Active labour market programmes and employer engagement in Great Britain and Germany

If active labour market policies are to mean more than disciplining and nudging claimants of working-age benefits, the question how and under what circumstances employers are more or less willing to hire non-employed working age benefit claimants, and how this is affected by claimants’ ascribed social characteristics, is a crucial one. Over the last decade a growing body of work has provided fruitful insights into employer preferences and behaviour with respect to engagement in employment services (Bredgaard, 2018; Ingold and Stuart, 2015; Ingold and Valizade, 2017). This chapter considers and compares employer engagement in national level active labour market programmes (ALMP) in the UK and Germany through examination of a selection of government commissioned research into public programmes intended to integrate a variety of claimant groups (long-term and short-term unemployed; lone parents; sick and disabled people; older jobseekers; newly arrived refugees) into the labour market. The chapter is organised as follows. Section one provides a brief overview of the organisation of the Public Employment Service (PES) and changing patterns of employment participation during the last 40 years. Section two considers employers’ views of benefit claimants and the PES. Section three outlines the types of policy tools used to activate claimants into the labour market and foster employer engagement. Section four explores the integrative capacity of employers, namely whether they are willing and/or able to recruit benefit claimants and/or participate in the services offered by the PES to facilitate this.