Introduction

The introduction of active social policies throughout the EU can be seen as a reconsideration of the importance of work. In the context of such policies, the emphasis on participating in work is embedded to varying degrees in discourses stressing work as an ‘entitlement’ and work as an ‘obligation’. It is similarly the case with discourses on the ‘empowering’ and ‘disciplining’ elements of work. Policy makers consider work to provide people with the material and nonmaterial resources to be, as it is called, ‘fully included in social life’. At the same time, participation in work is an obligation in the sense that when included in work, people fulfil their societal responsibilities by contributing to social production and preventing dependency on social security.

In emphasising participation in work, social policies do not usually refer to work in the general sense of “the carrying out of tasks, involving expenditure of mental and physical effort, which have as their objectives the production of goods and services that cater to human needs” (Giddens, 1989, p 481). As a rule, ‘work’, as conceived in social policies, refers to paid work or formal jobs. Often in Southern Europe, work on the informal market is not officially recognised as including people in the labour market or society. The size and importance of this market, however, make it a most central precondition for the official social policies and labour-market inclusion programmes. Contrary to the Southern European labour markets, work that is not taking place in the context of the regular and/or regularised labour market in Northern Europe is usually not considered of relevance with respect to the objectives social policies set themselves. Informal and non-regular work, including forms of unpaid work, are not recognised for their inclusion potentials, nor as one of the ways in which people might contribute to society; that is, as a way to fulfil their social responsibilities. In some cases, it is even considered a barrier to inclusion, as this is – explicitly or implicitly – defined by social policies. This happens, for example, when social security claimants are denied the opportunity to engage in voluntary work, because this is supposed to decrease their labour-market availability. It also happens when single parents on benefits are refused the right to raise their children and instead are expected to make use of childcare facilities to secure their labour-market availability.