Introduction

In the 1980s, the United States began requiring social assistance recipients to participate in work programmes. Subsequently, these kinds of reforms have progressively flourished in Europe (e.g. Handler, 2003; Freedland et al, 2007). The schemes, called welfare to work programmes (WTW), condition the granting of social assistance benefits on work performance in the private, public or non-profit sector. Well-known examples of WTW programmes include: the Work Experience Program carried out in New York (1996) or the Wisconsin Works (W-2) programme in Wisconsin (1996), two emblematic WTW devices in the United States (Dumont, 2014); Work for the Dole in Australia (1997) (Bessant, 2000); and the mandatory Work Activity Programme (2011) as well as the Community Work Placements programme (2013) for the ‘very long term’ unemployed in the United Kingdom (Paz-Fuchs and Eleveld, 2016).

This chapter tackles the question of justification of WTW measures from a legal perspective through the prism of human rights and, more particularly, the fundamental right to work. The promoters of WTW programmes sometimes state that these are based on the will to ‘better realize’ the right to work of their recipients (right as goal). This chapter questions that assumption and considers whether and under what conditions those programmes could eventually be founded on the fundamental right to work. For their part, opponents of WTW also deploy the human rights argument in order to critically appraise and set limits to the development of those programmes (rights as limits). Since they imply an obligation to work, which may be sanctioned by the reduction or even the complete loss of welfare benefits, WTW programmes can be questioned under several fundamental rights, among them the prohibition of forced labour and the right to freely chosen work, which are both included in the right to work. Chapter 4 clarifies the limits set by those fundamental rights to national work programmes.

This chapter, first, highlights the fact that work programmes in social assistance schemes can pursue various objectives, which determine the design and implementation of the programme as well as the type of work that is valued. Thereafter, the subject of the right to work will be specified.