Resistance of young working-class women in Swiss activation labour market programmes Open Access

Across many Western countries, the shift toward workfare has been characterised by the transformation from a welfare state to an active welfare state (Brodkin, 2007; Soss, 1999). The welfare-to-work policies in neo-liberal society are chiefly concerned with ensuring optimal labour market participation, self-sufficiency, and individual responsibility (Peck & Tickell, 2002). As Jenson and Saint-Martin (2003, p. 15–16) note, ‘work lies at the core of the notion of activation as a social policy and an active society as a policy goal.’ Benefits are conditioned on the individual’s participation in activation labour market programmes, which aim to maximise labour force participation and reduce dependency (Peck & Theodore, 2001; Wacquant, 2010).

Existing research broadly focuses on the changes in the welfare state. However, it overlooks the implications for the beneficiaries, often seen as having little to no agency, especially at the lower rungs of the labour market (McDowell, 2003; McDowell et al., 2016; Peck & Theodore, 2001). Some studies have shown that beneficiaries use different strategies to resist labour market-oriented identities promoted by the activation programmes (Boehringer & Karl, 2015; Caswell et al., 2013). In Denmark, Caswell et al. (2013) showed that beneficiaries use strategies such as exit and voice (Hirschman, 1975) to express their dissatisfaction, despite the risk of losing their benefits for violating the rules (Brodkin, 2007). Beneficiaries question the relevance of the decisions made by social institutions, which are driven by labour market demands, and strive to evade these demands (Caswell et al., 2013). Examining single mothers on welfare in Canada, Pulkingham et al. (2010) have shown that these mothers develop particular forms of agency to resist normative expectations and employment paths, leading them to only the lowest-waged work.

While these studies have provided insights into how some beneficiaries resist the requirements of activation policies, relatively little is known about the resistance of young working-class women and their agency. This article contributes to the current literature analysing administrative and bureaucratic sites where citizens exercise necessary forms of politics by focusing on young women whose resistance to policy has not been studied much.

This study examines the particularistic resistance (PR) of young working-class women enrolled in activation programmes that aim to help low-qualified young participants find jobs. PR comprises ‘policy beneficiaries who take oppositional action in response to an administrative decision threatening their access to valuable resources’ (Michener, 2018, p. 85). This analysis focuses on two activation programmes in French-speaking Switzerland. It draws on data from an 18-month ethnography, including observations of the workshops and pieces of training, meetings between job counsellors and young people, participation in the staff meetings, and 11 in-depth interviews with young women. Drawing on the approach of everyday practice (Naples, 2003; Pulkingham et al., 2010), we analyse the everyday experiences of young working-class women in the activation programmes and their claim-making activities, in which young women fight for the recognition of their professional aspirations when interacting with job counsellors in the activation programmes. We argue that young working-class women’s resistance should be understood as a PR against the degrading image associated with the programmes and a means to claim respectability by defending their self-image as workers and women using PR as discreet resistance.

The remainder of the article proceeds: First, we present the context of youth activation and labour market segmentation in Switzerland. Then, we describe the data collection and methods. The analysis is divided into three related aspects: the gendered organisation of the activation programme, the differences between the resistance of young men and women, and how young women’s resistance varies with their social and migration trajectories.

Resistance is a broad and contested concept in social science that has escaped a conclusive definition (Michener, 2018; Raby, 2005). Resistance has been studied in a wide range of engagements, from participating in rallies and protests to artistic performances. It has been overdetermined by its relations to politics and the political field, focusing on political change within public spaces and visible actions (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Resistance at work has also been widely studied. Most attention has been paid to resistance in male-dominated industries, focusing on conflict, union activity, and sabotaging work subcultures to reconstruct meanings. By contrast, resistance by employed women has been long ignored (Keating, 2013; Lee-Treweek, 1997).

More recent literature has shown that ‘feminised labour’, characterised by precarious and emotionally demanding work, generates a specific type of resistance. It is marked by flexibility and indefiniteness and creates a sense of collectivism based on the affective implications of precarity, such as disappointment, anger, and frustration, often involving a therapeutic – reparative mode based on story-sharing and mutual care (Vatansever, 2022).

Resistance against the welfare state has received relatively little scholarly attention. Drawing on the concepts of voice and exit as an expression of dissatisfaction (Hirschman, 1975), Brodkin (2007, p. 26) argued that ‘the concepts of voice and exit must be used with caution when applied to clients of the welfare state since there are considerable risks attached to the use of both strategies within this context where rights are uncertain, ‘voice’ is risky, and ‘exit’ means forgoing basic income support.’ Notwithstanding this caution, the exit and voice approach has been used to demonstrate how individuals interacting with welfare institutions use different exit and voice strategies to deal with dissatisfaction and disagreement. Caswell et al. (2013) have illustrated how people negotiate their multiple identities while interacting with social workers in job centres using different forms of exit, such as moving to another administrative area, walking out, being absent from meetings; adopting activation measures; or using voice to present a different storyline from the one presented by the social worker, which is based on a labour market perspective. This study shows that actors use diverse deliberate strategies to resist the discourse of active employment and evade institutional demands. While beneficiaries use these exit or voice behaviours, those are often not deliberate strategies (Caswell et al., 2013; Hydén, 2001).

Soss (1999) stated that people’s resistance against welfare institutions is about claiming their benefits through what he calls ‘claim-making activities’, which can also be seen as a form of agency and an avenue for political participation. Soss and Weaver (2016, p. 74) state that government agencies are a ‘site where citizens exercise important forms of political agency or an arena for direct political experience with modes of social control that have lasting consequences for political consciousness and action’. Soss (2000) argues that recipients’ support claims constitute a form of politics, albeit less visible than voting or public protests. By exploring welfare claims, he shows how citizens’ political lives are affected by their experiences as welfare claimants and how welfare participation affects citizens’ broader orientations toward government and political action (Soss & Keiser, 2006; Van, 2017). Similarly, Michener (2018) examined poor people’s interactions with welfare institutions as ‘sites creating both alienation and avenues for participation. She developed the concept of PR, defined as beneficiaries taking an oppositional action in response to an administrative decision threatening their access to valuable resources. She views this form of resistance as particularistic, focusing on specific individuals’ needs and interests. It is political because it ‘offers an avenue for checking the power of local welfare institutions and delivers a proximate opportunity for exercising political voice’ (Michener, 2018, p. 113). She also adds that race, class, and institutional responsiveness affect PR. The term PR is a relatively new concept to refer to discreet mobilisations, commonly referred to as a lack of publicisation and distance from the political field but with a political impact where individuals struggle over a critical kind of power that permits access to services. From the studies reviewed here, it is evident that interactions with welfare institutions create participation and politicisation in a broad sense. These studies have focused on poor people in general, whereas other studies have more specifically studied the impact of active policies on single mothers.

Studies about single mothers on welfare have shown that the shift to the active policy led to single mothers being treated primarily as employees and only secondarily as carers (McCormack, 2005; Pulkingham et al., 2010). This treatment impacts single mothers’ identities, particularly their constitution as ‘worker citizens.’ However, these studies also show that single mothers resist a moralising discourse about lone motherhood, welfare, and work by exercising an everyday form of political agency as contestation or claim-making. While these mothers are not passive, these strategies are focused towards challenging the public discourse and public policy. In line with the aforementioned approaches, these studies have examined women’s resistance as everyday claim-making activities that challenge prevailing public policies that confine women’s role to low-wage workers rather than treating them as moral citizens (Pulkingham et al., 2010). In other words, agency and resistance are not only expressed through critical attitudes but also through more silent and invisible ones.

Therefore, drawing on Michener’s (2018) and Soss’s (2000; 2006; 2016) approaches as well as on Pulkingham et al. (2010) work, our study examines how young working-class women enrolled in activation programmes in Switzerland use claim-making activities as a PR strategy to exercise their voice and agency to find an apprenticeship position in the occupation of their choice and claim a kind of power. We argue that native young women resist in response to the demands of social workers, which conflict with their need for respectability. However, focusing on their interest and needs makes their actions particularistic, not collectivistic. Finally, we argue that young women’s PR should be understood as resistance against the degrading image associated with activation programmes and as a means of protecting their professional aspirations and carving a respectable image for themselves, both as workers and women. In conclusion, the young women’s resistance to activation programmes can be therefore understood as both limited publicity and distance from the political field. This resistance is not labelled as such by both social scientists and social workers in the activation programmes. They can be therefore defined as discreet mobilisation as well as PR that challenges the activation programmes that make young women invisible rather than treating them as moral citizens.

The data were gathered from 18-month ethnographic research conducted from 2014–2015 in two activation programmes for young people aged 15–25 years, outside the education and employment systems. Both programme centres are in a French-speaking canton of Switzerland. This canton was chosen because it had one of the highest youth unemployment rates at that time. The two activation programmes are implemented at the canton level by non-profit organisations, as mandated by the unemployment insurance law. These two programmes were selected because both are specifically designated for unemployed young people but differ in their organisation and practices. There are also the only two activation programmes implemented by the unemployment insurance in the canton studied. If the study focuses on young women, the analyse compares men’s and women’s reactions toward the programme to illustrate how young women are made invisible in the activation programme’s organisation and workshops.

While women do better at school than men, and fewer of them start vocational training than men, they encounter more difficulties when they take the vocational training route after their compulsory schooling rather than continuing with school education. Indeed, in Switzerland, they are more likely to find no apprenticeship places after leaving secondary school, especially in their preferred fields (Lamamra 2016). This is due to the higher concentration of young women in a limited number of occupations, which has a direct impact on the gap between supply and demand for apprenticeships (Imdorf 2004; Meyer 2008). A previous study by Heiniger and Imdorf (2018) has highlighted that a vocationally dominant education system like the one of Switzerland ‘does not merely ‘produce’ a high degree of gender segregation in education; it also transmits the segregation more strongly into the labour market than in a system that is more oriented toward general education and less closely tied to the demands of the labour market’. In other words, high degree of gender segregation in the labour market is already produced in the vocational system. However, little is known about gender segregation in activation programmes.

From 2013-2015, at the time of the survey, the youth unemployment rate in Switzerland ranged between 3 and 3.2% and has been declining since then, apart from the COVID-19 period. By international comparison, Switzerland has a low youth unemployment rate. Only Iceland and the Netherlands have a higher result (SECO, 2021). Some young people joined the programme after dropping out of studies or of their first apprenticeship. Others are young immigrants who recently arrived in Switzerland. Some of the participants have previously completed another transition programme but did not find any apprenticeship at the end. Participants are, therefore, a relatively heterogeneous group in terms of their school, early work, and migration backgrounds but are mostly from working-class origins. Most of them are aged between 18 and 22 years and are generally directed to join the activation programme by social workers, teachers, or employers (see  Appendix Table A2).

The activation programme typically lasts six months. Attendance is mandatory for every workday from 8 am to 5 pm. Their day is organised around workshops such as woodworking, cooking, speaking, and training sessions on job-seeking processes and CV writing. The activation programme employees mostly work as job counsellors, instructors, social workers, and teachers. Their activities aim to help young people learn to structure their everyday lives, choose a career path, apply to jobs, apprenticeships, and study programmes, and learn soft and interpersonal skills, such as punctuality. Both the activation programme centres studied are in industrial suburbs in old and somewhat dilapidated industrial buildings.

The data were mainly gathered from participant observation, conducted over two to three days were week per programme for over 18 months. We participated in various activities. We also played an active role in helping the instructors supervise the participants during some of the workshops and advising some young women on their apprenticeship applications. 20–25 one-to-one meetings between job counsellors and young people and 15 staff meetings in both programmes were also observed. From participant observations, we observed the activities of four job counsellors out of six in both activation programmes. We also observed all the young people encountered in activation programmes: in total, 80 young people. The data also include transcripts from 19 in-depth interviews with young people, of which 11 were with young women. The interviews were mainly done with young native women, ten, and a single with an immigrant woman. These young people had participated in one of the two activation programmes studied in the past two years or so but had left by the time the researchers conducted their observations. They were recruited through a personal contact of the researcher, who worked as a social worker in another job training programme in the same canton without using any selection criteria except for having participated in the activation programmes studied. Written informed consent was obtained from all the young people before conducting the interviews and from all the workers from both activation programme centres. The interviews were conducted in cafes, parks, or in the interviewees’ homes. The interviewees were asked about their social background, school career, and their experiences during and after the activation programme. Table A1 ( Appendix) details the social characteristics of the eleven women interviewed. As we only got one interview from an immigrant young woman, most data for immigrant women were collected in written records from both activation programmes and during participant observation. The data included participants’ administrative files and records collected by the two activation programmes. Migration status plays a role in the passage through transitional and activation training: between 2012 and 2014, of all the people who passed through transitional/activation training, 28% were foreign-born, 11% were Swiss born in foreign countries, 18% were born in Switzerland and 21% were foreign-born in Switzerland (OFS 2016). Based on the specificity of the Swiss context, in this article, by young native women, we refer to young women who were born in Switzerland or immigrated when they were young and have completed their compulsory education in Switzerland, and by immigrant women, we refer to young women who migrated in the recent years and did no completed their compulsory education in Switzerland. The database on which our statistical analyses are based includes the entire population of young participants who transited through the two activation programmes studied between January 2011 and September 2014 (N = 1077). Finally, participants’ records were used to get more individual information on sociodemographic characteristics (e.g. age, birthplace, citizenship), their engagement in the programme (e.g. number of absences, interruptions), and their academic and job situation at the beginning and end of the programme.

The data were analysed in three steps. First, statistical analysis using SPSS was performed using participants’ database records to describe the participants in sociodemographic terms of both activation programmes over the three years of the study and to test the association between the job situation at the end of the programme and some variables of interest, such as sex and nationality using mainly crosstabs analysis (results not presented here). While gender is a structuring dimension for the vocational streams, it is not the case for the types of exit conditions. On the other hand, when analysing the joint effect of gender and nationality on exit conditions, we observe a small difference between young women of Swiss origin (48%) and those of foreign origin (52%). The latter have less chance to find a ‘solution’ at the end of the activation programme, but when they found one, it is in a better position than the foreigners’ young women. This observation sparked our interest in better understanding young women’s experiences.

Based on the statistical results, we focused on differences between young women in the analysis of the ethnographic material. Firstly, the ethnographic material was analysed thematically, with particular attention paid to the field notes on how the young women acted and reacted to the workshop activities and during their interactions with their job counsellors. Therefore, as a second step, we analysed thematically the interviews and performed a documented analysis of the administrative files focusing on the records and administrative files of the immigrant young women (Belotto, 2018; Cayouette-Remblière, 2012).

The following subsections first discuss men’s resistance, and then it discusses how men’s resistance differs from women’s one by analysing the gendered and classified activities in the workshops. Finally, the differences between native and immigrant women’s resistance are discussed.

Activation workshops are primarily centred around masculine jobs, leading to differences between men’s and women’s resistance. Historically, the workshops were established in the mid-1990s by two male social workers for young people in difficulty and were centred around male working-class jobs such as woodwork and cooking as cook’s assistants, and this trend is continuing today. How would young women’s resistance look in male-dominated fields? As observed in the workshops, all young people demonstrated different ways of contesting the participation rules and their job roles; however, there were significant differences between young men’s and women’s resistance.

Most young people are forced to join these workshops or risk being excluded from the activation programme and being deemed unemployable. However, young people are not very enthusiastic about participating in these workshops. The activation programmes’ activities are typically considered masculine jobs such as woodwork or cooking. Consequently, even if both young men and women develop resistance against forced participation, contest and question the rules and challenge the organisation of the activation programmes, they do so differently and are also interpreted differently.

These activation programmes target young people who are considered insufficiently qualified for training. Activation programmes were at the core of the 1995 unemployment insurance reforms in Switzerland, aiming to bring unemployed people back to work. The goal of these workshops was not to develop specific skills for young people’s future jobs but ‘social and soft skills.’ Activation programmes consider these skills as transferable skills that can be developed in all workshops. They are described by the workers as ‘work training centres’ because they have a productive focus and adhere to the principles of independence and autonomy. However, given that participants change workshops every month, do not undergo any assessment or obtain a diploma, are engaged only in these for a short period, implies that the programmes cannot provide them with specialised skills for a specific occupation. In other words, the workshops socialise young people to seek low-skilled jobs. They do so by teaching young people discipline, which is expressed as a set of norms and rules that young people must respect and for which they are intensively controlled and sanctioned.

Young men do not show much interest and motivation to participate in the workshops and often contest the rules imposed, often questioning what they are asked to do and why they must do it. They openly challenge the supervisors and the legitimacy of instructors asking trying to impose order and lecturing them about their behaviours, such as loitering. Some young men argue that if they were in a ‘real’ professional setting with a ‘real boss’ they would act differently, in other words, more respectfully and diligently. As discussed by classical authors working on class subcultures (Burawoy, 1982; Willis, 1977), the resistance displayed by these young working-class men in the activation programmes is based on defying the authority and the formal role of the instructor and challenging the middle-class norms. While they risk sanctions from the instructors, it does not prevent them from voicing their discontent. When receiving sanctions, young working-class men often protest using typically male rebellion acts (Hebdige, 1979). For example, one day, a group of young men made graffiti on a wall in front of the building of the activation programme to denounce the sanctions against them. When the instructor asked who did this, nobody told on them, even under threat of expulsion. The solidarity among young men surprised the staff members because the activation programme has strict policies to prevent the formation of social groups and youth counterculture.

Young women on their side do not view the activation programme and workshops as workspace. These workshops do not correspond to any class or gender culture they have been socialised to. They do not resemble a school or any internship they have attended or even the lowest rung jobs as cleaners they have done before. As Cassandra, a young native female interviewee, explains, ‘It is not a serious school. You do not do anything. The teacher is constantly leaving the workshop’. She despises having to attend these workshops. When arriving at the activation centre, they expect to find an organisation-like school where the instructors will help them find an apprenticeship and teachers will support them in building their scholarly competencies. The young women do not feel that they are in the right place and feel invisible. As they are not expected to be trained in soft skills for masculine job rules, they can easily use their invisibility to hide during break time, go to the toilets and take their time to come back and to systematically arrive late in the morning without being noticed. Young women use their invisibility to resist the work in the workshops and from being associated with the activation programmes. They do this because they feel like the work is depreciatory and affects their respectability.

Compared to the resistance displayed by young men, young women’s resistance was instead based on defying the stigmatised perceptions promoted by the programme as uneducated, good-for-nothing people. The types of workshops organised also contribute to young women’s resistance. As mentioned earlier, these workshops are mainly organised around predominantly male jobs. As women are made to feel invisible by the type of activities organised in the activation programmes, they use their invisibility to escape the confines of the rules. They also resist being associated with the activation programme.

Young Swiss women in activation programmes are viewed by the instructors as having difficulty finding a student or apprenticeship position. Only young women who experience difficulties at school or in finding a job, apprenticeship or other training opportunities are enrolled in such activation programmes. An analysis of the participant observations and interviews shows that young women resist the image of uneducated youth ‘in difficulty’. Ivana, a young woman who completed her compulsory education in Switzerland but had difficulty finding an apprenticeship as clerical worker she was ‘dreaming about’ after school, has strong opinions about where she stands relative to other young people in the programme. Ivana expressed her thoughts about this as follows:

However, workshop activities do not interest them and rarely correspond to their aspirations as young women. They often find themselves in degrading situations where their respectability is at risk (Skeggs, 1997). As a native woman told us during an interview: ‘It is suicidal [to expect anything from such programmes]. However, it can be useful to ‘others’. When prompted, she explains that the term ‘others’ refers to the girls who have recently immigrated to Switzerland and are not yet integrated. It also refers to the young people who have bad attitudes, called the ‘youth in difficulty’. These young native women do not want to be associated with these two categories of youth.

Young native women show ambivalent attitudes towards the activation programmes. On the one hand, they want to take advantage of their time in the activation programmes to find an apprenticeship of their choice, generally in childcare rather than elderly care occupations. On the other hand, they do not want to participate in workshop activities that they often see as degrading and rarely matching their aspirations. They develop attitudes of resistance such as voice or exit (Hirschman, 1975) and use PR strategies such as following the rules without much debate and making themselves invisible (Depoilly, 2017).

Although some young native women said that attending the activation programme was useless, paradoxically, leaving it seemed riskier. Defection is a rarely used PR strategy among young native women because they fear being associated with so-called troubled youths and being stigmatised. They also hope to get something out of the activation programmes, such as finding training or the apprenticeship position they are looking for.

One of the main reasons they stay in the programme is that they have access to computers and printers – a place of their own – to work on their job and apprenticeship applications. Most young native women prioritise job searches over workshops, often without requesting a meeting with their job counsellors. These women are often discreet and make the effort to remain so. Their discretion can be interpreted as a PR for concealing the frequency of their visits. This discretion is particularly evident in how they search for apprenticeships. They often go to a job interview without informing their job counsellors which is against the rules and usually do not mention the programme during the interview, nor in their CVs.

Although young native women use the activation programmes for access to material resources (computers, printers, and telephones), they make less use of relational resources, such as their job counsellors. They want to conceal anything that could explicitly associate them with the activation programme. While concealing their job search process from their job counsellors, they develop alternative ways of finding and applying for apprenticeships. This requires the young native women to develop discrete strategies. Some women scan the lists of employers present at job fairs for unqualified young people and send their applications on their own. Others look at less frequently searched websites to find alternative job opportunities. They use their discretion to look for apprenticeships in occupations in which they wish to be trained in and in places where the job counsellors often discourage them from applying. This is typically the case with apprenticeships in childcare. There are fewer apprenticeship positions in this field compared to elderly care, and their chances of getting a position supported by job counsellors are slim, considering their educational achievements. Their discretion also characterises their gender position (Clair, 2008). Young women have learned not to be noticeable. Based on the prevalent gender norms (Crompton, 2006), they transgress and circumvent the expectations of the programme. These forms of PR show that these women seek both to defend their occupational choices in childcare and benefit from placements or apprenticeships to gain qualifications in this field, even if they must work for free. However, as we will see in the next section, their strategies of PR and being invisible also entail risks.

Immigrant young women in activation programmes are described as uneducated and poor by the instructors and the social workers. Unlike young native women, this perception does not seem to be an issue among these women, who rarely have contentious relationships with the staff members.

Compared to the natives, some immigrant young women, especially from Muslim origins, grew up in a cultural context that strongly encouraged them to prioritise caregiving, marriage, and motherhood over paid work (male-breadwinner model). They have mostly completed compulsory education in their countries of origin and did not pursue studies beyond that level. They have usually helped their mothers with domestic work and, in some cases, have taken on the primary caretaking role in the household. Before migration, their destiny seemed to be all set. Naima, an 18-year-old interviewee, said, ‘There, they do not help you find a job because girls do not work in Syria’.

In Switzerland, Naima considered her time in the activation programme as an opportunity to emancipate herself from patriarchal norms, do something for herself, and take more control of her life choices.

These young immigrant women negotiate their roles within the domestic sphere by attending the activation and other work programmes for welfare recipients. Naima argued with her father that she does not want to wear her face veil in public places, arguing that it would be easier to find a job without it. Furthermore, because she is on welfare and is over 18 years of age (the majority age), Naima is responsible for receiving her benefits and is accountable for managing them by social services. Receiving social security benefits thus provides her with some independence from paternal control and a way to renegotiate her role within the household. In other words, being accountable to social institutions to gain benefits is not experienced as being under their control but rather as a way of gaining independence and emancipation from patriarchy. Finally, unlike young native women, immigrant women accept internships and jobs in any occupation, including hard-labour and low-paid and low-prestige ones, such as elderly care assistants or sales assistants. Their gender identity, constructed mainly through their assignment to domestic work, is already challenged by working outside their family home, regardless of the type of jobs they do.

While these immigrant women take advantage of these activation programmes to gain more autonomy and take control of their own lives, their behaviours also reproduce class, gender, and racial inequalities, by being assigned to the most precarious and stigmatised jobs, as discussed in feminist and intersectional studies (Crompton, 2006; Fraser, 2010). The internships and fixed-term jobs in personal service occupations, such as care assistant, are not so different from activities performed at home for their families.

The racialisation of young women affects their forms of resistance. Their PR against the activation programme takes the form of a discrete but subversive mobilisation practice that changes their relationship with domestic work (Sainsaulieu, 2012) and enables them to learn to think of themselves as future workers, albeit in low-paid jobs. Realising that what they did for free at home could be undertaken as paid work, they comply with the disciplinary requirements of the programme, which prompts them to transform their self-perception and claim a place for themselves. By accepting the discipline of the activation programme, their claim-making activities remain largely invisible. The opportunities for more independence and the important changes in their roles and attitudes remain invisible to the job counsellors, who predominantly perceive them as employees at the bottom rung of the labour market. Naima’s behaviour exemplifies what some recent studies (Norris & Inglehart, 2012) have shown that Muslim migrants express values between their country of origin and destination and do not express rigidly fixed attitudes as they gradually absorb the value prevalent in their host society.

From participant observations and administrative files of the young women, we identify another category of immigrant women. Young women who had recently immigrated to Switzerland for family reunification also develop a positive relationship with the activation programme. These young women are also more likely to expect or have a child. For activation programmes, being a mother is perceived as a constraint to employment. Childbearing and motherhood can restrict young women’s labour market participation, yet they find support from the directors of the activation programmes who understand their concerns and make special arrangements for accommodating their needs.

Compared to other cultures that value pregnancies in Swiss, and more broadly, Western cultures, young mothers are often perceived as deviant, and ‘at risk’ (Bettoli, 2003). Nevertheless, when considering their family’s own context, motherhood appears instead as a way for these women to become autonomous, leave their parental homes, and adopt an adult woman’s identity, that is, gain socially recognised statuses (Van, 2006). Motherhood is, therefore, a PR against their subordination. Although young motherhood may appear to be an expression of dissident femininity and deviant sexuality, Bettie (2000) points out that for young working-class women, sexuality operates as a sign of adulthood in the eyes of public institutions and the family. In this sense, becoming a mother allows immigrant young women to emancipate themselves from the guardianship of their homes, accelerate their entry into adulthood, and gain independence from their often-restrictive family environments. Inseparable from their class and race identities, motherhood is a way of establishing themselves as women.

From this perspective, young mothers see the activation programme as a way of accessing a job, internship, or apprenticeship that will enable them to reinforce their autonomy before their families. The different staff members, job counsellors, and managers often support and assist these young mothers. Through their intention to reconcile motherhood with labour force participation, these mothers demonstrate their commitment to activation programmes and employability, which were well received by the directors of the two activation programmes. These directors showed empathy because they are caught up in similar constraints as full-time employees and mothers. Finally, for young immigrant women, motherhood is a personal form of agency that runs counter to normative expectations and proscribed employment path and is a significant form of PR.

This study has shown how labour-market activation programmes and policies make women and their work invisible. The main workshops are centred on men’s jobs. Young native women also experienced being in these programmes as a risk of losing their respectability. They did not feel that the workshops fit their needs and did not feel in the right place. By making them invisible, the institutional context prevented job counsellors from seeing and supporting them in their career projects. However, young women turned their invisibility to their advantage to politicise their demands on an individual level. Their resistance to being assigned to elderly care work politicised the conditions and modes of placing workers in the most devalued and subordinate jobs because of these working conditions and the types of women who occupy them. Young migrant women’s resistance to their domestic roles in the family was made possible through their attendance in the activation programmes, enabling them to negotiate and claim a different place in their families.

These resistance forms also result from how young native women handle competing expectations from active unemployment policy, social workers’ interventions, street-level bureaucrats, job and vocational counsellors, and interactions with family members and friends. At the same time, young working-class native women expressed agency in various ways, crafting new meanings as they embraced, complied with, and resisted the demands of activation programmes. On their side, young immigrant women also faced competing expectations of who they are and what they should be as women, principally from their families. They met competing expectations from their families and activation programme job counsellors. At the same time, they expressed agency in various ways as they juggle their roles as employees and mothers.

We used the concept of ‘particularistic resistance’ to better understand the resistance of young working-class women in their effort to be recognised as respectable young women and improve their living and working conditions within welfare institutions. This concept was beneficial in examining young women’s forms of resistance that were largely individualised and invisible compared to more-researched political and collective resistance. Because programmes deal with participants individually, it discourages collective resistance. Collective action is also tricky, as the different groups of young women do not have the same interests and do not express the same demands.

Young working-class women resist moralising discourses about low-skilled labour and welfare and work through everyday personal forms of agency reflected in the young native women’s accounts of resistance. Resistance occurs through the political agency, such as making claims about their job aspirations or reconciling employment and motherhood.

Our analysis suggests that young working-class women face multiple difficulties in being recognised as employed and respectable women. Future research could investigate how to empower young working-class women through programmes better accounting for their values and aspirations. Finally, some findings from this study suggest that research on welfare has underestimated beneficiaries’ agency. Future research should examine the agency of beneficiaries by looking at how the programmes are used differently accordingly to their values, norms, gender and race. A study examining the strategies engaged by other populations on the unemployed insurance on how and why they contest the activation policy consensus is also needed.

Our study has some limitations. Our data are based on a small sample of interviews, especially with young immigrant women. We cannot exclude the possibility that more data would provide nuance and expand our conclusions. The findings of Muslim immigrant women may be somewhat limited by the limited cases interviewed. Future research on policy beneficiaries’ resistance should be conducted in other contexts and with a larger sample of young women to control these results. Our data also come from activation programmes in an urban region of Switzerland that is only partly comparable with other political and institutional contexts. It remains to be investigated whether the forms of resistance operate the same way in other national contexts with different active labour-market policies and social profiles of unemployed young people, for example. Key regional and cross-country differences exist in employment opportunities, labour market policies and social policies of welfare states, shaping the labour market position of young native and immigrant women. These factors also influence the institutional levers that policymakers can use better to integrate women and young women into the labour market. Further comparative research on gender-related policies could provide critical insights into their roles in increasing women’s participation in the labour market in differing welfare state contexts.

Despite these limitations, our analysis provides vital insights into vulnerable young women’s resistance to welfare institutions. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of young women’s resistance to welfare institutions in Europe. It analyses some mechanisms by which the activation programmes are ‘sites where [young women] exercise essential forms of political agency’ (Soss & Weaver, 2016, p. 86).

Earlier versions of the manuscript have benefited from comments by Gil Viry, and the participants of the politics and history workshop of the department of political science of the University of Albany in particular Virginia Eubanks, Julie Novkov Peter Breiner. The author is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their attentive feedback, which has significantly improved the manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).