ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, the obligation to work was extended into the duty to become employable. In Sweden, as in most other Western countries, governments would impose a strict regime of work-related requirements. The dual approach to simultaneously coerce and train individuals into wage labour came to be known as ‘activation’ (Gilbert and van Voorhis 2001; Lødemel and Trickey 2001; Goul Andersen and Jensen 2002; Hemerijck 2002). In Sweden, the assumption that everyone could and should be made employable was spelled out most explicitly in the ‘activity guarantee’ launched in 2000. Everyone who is, or is at risk of becoming, a long-term enrollee in the public employment service may be referred to individually designed labour market policy activities corresponding to full time activity. Participation is mandatory. For the duration of this open-ended intervention, the enrolled individual will circulate through a variety of training programmes and activation measures, which have a common focus on basic employability, including presentational skills. The activity guarantee and similar schemes are usually contrasted against
passive labour market policies, which entitle those who are unemployed to income provision without requiring any activity in return (van Berkel and Hornemann Møller 2002a). The overtly coercive nature is also stressed in the literature (Lødemel and Trickey 2001; Giertz 2004). In that sense, however, the activity guarantee was nothing fundamentally new. In a Swedish context, ‘activation’ had been official government policy since the 1920s (Junestav 2004). The emphasis on work-related activities, in order to be entitled to unemployment benefits or social assistance, was prominent from the very beginning (L. Eriksson 2004). By comparison with other countries, Sweden distinguished herself through the combination of a strict obligation to work and high levels of unemployment benefits. In a study from the late 1990s, Sweden was found to have both the highest level of compensation and the toughest legal requirements among a sample of 15 Western countries (ARM 1999: 154-55). The strict requirements to accept employment were not always enforced. During the period of the classical welfare state, ‘these demands have been generously interpreted and the unemployed have usually
had the possibility of rejecting the offered position or programme’ (Johansson 2001: 66). In addition to a lenient interpretation of the requirement to accept work, some groups were exempted from these requirements altogether. For instance, ‘the ambition to make use of the residual work capacity of people on social insurance benefits was extremely low’ (Lindqvist and Marklund 1995: 231). This was to change in the 1990s, when work requirements came to be enforced with more vigour and few groups were exempted. Individuals who had traditionally been exempted from the obligations of labour market availability were subjected to demands similar to those on other people out of work. Work requirements were extended to new groups such as those on long-term sick leave and social assistance clients. In addition, attempts were made to activate people with disabilities and handicaps (Bergeskog 2001). In principle, there was to be no exception. Under the assumptions of the activation policy, no one is exempted from the duty to become employable. Each agency dealt with a segment of the target population in accordance
with its own specific categories and routines. In the social insurance system, the notion of ‘labour market oriented rehabilitation’ was introduced in 1992 (SOU 2000a). It was made obligatory for persons on sick leave to participate in ‘rehabilitative’ measures that would enable a return to the workplace. If the individual was too sick to return to his or her present employment, any kind of work should be considered. The residual work capacity was to be tested in relation to the entire national labour market (Proposition 1996/97). Insurance benefits could be made conditional on compliance, and this constituted the incentive to participate in rehabilitation or to accept any position corresponding to the individual’s residual work capacity. In the social services, the legislation was changed in 1998 so that social assistance could be made conditional on carrying out assigned work or training programmes. Those who were considered to be immediately job-ready would compete on the regular labour market, whereas social assistance recipients found to be ‘in need of skill-enhancing measures’ were referred to activities organized or contracted out by the social services (SFS 2001: section 4). These legal changes were significant. Although the new requirements were far from always enforced (Hetzler 2004; Salonen and Ulmestig 2004), the centuriesold distinction between the sick – who don’t work because they cannot work – and the able-bodied – who don’t work because they don’t want to – was being blurred (Castel 2003). The conception of those who can, or can be made to, work was widened. The extension of work requirements to new groups was implemented in
close co-operation with the public employment service. Substantial minorities of social assistance recipients were managed in a joint venture undertaken by the public employment service and the social services, while interventions for those on long-term sick leave were co-ordinated by the public employment service and the social insurance agency (Lindqvist 2000; Giertz 2004). A total
of 1.1 million individuals were enrolled at the public employment service at some point in the course of 2004 (AMS 2005a: 2). The sum total of enrollees during one year thus represents a substantial segment of the entire workforce, or one quarter of the population in the ages 16 to 64 years. Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, the public employment service has confronted everyone formally registered as unemployed by means of a dual role of service provision and control – with a varying emphasis and level of vigour (Delander et al. 1991). While controlling that the unemployed actively seek work, the agency also provides a range of services to facilitate employment. Nowhere was activation turned into a more coherent strategy as in this agency, positioned at the centre of the state campaign to reconstitute labour. The activity guarantee did involve a displacement towards more state-
designed labour market intervention and more coercion. But it cannot be understood simply by contrasting passive and active labour market policies, or by using the distinction between coercion and consent as the sole point of departure. Instead of accounting for change using the dichotomies between passive and active, or between voluntary and involuntary interventions, activation will in this chapter be analysed as a strategy comprising a mix of repressive power and productive power towards the target group, built on a layered control structure within the organization. The analysis focuses on the momentary composition of the activation strategy, dealing with each of the three stages separately. At the target-setting stage, I will follow the way in which the risk of long-term unemployment was linked to a broader risk of social disintegration and came to be operationalized in terms of job-search activity and employability. The targeting, consequently aimed at increasing job-search activity and employability, involved the two main inventions of the decade – individual action plans and the activity guarantee – that revolutionized the business of laying down activity requirements. This will be followed by an account of the multiple layers of control within the public employment service that enabled and directed the first-order targeting. A disciplinary surveillance regime, assessing the individual members of the organization and shaping the organizational control performance, ensured that the power exercised towards the target group was on target.
