This book offers a detailed study of the ‘double dynamics’ (Newman, 2007) of activation in Ireland that speaks to wider intersections between the workfarist turn in activation policy and the governance turn towards marketisation in welfare administration. In so doing, it illuminates the political effects of governance reforms to underscore that ‘the practical is political’ (Brodkin, 2013a: 32). Specially, the book tries to explicate the mechanisms by which marketisation reinforces and accentuates the activation of claimants in more demanding, workfarist ways, while also tracing the shifting sectoral division of welfare in Ireland and the gaining ascendency of the market as the means for deploying the commodifying power of the state.
The core thread of the book is the logic of commodification underpinning both the administrative and policy tracks of contemporary welfare reform. Activation policies deploy conduct conditionality to motivate un(der)employed people to sell their labour on the open market. Quasi-marketisation tries to ensure that providers deliver upon this project of activation by, in turn, further converting non-employed labour into a fungible commodity that can be acquired through a competitive tender, polished, and sold on for profit. Importantly, the two forms of commodification work in tandem: conceiving of their
The Irish case
This is far from the first study of the impact of marketisation on the delivery of welfare-to-work. It owes much to the rich body of work that has preceded it by a range of scholars from Australia, Britain, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and United States among other countries (for example Considine, 2001; Bredgaard and Larsen, 2007; Brodkin, 2011; Soss et al, 2011a; van Berkel, 2013, 2017; Larsen and Wright, 2014; Considine et al, 2015; Fuertes and Lindsay, 2016; Greer et al, 2017; O’Sullivan et al, 2021). Where the book breaks new ground is in offering an original study of the delivery of activation by street-level organisations in Ireland and in synchronously comparing the frontline delivery of welfare-to-work under different governance conditions.
The pluri-governance approach to commissioning employment services that operated in Ireland from 2015 to 2022 afforded an almost unique opportunity to control for ‘policy noise’. By contrast, previous studies of the connections between activation practices and governance reforms have either relied on single case studies of implementation by market providers or evaluated the impact of market governance by tracking changes in delivery over time (before and after various marketisation reforms). The challenge is that marketisation reforms seldom happen in isolation from substantive changes
The Irish case filters out the policy noise that often clouds studies of double activation. Claims about the effects of market governance on the nature of frontline delivery can consequently be put to the test in new ways, and in a context where commitment to activation reform has historically been weak. In some ways Ireland provides a ‘least likely’ case – at least among liberal welfare regimes – for testing the points of intersection between workfare and quasi-marketisation. It was an outlier not just among liberal welfare states but across OECD countries as far as the use of sanctions and conditionality goes. Support for the welfare state was comparatively high for a liberal regime, albeit one with ‘a “kinder and gentler” political culture’ (Hick and Murphy, 2021: 314), and active labour market spending was predominantly oriented around training, work experience, and job creation programmes.
All this suggests that Ireland should not have been an especially fertile ground for cultivating workfarist practices and that the effects of market governance on skewing the
Connecting workfare and marketisation
Conceptually, the book unpacks the underlying theories of human motivation and commodification of the unemployed, shared by proponents of workfare and quasi-marketisation. Chapter Three positions quasi-marketisation as a form of hyper-commodification of the unemployed – identifying how allocating employment services through competitive tendering and outcomes-based contracting involves organising claimants into lots to be bid for, acquired, and sold on for profit by contractors. To the extent that workfare policies constitute strategies of administrative re-commodification, quasi-marketisation involves the state-sanctioned multiplication of how profit can be extracted from surplus labour, giving rise to a welfare-to-work system replete with ‘affirmative sites of commodification’ (Soss et al, 2011a: 297).
Chapter Three also draws out the parallels between the pathological theory of unemployment motivating workfare, and the assumptions made by proponents of quasi-marketisation
Chapter Four demonstrates that the intersection between workfare and quasi-marketisation is not just theoretical but plays out in practice in terms of reorienting the delivery of employment services away from enabling supports towards a more demanding model of activation. This was reflected in the apparent willingness of JobPath staff to report clients for breaching mutual commitments – especially in circumstances concerning job-search conditionality – and in the greater demands that were made on service-users’ time to more frequently attend appointments and ‘job-search sessions’ at offices. ‘Enabling’ support was essentially limited to job-search training workshops on preparing CVs, cover letters, and interview techniques rather than encouraging participation in education, work experience, or substantive training. In short, the locus of support was on increasing the intensity and effectiveness of claimants’ job-searching whereas there was evidence that LES placed a greater priority on human capital development as the route to employability. This was consistent across the frontline survey data and the experiences of the two employment services reported by service-users.
How quasi-marketisation reconfigures organisational conditions and agency of street-level workers to reshape frontline practice
Source: Adapted from McGann (2022b)How quasi-marketisation reconfigures organisational conditions and agency of street-level workers to reshape frontline practice
Source: Adapted from McGann (2022b)How quasi-marketisation reconfigures organisational conditions and agency of street-level workers to reshape frontline practice
Source: Adapted from McGann (2022b)A second key dynamic by which quasi-marketisation restructures the nature of administrative agency in policy delivery is through providers’ workforce selection practices and the politics of professionalism. Allocating responsibility for the delivery of employment services through competitive tendering and results-based payment models generates embedded incentives for providers to cut costs. They must do so to be competitive on price when bidding for contracts and to minimise their financial exposure on contracts that render their revenues contingent upon the volumes and duration of job placements they can secure. These revenues are far from certain when the proportion of the caseload that progresses to 52 weeks or more of full-time employment is only about 7 per cent (Oireachtas Committee, 2021: 8). Because staffing is among the most significant cost facing contractors, there is an understandable temptation for providers to recruit inexperienced workers rather than more costly trained professionals. However, to do so, they must routinise as much of the case management task as possible through developing standardised procedural guidelines and assessment protocols that can be easily followed to arrive at recommended but somewhat generic courses of action. The upshot, as Greer and colleagues observe in their comparative study of marketisation in Denmark, Germany, and Britain, is that the resources needed to staff the frontline with qualified professionals are siphoned ‘out of services … and the standardisation of services that this requires drains the capacity of providers to innovate’ (2017: 141).
This connection between quasi-marketisation and the politics of professionalism in activation work is perhaps not as widely remarked upon in the literature as the connection between marketisation and the disciplining of discretion via targets and performance measurement. But it is no less significant to understanding how instruments of market governance reconfigure the agency of street-level workers. Quasi-marketisation transforms agency in policy delivery by not only changing the managerial and performance regimes under which street-level workers’ exercise their discretion. It also fundamentally dislodges who holds that agency in the first place, shifting the types of professional identities, occupational
In identifying these two dynamics tracing workfare policy practices to instruments of market governance, it should not be presumed that these are entirely discrete mechanisms. To the contrary, the intensification of managerialism and performance measurement within delivery organisations is likely to go hand in glove with the de-skilling of frontline staff. This is not least because systems of managerial scrutiny and performance measurement will be easier to implement in the context of a less experienced, lower qualified, and non-unionised workforce. To this extent, the politics of discretion and the politics of professionalism are reinforcing. Each begets the other, and each begets a more demanding workfarist orientation.
Does workfare work?
What has yet to be addressed in any detail is the extent to which workfarist activation works. Behind the book’s critique of activation’s double dynamics is an implicit assumption that what is produced when workfare meets marketisation is detrimental to the interests of the long-term unemployed. The experiences reported by the service-users interviewed for this book certainly give credence to this assumption. But that is a topic for another day. To satisfactorily address it would
The selection of what to measure is a political choice with highly significant ramifications for how policies are evaluated. Should success be judged by how many people are moved off benefits; by how many find employment; by the quality of employment transitions in terms of sustainability and earnings; or by the impact on people’s wellbeing more broadly conceived? Each of these are very different measures, so the ‘success’ of programmes will look very different depending on the choice of measure. When the preferred measures of success are off-benefit rates and the speed at which people return to work the outcomes of programmes characterised by job-search services and sanctions appear quite good. However, exiting welfare is not synonymous with entering employment and even then, the aim of employment services ‘should not only be to get people off benefits and into work, but also to help them access “quality” jobs’ (Martin, 2015: 22). To this extent, a critique of workfare models is not only that they result in many people being ‘activated to take low-wage jobs … which may not lift them and their families permanently out of poverty’ (Martin, 2015: 22). They can also give rise to people exiting welfare caseloads ‘to destinations unrelated to work’ (Loopstra et al, 2015: 11).
‘I went to my doctor to write me a letter to basically put me on an illness benefit, to get me out of going … With [JobPath], going in and out every week and feeling this kind of us and them approach, it would not help anyone’s mental health either. I found I was just going in and doing a pointless thing of job-searching week-in, week-out and I did not fancy going through the whole thing again.’ (Cormac, service-user, 40s, Limerick)
‘I got another letter from JobPath to go back into it again for another year. And I made the choice then, because I just knew it would just bring me down, so I came off the two days Social Welfare … I didn’t want to put my head into another place that was going to bring me down … it was kind of like the money against your mental health.’ (Emer, service use, 40s, Dublin)
Workfare programmes may reduce welfare caseloads and accelerate the speed at which some people return to employment. But they can also lead to hidden unemployment and in-work poverty (Arni et al, 2013; Seikel and Spannagel, 2018), as in the examples of Cormac and Emer who also articulated saliant concerns about the potential impacts of participation on their mental health. Here, Carter and Whitworth argue for the importance of differentiating between the ‘process wellbeing’ and ‘outcome wellbeing’ effects of activation. While the psychological benefits of employment are
Beyond the problem of what to measure, there is also the question of how long the duration of measurement should be. This is especially pertinent when comparing the outcomes of job-search services and sanctions approaches against human capital approaches. The literature comparing the two main activation approaches tends to find that ‘job-search assistance and sanctions’ approaches have large short-term effects on employment participation over one to two years but that human capital approaches tend to have more positive effects ‘in the medium or longer run’ (three to five years) (Card et al, 2018: 31). For instance, an Australian study drawing on panel data from over 6,000 unemployed people found that, over the long run, people who were subject to mutual obligation moved into ‘lower quality jobs’ (Gerards and Welters, 2022: 957) in terms of earnings and hours than similarly matched cohorts without job-search conditionality. In a review of over 90 studies on the impacts of sanctions, Pattaro and colleagues similarly found that although studies consistently report positive short-term impacts on employment, sanctions are also associated ‘with a range of adverse impacts in terms of worsening job quality and stability in the longer term’ (2022: 35) as well as higher exists to non-employment.
In short, the evaluation literature is far from conclusive. Workfare models seem effective when outcomes are measured over a shorter duration and in terms of ‘off-benefit’ rates or speed to employment. In this respect, an econometric evaluation of JobPath found that the programme was ‘effective
Why is it then that governments across countries, including Ireland, have become so enthralled by workfarist policies? The answer most likely lies in politics and ideology. The unemployed are a politically weak group. Their small number poses little threat at the ballot box while there is political currency to be made in politicians appearing tough on welfare and appealing to tropes of ‘lifters, not leaners’ and ‘strivers, not skivers’. The narrative that a significant proportion of people are claiming benefits due to the low-intensity and ineffectiveness of their job-searching also conveniently conceals the structural causes of unemployment, and policymakers’ failure to address them. To this extent, political commitment to workfare is driven more by ‘gesture politics’ (Power et al, 2022: 8) than empirical evidence; a form of political dog-whistling in which claimants are the victims of not just economic but political commodification.
