Introduction

If active labour market policies are to mean more than disciplining and nudging claiming working-age benefits, the questions of how and under what circumstances employers are more or less willing to hire non-employed benefit claimants of working age, and how this is affected by claimants’ ascribed social characteristics, are crucial ones. 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 (Ingold and Stuart, 2015; Ingold and Valizade, 2017; Bredgaard, 2018). 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 organized as follows. The first section provides a brief overview of the organization of the public employment service (PES) and changing patterns of employment participation during the last 40 years. The second section considers employers’ views of benefit claimants and the PES. The third section outlines the types of policy tools used to activate claimants into the labour market and foster employer engagement. The fourth section 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.

Labour market trends and employment service Institutions

Over the last 40 years the size of the labour force aged 16–64 in employment in the UK has expanded considerably, rising from a low point of around 23.2 million in 1983 to 31.6 million by the end of 2019 (ONS, 2021b). The overall growth in employment has been mirrored by an increase in the employment rate for people aged 16–64, albeit subject to fluctuation with recessionary periods and their aftermath. Prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020/ 21, the UK economy had experienced three recessions during this period – 1980–81; 1990–91 and 2008–09.