Introduction

‘Workfare’ is not a positive term in the French policy debate. It is usually reserved to describe the kinds of strategies that policy makers want to avoid, since workfare policies are considered to focus on social exclusion resulting from individual behaviour. French activation policies are strongly rooted in a republican ideology and form part of a broader strategy to fight ‘exclusion’ and foster ‘insertion’. Nonetheless, recent developments in job creation and activation policies have tended towards compulsory work, through the development of work insertion requirements for over 25-year-olds receiving means-tested cash assistance, and via a refusal to provide financial assistance to under 26-year-olds outside of a work or training context.

Insertion policies (policies with an official goal to re-integrate ‘excluded people’ either into the labour market or into social life) began to be introduced in France at the beginning of the 1980s. While France shares a European orientation towards activating social assistance recipients, it is exceptional in several key respects. In general, French policy makers place responsibility on society to enable individuals to be integrated, rather than on individuals to develop their own strategies. Unemployment has grown to a level that policy makers accept will not be absorbed through economic growth alone. Policy makers view this unemployment as a structural problem – with a shortage of low-skilled jobs seen to be the primary cause of social exclusion among young and unskilled people – rather than resulting from poor motivation on the part of the individual. Nonetheless, dependency on ‘passive’ benefits is increasingly viewed as highly undesirable, particularly for young people.

The administrative context for French activation is extremely complex. Insertion policies involve state agencies and autonomous elected bodies at the national, regional, departmental and local levels. Policy developments have been incremental, and have built up within a complex administrative system. As a result, French work-for-welfare requirements do not constitute a clear set of programmes. For older uninsured people workfare is one possible trajectory attached to the nationalised social assistance programme. Revenu Minimum d’Insertion (RMI). For younger people workfare does not replace social assistance but rather exists instead of RMI since younger people are not eligible for RMI.