Introduction

Having established that a large part of welfare to work (WTW) programmes cannot find their justification in the right to work (right as goal) (see Chapter 3), this chapter examines when these programmes violate the prohibition of forced labour or the right to freely chosen work as components of the right to work (rights as limits). Regardless of their purpose (reintegration into the labour market or reciprocity logic, see Chapter 3), WTW measures imply a legal duty to perform work, often accompanied by sanctions which can be questioned from the angle of human rights and the freedom of work and may even result in relations of domination in the republican meaning (see Chapters 1 and 12). Through a systematic analysis of international human rights case law, previous work has already demonstrated that reinforcement of the general legal duty to work imposed on social benefit recipients (including, for example, recipients of unemployment benefits) could infringe the prohibition of forced labour or the right to freely chosen work (Dermine, 2014a, 2014b, 2017). This chapter aims at clarifying the specific limitations on the development of WTW programmes in social assistance schemes.

It first examines the international human rights case law concerning the prohibition of forced labour. As the right to freely chosen work offers a larger protection of the freedom of work, it then turns to the international human rights case law concerning the right to freely chosen work with a view to verifying whether it offers additional protection to recipients of social assistance. The developments dedicated to these two rights will also lead us to consider the right to social assistance and political rights, and to establish links between them. The last section summarizes the main conclusions of this chapter.

The study reveals that the mandatory character of WTW programmes in social assistance schemes does not appear to violate per se the prohibition of forced labour or the right to freely chosen work. Nevertheless, as will be further elaborated in this chapter, international bodies have set some limits to those programmes when the imposition of the legal duty to work goes hand in hand with a reinforcement of the economic pressure to join the labour market.