This paper discusses the effects of ‘welfare to work’ and ‘making work pay’ policies such as tax credits on job quality in the wider labour market. It examines the consequences of two policy approaches to the problem of work incentives for the unemployed. One approach is greater conditionality of benefits systems, of which the extreme case is workfare; the other is transfers to supplement low wages. It is argued that both approaches, individually or in combination, threaten to set up vicious circles, creating yet more of the problems they attempt to solve. Through qualitative interview material from Britain, France, Germany and Belgium, from a recent international project supported by the EU,1 the paper illustrates how the responses of the unemployed to the four countries' benefits systems and insertion programmes structure the effects of these policies on the labour market.

Social Assistance, Workfare, Welfare, Speenhamland Effect, European Employment Policies
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Copyright Taylor & Francis
2002
Taylor & Francis
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