Enabling and demanding job activation

Public attitudes and sterotypes of unemployed people

Enabling and demanding employment activation reflect politics

Last week’s Social work bites post looked at research on claimants’ experiences and views on employment activation; that is, policies to encourage or pressurise people into jobs or at least looking for employment. There is another interesting recent study looking at public attitudes in Belgium to two types of the ‘Active Labour Market Policies’ (Meuleman, et al., 2024). This looks at the impact of what last week’s research called ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ activation. This week’s study calls it ‘enabling’ and ‘demanding’ activation, but it means the same thing.

Enabling or positive activation uses training, skill development and ‘human capital improvement’ (encouraging and supporting more positive or assertive attitudes and responses to employment). Demanding or negative activation uses cuts in benefit and other sanctions on social provision to get unemployed people working. Last week, for example, we saw that in the UK some people receiving benefits were not left to carry out their own job searching, but required to apply for jobs or come to meetings with an adviser.

There are political implications of these different approaches. Enabling policies, originating in Sweden, used behavioural incentives, and were typical of social democratic political leadership. Demanding approaches originate in American ‘work-first’ ideas and uses punishing, repressive policies to encourage people to move into employment quickly, rather than necessarily seeking good quality jobs. This approach has been developed in the 1990s by centre-right political parties.

In Belgium, there are complications because there are linguistic and cultural divisions between two population groups, one oriented towards Flemish heritage, the other French-speaking. Enabling activation was used initially for young people in an activation and job support project, which later extended to other groups of unemployed people. There was a shift towards tighter controls and sanctions from 2012-16. Unemployment benefits became less generous.

Lying behind these changes were two distinct ideological explanations for how to influence people in the direction of preferred policies. Self-interest theory says that individuals make calculations about personal advantages and costs in how policy is applied to them, assuming that people try to maximise their interests and reduce disadvantages. Enabling activation is about encouraging people to take advantages of opportunities that will benefit them, but it is also possible to see it as an attempt to control of what you do with your life, which some people might resist. There is a social class gradient; more middle-class people take an opportunities view while more working-class people are more resentful of people around them who are unemployed.

Ideological dispositions create complex and ambiguous views. Employment policy is embedded in a moral worldview which is about everyone’s solidarity with and obligation to work to contribute to society. More right-wing individuals accept this kind of argument. Seeing activation as a social investment has elements of right- and left-wing views: it includes strong state intervention and personal responsibility (left-wing). But there are ambivalent views among trade unions, which support people being helped to work, but not forcing them into more exploitative working conditions or enforced obligations, like attending meetings with a work adviser. The position is complicated, therefore, many ambivalences in attitudes exist, and different views of social justice are also relevant (for example favouring rights to work, but against compulsion).

Public views of unemployed people: a Belgian study

The study sought to look at the interplay between social structural issues, such as status, income, occupation, education, and ideological views, such as left-right views, justice preferences and attitudes to unemployed people. Data from the 2020 Belgian National Election study provided a sample of 1659 respondents to explore attitudes to employment and activation.

The outcomes showed that demanding activation policies were supported by about 6 in 10 Belgians, for example requiring people to accept job offers, even when they lost income. 72% supported government controls on job search, 66% favoured sanctions where unemployed people did not comply with their responsibilities. Opposition to these sorts of policies was low: 21%, 10% and 9% respectively. Support for enabling activation was at least as strong; 70% supported higher investment in education and training and the least popular measure, financial incentives to enter low-paid jobs, was still 55%.

Looking at the attitudes that underlie these policy preferences showed very high support for enabling policies such as investment in education and training, but less for financial incentives paid to unemployed people. Reflecting the experience in other studies, there are two distinct attitudes: people support investment in education and development policies, but they also support demanding activation when they think about unemployed individuals.

It seems that the support for demanding policies comes from people who stress equity between individuals in society but not need as a basis for benefits, and are negative about unemployed people. Positive attitudes to unemployed people and a preference for equality among different social groups favour enabling policies. People differentiate between the two policy approaches, they understand that these are different views.Nevertheless, there is support for both types of activation. Ideological dispositions are an important source of attitudes, particularly people’s views about what constitutes justice or fairness and their stereotypes of unemployed people.

What should we do?

These attitudes are not going to go away. But perhaps attempts to change stereotypes of unemployment would lead to greater policy flexibility. For example, it might be good if public attitudes were better informed about how people have become unemployed and how they behave when they are unemployed. Such greater flexibility in public attitudes when there are problems of unemployment in a society could lead to a more nuanced policy environment.

When I was involved in community initiatives to help unemployed people at a time in the UK of quite high unemployment, I found there was a lot of support for public sector help to enable people to develop skills and work-related positivity. It seems that this was true in Belgium also. There was a lot of support for positive attempts to improve employment opportunities. But this does not negate the reality of a long shadow of punitive attitudes in our culture towards people who experience unemployment; to many people it’s natural to see them as scroungers and skivers, and we should change these attitudes tobeing more understanding of the pressures.

We need research that explores how it feels to be unable to make a contribution to society through working, that shows what individuals, families and communities go through when there is high unemployment and which helps everyone to understand the mental health and social relations consequences of unemployment.

Meuleman, B., Van Hootegem, A., Rossetti, F., & Abts, K. (2024). Two faces of activation attitudes. Explaining citizens' diverging views on demanding versus enabling activation policies. Social Policy & Administration, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.13055