ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the labour market as a central arena to promote citizenship, a theme also discussed in Chapter 5. The authors investigate a specific policy called the Inclusion Dugnad, which was introduced in Norway between 2018 and 2022 and that included a soft quota obliging Norwegian state employers to make sure that 5% of new hires were disabled or had a CV gap. The policy also entailed renewed efforts in a state trainee programme for disabled people. By highlighting how employers should contribute to the societal economy by hiring disabled people, it was a policy introduced with a welfare state sustainability narrative. The reviews show that state employers struggled to meet the quota. This chapter investigates potential reasons for the failure of the policy by using interview data with employers and observational data from job interviews from the trainee programme. Two main findings are emphasised: how hiring disabled people is portrayed as a charitable act and how employers have trouble addressing disability as an asset. The authors argue that, by trying to incentivise employers to hire disabled people by highlighting the importance of employment for the sake of the welfare state, this conceded that disabled people fail to live up to the employers’ notion of an ideal worker, rendering them second-rate workers.
