‘Integrative’ or ‘Defensive’ Youth Activation in Nine European Welfare States

Abstract

Young unemployed persons are a prioritised group in active labour market programmes. Such programmes can be regarded as ‘integrative’, facilitating integration into the labour market for young people in accordance with their own preferences. However, such programmes can also be regarded as ‘defensive’, discouraging young unemployed persons from claiming transfer incomes and urging them to lower their sights when looking for jobs. The article examines the conceptions of the young participants themselves, analysing whether activation programmes are experienced in ways endorsing the integrative or the defensive perspective across different European welfare states. Survey data from these countries indicate that activation programmes for youth are at the integrative end of the spectrum. This is especially the case in the universal welfare regime countries, which are also the group of countries in which youth activation schemes are most widespread. Participant's scheme evaluations are least favourable in Scotland, in line with expectations of a liberal welfare regime approach. Most conservative welfare regime countries fall in between.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Einar Øverbye, Morten Blekesaune, Torild Hammer, Axel West Pedersen, Kirsti Valset from Norwegian Social Research, Lars Mjøset from University of Oslo, participants in the Sociology of Social Policy session at the 6th ESA Conference, Murcia, 2003, participants in the session on Labour Market and Activation Policies at COST A13, Oslo, 2003, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and advice.

Notes

1. It is sometimes claimed that Scottish social policy is distinctively different from social policy in England and Wales, so treating Scotland as a represent of the liberal regime is misleading. However, in an analysis, Mooney and Poole find that concerning the overall trend in educational policies, Scotland does not deviate significantly from the United Kingdom as such: ‘“learning for labour”, and the argument that education should be driven by the perceived “needs of the economy”, increasingly characterized education policy throughout the UK: institutional differences remained but policy was guided by broadly the same set of principles’ (Mooney & Poole 2004, p. 462; original emphasis). Furthermore, they refer to the fact that the systems of cash benefits are very much alike in England, Scotland and Wales, and point to trends of social policy convergence during the Thatcherite period (Mooney & Poole 2004).

2. The importance of acknowledging the young scheme participant's conceptions becomes clearer if one considers the so-called flexicurity arrangement that is argued to operate in countries such as The Netherlands and Denmark (Klammer & Tillmann 2001, p. 3). This institutional framework represents a compromise between capital and labour in which flexibility for employers (primarily in terms of lax employment protection legislation) is traded off by workers, in return for a generous and comprehensive benefit system. It may be important for the fate of such an institutional framework in the long run, whether the introduction of requirements of participation in labour market schemes are conceptualised by the new generations of workers, as mainly enhancing employee security (in terms of increasing the chances of regaining a proper and well-paid job when unemployed) or, on the contrary as enhancing employer flexibility (in terms of cultivating a flexible labour supply).

3. Unfortunately, as already explained, the year of the study varies between the countries. One has to bear in mind that changes in the social system relating to the balance between active and passive measures, especially in Finland and Denmark, were not fully introduced, let alone fully implemented, until the later part of the 1990s (Julkunen 1997; Hanesch & Balzter 2001).

4. The educational level variable was constructed by combining CASMIN scale codes as follows: ‘Primary education + lower secondary’ = 1a + 1b + 1c + 2a; ‘Upper secondary education’ = 2b + 2c; ‘Tertiary education’ = 3a + 3b.

5. Selection on the dependent variable is a challenge inherent in most studies of subjective evaluations of activation schemes, including the present study. The way in which young adults will evaluate activation schemes is likely to relate to how they would react first hand to the mere offer of scheme participation. National activation arrangements in the defensive end of the spectrum may discourage young people from claiming benefits at all. Those being very negative towards the offer may immediately, or as soon as possible, withdraw their claim for benefits in favour of relying on family, finding paid work (perhaps informal) and the like—of course, only to the extent that such means of existence appear to be available to them (Geerdsen 2002; Harsløf and Graversen 2000). In other words, it is likely that some groups of young people may not be properly represented in the data, precisely because of the interplay between the nature of the activation arrangements they have been facing and their attitudes towards them. However, even if, by missing a group of discouraged benefit claimants, harsh activation arrangements may receive more positive evaluations than would otherwise have been the case, the subjective evaluations by those having participated in the schemes are nonetheless important testimonies of the designs of the activation programmes in European welfare states.

6. As part of the European Union's Employment strategy, comparative statistics on activation rates are published. Concerning youth activation, however, it is difficult to compare across countries, as the rates are only disaggregated according to age group in a few of the European Union countries (Council of the European Union 2004, p. 122). The OECD database on social security expenditures is also inadequate for our purpose as the entry ‘Youth measures’ only covers special programmes, and not young people's participation in programmes open to all age groups (Martin & Grubb 2001, p. 13).

7. In the Scandinavian questionnaires, however, the following wording was used: ‘It was nice to have something to get up for in the morning’.

8. The highest possible score that can be obtained is 8 (corresponding to a situation where respondents ‘strongly agree’ with all propositions), and the lowest is −8 (corresponding to a situation where respondents ‘strongly disagree’ with all propositions).

9. A qualitative follow-up study among male respondents from the Scottish sample corroborates the impression of a more ‘defensive’ design of Scottish schemes: ‘Very few young men … had a positive experience of Youth Training and, from their perspectives, training had been low quality and was regarded largely as a waste of time. Indeed, for some, it was hard to identify a training component in their work and there were examples of outright exploitation. … The image of Youth Training as “slave labour” was one that was repeated by several ex-trainees’ (Furlong & Cartmel 2004, p. 13). Country differences may to some extent reflect cultural differences, and not only differences in the activation arrangements. For instance, it has been argued that English new school-leavers tend to regard themselves as ‘workers’ immediately. Allegedly, this results in a cultural devaluation of alternatives to ordinary employment among young people: ‘“youth training” rather than being seen as preparation for employment, is typically seen as an inferior kind of paid work’ (Bynner & Chisholm 1998, p. 137). If this applies to Scottish young school-leavers as well, this could explain why Scottish youth activation gets a relatively poor rating in the comparison.