Introduction

With the so-called Hartz reforms introduced in 2003, German social and labour market policy was geared towards the welfare-to-work principle. The merging of unemployment assistance and social welfare benefits into ‘unemployment benefit II’ (Arbeitslosengeld II) and the shortening of the periods of entitlement to ‘unemployment benefit I’ (Arbeitslosengeld I) resulted in people who had lost their jobs being in danger of sliding more rapidly into the sphere of means-tested basic social security. Unemployed persons claiming ‘unemployment benefit II’ become de-facto social work clients. Not least in order to prevent this, the public employment service (PES) was restructured in organisational terms with the aim of creating a more efficient and effective method of finding work for unemployed persons who were drawing ‘unemployment benefit I’ pursuant to insurance law. This was supported by three measures taken from New Public Management: increasing the number of placement staff; improving the quality of the employment service by separating the functions of employer and employee consulting and by creating more time for consultation including more frequent interviews; and ultimately developing a comprehensive target and management system. The idea behind management by objectives was to bring about decentralisation which would afford the placement officers and senior management at the local agencies more freedom when making necessary task-specific decisions. Moreover, by means of target indicators, the placement performance of the agencies and their placement teams could also be measured and compared, and then optimised with the aid of analysis indicators that map the operative processes. In addition, a few years before the Hartz reforms, the German Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit; BA) had already begun to refer to unemployed people as ‘customers’. These semantics indicate that the concerns of the unemployed are of core importance.

The question addressed in this chapter may initially seem to be unimportant: what about the ‘social work’ performed by the placement officers in the context of the reformed PES? In the second section of the chapter, we take classical research studies as a basis to illustrate that this question is anything but irrelevant. Although clearly defined institutional boundaries between PES and social work exist, some aspects of job placement work do require that the placement officers at least adopt a ‘social worker's perspective’, which is what they express when they describe their work as social work.