Activating welfare state

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Activating welfare state is the designation for a state whose labor market and social policy should follow the leitmotif of promoting and demanding and both “setting people in motion” and enabling them to actually provide the services they expect. The activating welfare state is concerned with redefining the mutual division of tasks and responsibilities in the relationship between state and society.

historical development

The concept of the activating welfare state was developed in Germany in the early 1990s and then quickly taken up in political and scientific discussions. The accent on the attribute “activating” since the 1990s replaces previous accents. According to Ansgar Willenborg , the emphasis from 1945 to 1965 was on the democratic constitutional state, from 1965 to 1979 on the active state, and from 1980 to 1995 on the lean state.

With the concept of the activating welfare state an attempt is made to influence the German welfare state reform in a trend-setting way and thus to follow up on the current international discussion. These advances draw on a broad international political theory discussion that extends into the 1970s.

Features of the activating welfare state

The basic idea of ​​the activating state is to orient state action towards the mobilization and support of potential for self-help. In the long term, it can be assumed that activation policy and with it the activating welfare state will remain a central concept of welfare state action and will change the character of the social market economy . No longer the right to social benefits, but the idea of ​​social investment is very characteristic of the Activating State. People who cannot participate in the labor market are moved back towards social independence through government investments (e.g. investments in education ). You will be activated. The people to be activated were expanded to almost one million in 2005 as a result of an expanded definition of employability (three hours a day). Activating social policy is therefore also aimed at people who are further away from the labor market, such as the homeless, aggressive young people or people with mental and physical illnesses. Low-threshold measures have been developed for them in Germany. If the social investment does not succeed, there is compensation at a relatively low level.

The activating welfare state is characterized by:

  • Activation and personal responsibility through preventive and empowering measures;
  • the freedom from the welfare bureaucracy, the freedom to self-management with a (minimum) security, through (re) commodification ;
  • Equality of opportunities for social participation in the labor market and in education;
  • Participation rights; conditional and individualized services (condition: co-production); Services as a contract;
  • a cooperative state as mediator and initiator; Warranty responsibility; discursive and cooperative procedures;
  • an employability for "all"; flexible adjustment of workers to the labor market;
  • an offer control : the reduction of transfer benefits (through work incentives), qualification and services, activation of individuals;
  • the egalitarian two-earner model, defamiliarization (supported by public care and nursing services).

In relation to the concrete situation of the unemployed, an activating welfare state implies the following changes:

  • Personal responsibility and differentiation, “activation” as right and duty, “no right to be lazy ”;
  • the belief that work “is there”;
  • a change in the behavior of labor market subjects;
  • the development of the attitude: “I find work and I need help”;
  • Employment promotion as a service in co-production;
  • less unemployment by relieving pressure on the market;
  • more transitions from unemployment to work (also briefly).

The activating state as a framework

The concept of the activating welfare state represents a concretization of the model of the activating state. This is about

  • Dialogue instead of decree - development of priorities.
  • Targeted cooperation instead of mutual accusation and domain thinking.
  • Product and process optimization, e.g. B. Purchaser-provider-split, one stop shop, decentralized specialist and resource responsibility, quasi-markets, performance comparisons, etc.
  • Co-production - cooperation between public service providers and active and self-responsible citizens / clients.

criticism

Michael Opielka recognizes a strategy that is based on “activating” individuals as a “ social pedagogy of social policy” in the sense of a “social-psychological control strategy that wants to subject individual attitudes and habitual orientations to a comprehensive market orientation.” The central function of the modern welfare state - The reduction of the labor market dependency of the commodity labor through options for securing livelihoods outside the labor market (also called decommodification ) has been "twisted" into a re-commodification by the activation agenda.

Proponents of the introduction and maintenance of a low-wage sector in Germany argue that this measure is necessary in order to get people to work who have made friends with the option of living permanently on wage replacement benefits. In addition, the phase in which the people concerned receive low wages is often only brief, as they, once included in the primary labor market, have the chance to prove their qualifications or to qualify and then to receive higher earned income.

Stefan Sell , professor at the Institute for Social Policy and Labor Market Research at the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, stated in January 2017 that efforts to “activate” the long-term unemployed in Germany had in some cases failed. There are almost three million long-term recipients of Hartz IV benefits, one million of whom have long been disconnected from any work. “We weren't able to offer these people much, often nothing at all. And if so, then highly debatable offers, short-term measures ”, summarized Sell.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Norbert Wohlfahrt: The activating welfare state - A new sociopolitical concept and its consequences . In: Transparent. Journal for the critical mass in the Rhenish Church . 2001.
  2. ^ Ansgar Willenborg: The activating welfare state. Dissertation. Humboldt University, Berlin April 8, 2011.
  3. ↑ Werner Schönig: Lexicon of the social market economy: Activating social policy. Konrad Adenauer Foundation
  4. ^ R. Konle-Seidl, K. Lang: Employable transfer recipients in an international comparison. From outsourcing to integration into the labor market . Federal Worksheet, No. 10 , p. 20 .
  5. ↑ Carolin Freier: Social activation of the unemployed? Practices and interpretations of a new labor market instrument . transcript, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3548-5 ( transcript-verlag.de [PDF; accessed on April 16, 2019]).
  6. ^ Ansgar Willenborg: The influence of the activating state on family policy in Germany and the Netherlands . Dissertation. Humboldt University, Berlin April 8, 2011, p. 104.
  7. ^ Frank Oschmiansky: Activating State and Activating Labor Market Policy . In: From Politics and Contemporary History. June 1, 2010.
  8. ^ Wolfram Lamping, Henning Schridde, Stefan Plaß, Bernhard Blanke: The activating state - positions, terms, strategies. Study for the civil society and activating state working group of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung . Friedrich Ebert Foundation . 2002, p. 34.
  9. ↑ Michael Opielka: Justice and Social Work. Socio-ethical and socio-political perspectives . In: EthikJournal. No. 1, 2013, p. 3.
  10. ↑ Michael Opielka: Justice and Social Work. Socio-ethical and socio-political perspectives . In: EthikJournal. No. 1, 2013, p. 9.
  11. ^ Carl-Friedrich Höck: Communal conference of the SPD parliamentary group: How solidarity communities can function . In: Demo. The social democratic magazine for local politics. January 27, 2017.