility. Types of participation offer different degrees of flexibility to participants. For example, flexibility of the number of working hours or the scheduling of working hours, and autonomy in deciding over these issues, may be an important condition to increase the inclusionary potential of types of participation, specifically for people with caring re-sponsibilities (for example, single parents) or for people with physical or mental health problems.

Availability of guidance and support. Activation schemes may operate according to a ‘plug-in-and-play’ philosophy, in which little care is given to participants after placement, or according to a more human-resource-management like philosophy, in which guidance and support is offered after placements. As we have seen in our case studies, the availabil-ity of guidance and support may be an important factor in increasing the inclusionary po-tential of types of participation. This is specifically the case for long-term unemployed people who are or have been confronted with several and severe problems.

Summarising, we might state that the degree to which types of participation offer participants security with respect to their ability to fulfil current and future needs is an important determ-inant of the inclusionary potential of these types of participation. People do, of course, have other resources of security: compare, for example, the importance of the family we witnessed in the Southern European countries. However, since all countries increasingly emphasise the importance of labour-market participation, alternative ‘security providers’ (such as the family, forms of self provision, mutual aid) are increasingly eroded.

11.4 Types of participationAgainst the background of the general comments in the previous section, this section will ex-plore the opportunity and risk structures with respect to the inclusionary potential of the dif-ferent types of participation we distinguished in this report.

11.4.1 Regular employmentThe emphasis in our case studies has been on types of participation outside the regular labour market and on groups of people with a vulnerable labour-market position. This means, of course, that our findings are biased: they are primarily focused on vulnerable socio-economic

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groups. For example, our conclusion in the previous section that security offered by types of participation is an important aspect of their inclusionary potential should be qualified when focusing on people with a strong market position, in the double sense that, firstly, they have more opportunities to make supply meet their demands and, secondly, they can rely on private security arrangements.

But even though we should recognise that, for acquiring security people are dependent on their jobs in different degrees, to the degree that they do depend on their jobs, the general comments in the previous section apply to people participating in regular employment as well. This was clearly illustrated by the part-time case study in the UK. Part-time work offered the female respondents partial security: a moderate income, social interactions outside the private sphere of the family, and a certain degree of flexibility to match paid work with the prioritised mother role. At the same time, part-time work excluded them from opportunities to choose the job they would like to do, from certain employment rights and from long-term security. Thus, this case study clearly shows that, even where regular employment is concerned, inclusion can only be partial. Rather than treating regular employment as an undifferentiated category and putting it at the top of a hierarchy of participation, statements on the inclusionary potential of regular employment should be qualified with respect to the growing diversity in the regular labour market.

11.4.2 Secondary labour-market participationIn this report, much more attention has been paid to participation in the secondary labour mar-ket. Many EU countries have started secondary labour-market schemes to create participation opportunities for unemployed people. Most of the times, these schemes are directed at groups of older and low-qualified unemployed, offering them low-skilled jobs. The small sample of schemes investigated in our case studies already revealed the diversity of these schemes. The Spanish scheme is clearly exceptional and has hardly any characteristics of a secondary la-bour-market scheme, since it is not directed at long-term and low-skilled unemployed people and since it is not aimed at creating a labour-market segment of low-skilled and low-paid jobs. In terms of the inclusionary potential of the secondary labour-market schemes, the asso-ciated workers in the Spanish capitalisation of unemployment benefits scheme seem to be best off, even though failure risks are quite large, larger than any of the other schemes we investig-ated. At the same time, compared to participants in the other schemes, the Spanish parti -cipants were already better off in the first place, before starting their participation: on average, they were higher qualified, had a more stable labour-market history and were short-term un-employed. Part of this can, of course, be attributed to the preventive nature of the scheme. Rather than providing activation opportunities after people have been unemployed for some time, the Spanish scheme provides these opportunities the moment people are threatened with unemployment.

As far as the other schemes are concerned, we have found that these schemes do cer-tainly have an inclusionary potential. Although to different degrees, they provide participants with economic independence, income improvement, social contacts, status and respect, useful activities, self-confidence and a more positive outlook. At the same time, all schemes also have clear exclusion risks. As far as the temporary schemes are concerned, the most important issue is, of course, what will happen to participants once their participation in the scheme has ended. Since these schemes are designed to be stepping-stones to regular labour-market parti-cipation, their inclusionary potential is significantly increased when they actually manage to contribute to labour-market participation. Participants’ positive evaluations of the schemes can at least partly be attributed to the positive expectations they have in this respect. At the

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same time, we also observed that when these expectations are not fulfilled, experiences of ex-clusion will increase. This risk is not imaginary, as our case studies and other investigations into similar schemes show: there is a considerable risk that people find themselves trapped in an activation recycling process, participating in one scheme after another. This does not imply that people prefer being on passive benefits, but being caught in this activation process and lacking opportunities to escape from it may contribute to experiences of marginalisation and stigmatisation.

With respect to the permanent schemes, we witnessed a tendency that their inclusion-ary potential is smaller than that of the temporary ones. However, we should be careful in drawing the conclusion that this means that temporary schemes are ‘better’ than permanent schemes. In both cases, the degree to which the schemes meet people’s needs and expecta-tions is crucial. In the temporary schemes, people have the expectation to be able to find a regular job in the end; when they are disappointed in this respect, the inclusionary potential of the temporary schemes is decreased significantly. As far as the permanent schemes are con-cerned, the important issue is to what degree developmental and career perspectives are offered, either in the context of the scheme or in the regular labour market. Since these offers are practically absent in the schemes we have been investigating, respondents who have these ambitions are confronted with experiences of permanent stigmatisation and marginalisation. Once again, not the temporary or permanent character of the schemes as such but the fit between participation, policy and participants’ characteristics determine the inclusionary or exclusionary potential of the various schemes.

The status of participants in permanent secondary labour-market schemes is an issue that deserves special attention. Whereas for participants in temporary schemes status differ-ences may be acceptable because there is the expectation of a regular job in the near future, status differences for permanent scheme participants may at some point become unacceptable and turn into an important motive for desiring to leave the scheme. We have seen that various status differences exist: programmes are targeted (at long-term unemployed, low-qualified people, certain age groups, people with multiple problems, et cetera) which may influence in-teractions with others; they are subjected to income ceilings; they are confined to specific kinds of tasks; et cetera. Whereas some participants resign to these status differences because of a lack of alternatives, or do manage to cope with them, they result in increasing feelings of stigmatisation and marginalisation. Decreasing status differences (for those for whom second-ary labour-market participation is likely to be permanent) and increasing investments into people’s future perspectives (for those who want and are able to participate in regular jobs) are two policy options to increase the inclusionary potential of secondary labour-market parti-cipation.

11.4.3 Unpaid workParticipation in unpaid work may have an inclusionary potential as well. Obviously, without additional measures, the inclusionary potentials of this type of work are limited to the imma-terial aspects, since as such, participation in unpaid work will not offer economic independ-ence and income improvement. Nevertheless, these immaterial aspects (status and respect, so-cial networks, personal development, meaningful activities) may be and, in our case studies, actually are important on their own. Of course, as is the case in the other types of work as well, people may chose to be active in unpaid work from different backgrounds and for differ-ent reasons. Among the Danish volunteers, reasons for participating seem to be more ideolo-gically inspired than among the Dutch, where motives are more related to breaking through social isolation and/or increasing social networks and developing meaningful activities, some-

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times seen as first steps towards labour-market participation. In the British case, where the at-tention was focused on different kinds of unpaid activities, motives were related to getting things done in the household. The inclusionary potential of unpaid work depends among other things, on the degree to which these motives are met. For example, unpaid work is often not allowed to unemployed people, certainly not as an alternative to paid work, which of course limits its inclusionary potential. Where unpaid work is done as a stepping-stone towards paid employment, its inclusionary potential is highly dependent on support people get in realising this objective. The British case shows that being able to make use of unpaid work to fulfil needs depends on the availability of resources.

Generally speaking, whereas the promotion of secondary labour-market participation is entirely subjected to social policies, the contrary is the case with unpaid work. Supportive policies (recognising and rewarding unpaid work, guiding people in finding placements or in finding a job, offering them the resources needed, et cetera) are practical absent and some-times unpaid work is counteracted rather than encouraged. Thus, often the inclusionary poten-tial of unpaid work is realised despite rather than as a result of policies. This is, of course, closely related to the dominance of paid work in social policies. This also goes for the Dutch case, where participation actually is encouraged and supported in social policies. For the tar-get group of these policies is limited to those unemployed whose labour-market chances are considered to be nil. In other words, here it is clearly designed as a last-resort integration op-tion: only when participation in measures directed at primary or secondary labour-market in-tegration has failed or is considered unrealistic, integration through unpaid work is allowed. So even though the inclusionary potential of unpaid work is recognised, it is clearly posi-tioned at the bottom of a participation hierarchy13.

Contrary to what was the case with secondary labour-market programmes, our case studies into unpaid work did not reveal experiences of stigmatisation of unemployed people in unpaid work. Probably this is related to the fact that our case studies did not deal with forms of obligatory participation in unpaid work, and to the fact that in our case studies, unpaid or voluntary work carried out by unemployed people could not be distinguished from unpaid work done by other categories of unpaid workers. Furthermore, secondary labour-market schemes often limit work tasks to low-skilled and/or low-productive work, whereas such a limitation does not exist where unpaid work is concerned. The degree to which participants in activating social policies or their tasks can be clearly ‘identified’ (either in existing work or-ganisations or in separate organisations) seems to have influence on stigmatisation risks. This does not mean, of course, that unpaid workers never report experiences of stigmatisation, for example, in work organisations where both paid and unpaid workers are working. However, in these circumstances, processes of stigmatisation will likely be directed at unpaid workers as such, not specifically at unemployed unpaid workers.

11.4.4 Training and educationThe training and education schemes we investigated were all, like the temporary secondary la-bour-market schemes, designed to prepare people for labour-market participation. Generally speaking, the training and education schemes are targeted at groups of people that are younger than the target-groups of secondary labour-market schemes are. The inclusionary potential of these schemes is, like the temporary secondary labour-market schemes, highly dependent on 13 To illustrate this: according to the Dutch Social Assistance Act, single parents with children under 5 are re-lieved from the obligation from paid work. Until 1996, single parents with children under 12 had no obligation to look for a job. Recently, the Dutch government launched a proposal to put single parents with children under 5 under the obligation to look for part-time (24 hours) jobs, thus decreasing single parents’ opportunities to raise children on their own.

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people’s opportunities to find a job after completing the scheme. And even though parti-cipants in these schemes are on average younger, there is a clear risk of ‘educational recyc-ling’ or ‘activation recycling’ here as well. Thus, even though participation in the schemes raises people’s expectations to be able to find a job, the risk that these expectations will be frustrated is very real. Nevertheless, despite these considerations training and education schemes also have an inclusionary potential: they may offer people new skills, social contacts, status, meaningful activities, some income improvement in some cases, et cetera. These ‘ad-vantages’ of participating in education and training schemes may have positive effects on par-ticipation in other domains than the labour market. In other words, the successes of training and education schemes in terms of their integrative functions cannot be measured by merely evaluating their contribution to participants’ labour-market chances. Sometimes training and education programmes recognise this explicitly, as we saw in the Portuguese case study where stimulating social participation was considered to be a separate objective of the training pro-gramme, apart from labour-market integration.

11.5 Domains of participationIn this report, we have been distinguishing several domains of participation: the economic, the social, the cultural (including leisure and religion) and the political domain. From our case studies it can be concluded that the economic and social domains seem to be by far the most important in shaping people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion; even though this does not mean, that they never feel excluded from or would like to be more included into the cul-tural or political domains.

It turns out to be rather complicated to establish the relationship between participation on the one hand and inclusion into the various domains on the other. Usually it is assumed that regular employment offers resources and opportunities that enable inclusion into the do-mains: income, social networks, status, employment rights et cetera. At the same time, access to these resources and opportunities may differ from one job to another, as the part-time case study showed. Furthermore, having a paid job may also limit resources and opportunities to be engaged in other domains: the Spanish case studies illustrated this with respect to the re-source of time. In other words, generally speaking there is no straightforward relation between having a regular paid job and inclusion into other domains.

Another aspect that makes the relationship between participation and inclusion into various domains a complicated issue is that people are not necessarily dependent on the re-sources that regular jobs offer them to be included into the domains of participation. For ex-ample, other types of work or participation may give access to similar resources as well. This goes for all types of participation we have been distinguishing in this report. And even beyond the types of participation we distinguished, people may find other ways to get integrated into the various domains, such as through networks of family or friends, leisure activities et cetera. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that different types of participation are not equivalent in the access they offer to certain resources. For example, we showed that unpaid work gives no access to income, and that secondary labour-market participation may give only limited ac-cess to status. Thus, different types of participation reveal different patterns of integration op-portunities, and the fit between these opportunities and people’s needs will determine their in-clusionary potential.

In this context, income seems to be a resource deserving special attention. On the one hand we observed that income is an important resource for being integrated into the domains of consumption, culture/leisure and social networks in particular. Many respondents pointed at a lack of income as an important barrier to their integration into these domains. On the

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other hand, of the various resources that may increase integration into these domains, access to income is most exclusively related to job access. Thus, insofar as income is a prerequisite for inclusion into the various domains, one might argue that participation in a regular job and, to a lesser extent, in secondary labour-market jobs does actually constitute an entry ticket to full participation. Nevertheless, even in this case, the link between paid jobs and full particip-ation is highly policy-dependent. For example, passive social policies in the countries we have studied provide people with very different levels of income, thereby influencing the de-gree to which full participation is dependent on having a job. Furthermore, proponents of a basic or citizens’ income scheme argue in favour of loosening the work-income nexus, which would make availability of income and, consequently, full participation less dependent on availability of paid work. In a more moderate version, a participation income might give people access to income improvement dependent on their involvement in useful activities rather than just paid work. And systems of informal exchange may open up non-monetary in-come resources that can enhance people’s full participation. In other words, even though in-come is an important resource to be able to fully participate in a highly monetarised society, there are other options available to improve people’s income situation than just offering them a paid job.

Summarising, even though paid employment may –at least potentially- give access to re-sources for full participation, it does not do so exclusively. Furthermore, insofar as paid em-ployment does stimulate integration into domains of participation, it does not do so by its very nature, but by the way policies deal with work and participation. In other words, to increase full participation of people out of employment, two policy options are open: either to stimu-late their participation in paid employment, or to open up other opportunities and resources towards full participation.

In this context, some remarks should be made with respect to the issue of ‘self-exclusion’. In describing the results of the case studies in previous chapters, we encountered various in-stances of self-exclusion. People withdraw from the labour market in order to avoid disap-pointments and frustrations related to frequent rejections when applying for jobs. People with-draw from social networks in order to save money, because they cannot afford it, or because of feelings of shame and a lack of self-confidence. People withdraw from political participa-tion because of their lack of trust in the political system. Of course, social interventions do not (and probably should not) take these ‘self-exclusion strategies’ for granted. Even though people might use these strategies as ‘survival strategies’ and even though they might find it hard to break through them as ‘self-exclusion’ also offers them security and a reduction of so-cial risks, in many cases they result from an actual and/or perceived lack of resources, oppor-tunities and options. Here, the importance of a dialogic approach of social interventions aimed at activation becomes clear. Instances of exclusion, assessed from an ‘objective’ point of view, which are not immediately perceived as problematic by the people involved, do not ne-cessarily indicate that one should refrain from social intervention. Thus, the dialogic character of social interventions implies that norms and values of both the interventionists and the target groups of interventions should be open to debate.

11.6 Traditional and new activation approachesTraditionally, active social policies start from a rather top-down point of view, fettered by a paternalistic perspective saying that paid employment is the one and only way to integrate

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people into society. From this perspective, there seems to be no need to legitimise social policy interventions, since the dominance of paid work is considered to be an issue of con-sensus. However, the dominance of paid work, and with it the top-down and paternalistic character of active social policies, have been criticised again and again. The reasons for this criticism are various: There is not enough paid employment for the ever increasing number of people that are

subjected to active social policies; Paid employment is not the only way in which people can contribute to society, neither is

it the only route towards social integration; Not everyone wants or is able to participate in paid work.

Against this background, social policy ‘niches’ have been developed in which different social policy approaches are used, opening up non-traditional social inclusion strategies and/or pay-ing more respect to strategies and ambitions of the target groups of social policies themselves. Examples of these policies were found in the Dutch and Belgian case studies, and were ad-vocated on the basis of the British case study into informal work. In most cases, these policies have been developed for groups of unemployed or poor people who, time and again, were not reached by more traditional social policy approaches: the very long-term unemployed, unem-ployed or poor people with multiple problems, et cetera. The reasons for not reaching these groups are various such as the lack of flexibility of existing programmes, the lack of an integ-rative approach in tackling people’s problems, the lack of opportunities to develop tailor-made integration routes, et cetera. The failure of traditional social policies for these people has opened up opportunities to experiment with a variety of alternative approaches, ranging from tailor-made guidance in supporting employment, to recognising and facilitating particip-ation strategies developed by poor and unemployed people themselves, to creating new types of participation et cetera. Once again, these new approaches have, up until now, been con-fined to people who were excluded from traditional activation approaches. However, one may expect that since social policies in the EU countries are becoming more and more activation-oriented, EU countries will be increasingly confronted with groups of people that are not reached by these policies and, consequently, are not only excluded from the labour market, but from activating social policies as well. In a negative scenario, one may expect a situation in which these people are left to their own devices and policy interventions are limited to re-duce the inconvenience they may cause to the better-off and included parts of society. In a more positive scenario, opportunities will be created to develop the ‘enabling’ social policies we mentioned, providing room for experimenting with new social intervention strategies, new ways to improve social inclusion, et cetera.

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