Introduction

Since the late 1990s, social protection and labour market policies among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states have been recalibrated so as to make the promotion of entry to the labour market for working-age individuals the priority of state intervention. Traditional concerns with income replacement in times of unemployment or income assistance to help meet the costs of life contingencies (disability, parenting) continue, but the emphasis has shifted to enacting reforms that ‘activate’ people into paid work (Bonoli, 2013). Accompanying changes to benefit eligibility, value and conditionality, and job placement and assistance schemes have been changes to the institutional arrangements for the delivery of benefit administration and public employment services. One of the most striking reforms has been the introduction of quasi-markets, through which various functions, previously performed by the public employment service or designated social partners, have been contracted out to for-profit and not-for-profit organisations through competitive tendering. Employment service marketisation has become commonplace across OECD states, but there is considerable diversity in how states configure market regulation, choice and competition, which effects how service users, service providers and the state act within the market, and their capacity to influence its evolution (van Berkel et al, 2012; Struyven, 2014; Zimmerman et al, 2014; Wiggan, 2015).

This chapter provides a case study of a new employment service quasi-market introduced in 2015 by the Irish government. Ireland is an interesting case as, while it may seem an ostensibly liberal welfare regime, its levels of expenditure on labour market programmes have been somewhat higher than other Anglo-Liberal welfare states such as the UK (Immervoll and Scarpetta, 2012, p 12). Until recently it was also a laggard in its embrace of the types of activation recalibration and employment service marketisation reforms embraced elsewhere (Murphy, 2012). In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the Irish bank bailout of 2010 (see below), this has changed, and a programme of rapid ‘modernisation’ has taken place. Reforms to social security benefits have strengthened work-related conditionality, a new ‘one-stop shop’ integrating benefits and employment service support has been introduced and, from 2015, employment services for the long-term unemployed have been outsourced under the new JobPath programme. The focus here is an examination of JobPath to identify what kind of quasi-market it is, and what this implies for the role and influence of service users, the state or service providers.