ENGAGEMENT UND ERWERBSARBEIT IN EUROPA - BBE

forum 1 | roth: activating labour market policy and volunteering
motivation levels as well as to the requirements
of companies and their employees,
• the lack of consideration of the participatory potential
of socially excluded or marginalised groups.
This criticism was aimed primarily at strengthening
the bond and exchange between the labour market
and volunteering, and thereby making better use of
the potential for labour market integration, as well
as promoting volunteering. At the moment however
it looks as if this connection will be undermined and
completely severed over the next few years.
Since 2011 the new Rutte Government has made
changes in direction. The present regulations and
laws will be changed from 2013 and will then increasingly
focus on direct entry into the labour market.
At the same time, strict austerity measures have
been announced, so that from 2012 many municipalities
will cut their budgets in the area of social activation.
The municipalities are largely responsible for
the activation programmes and projects.
These developments may have an adverse effect on
involved unemployed people, non-profit organisations,
local authorities and also employers. On the
other hand, so called “social enterprises”, an innovative
model of social enterprises with relatively low
dependence on government financing, are gradually
beginning to fill the resulting gap.
Prof. Dr. Roland Roth
actiVating labOur Market pOlicy
and VOlunteering
The starting point is a paradigm shift in labour market
and social policy from welfare to workfare, which has
taken place over the past two decades in different versions
and to different extents in many OECD countries.
Its logic runs: Away from social security as status protection
(passive services) to mandatory and sanctionable
forms of activation for the labour market. Groups
far outside the labour market are to be brought back
into the labour market, or included for the first time,
by means of a work-first policy (employment rather
than benefits). In the USA for example, the first target
group was the “welfare mothers”. Destandardised,
deregulated and precarious employment (temporary
work, part-time work, mini-jobs etc.) will be encouraged
in order to create the corresponding demand. In
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some countries, further concepts of social activation
have also been drawn up in the form of training programmes.
It remains disputable whether workfare has
succeeded in reintegrating such groups back into the
labour market. What is indisputable however is that
there has been a considerable increase in gainful employment,
although to a large extent in precarious employment
and in the low-wage sector.
1. the prOfile Of actiVating labOur
Market pOlicy in gerMany
Germany is a late-comer in matters of activating labour
market policy. Central reforms (in particular the
amendments to SGB II, III and XII referred to as Hartz
IV) only came into force in 2005 (most importantly),
although they were far more extensive than in other
countries, which usually focused their workfare programmes
selectively on certain “problem groups”.
The reduction in registered unemployment since 2006
and the comparatively strong resistance of the labour
market to crises is attributed to by government to this
activating labour market policy. Another view sees in
this development primarily economic effects and the
impact of the special economic competitiveness of the
German economy. One indisputable result is the enormous
expansion of the low-wage sector in Germany,
which is the largest in the EU, with a variety of precarious
forms of employment, such as the large number
of “topper-uppers” on supplementary benefits, who
need such benefits to secure their livelihood. At the beginning
of the last decade, the absence of such a sector
was still seen as a major factor in the high level of longterm
unemployment in Germany. Today, the “flexiblised”
labour market of Germany is regarded as a model
by conservative and liberal governments in the EU,
while from the classical social democratic perspective
there are increasing calls for collateral security (“flexicurity”).
The overall increased employment rate observed
and the structure of the low-wage sector have
a definite social profile: predominantly female, and with
a larger proportion of immigrants, with the younger and
older more strongly represented than the middle-aged.
Contrary to the official slogan of “support and demand”,
the rise of activating strategies was paradoxically
accompanied in Germany by a more or less
drastic dismantling of active labour market policy
(qualification, further training, retraining etc.) – i.e.
plenty of demand, or compulsion, but little support.
Not least for this reason, the ongoing employment
debate confirms the lack of skilled labour. Activating