Today, when the Belgian authorities determine that an unemployed person isn’t looking hard enough for a job, they can stop paying that person unemployment benefits. What happens then? Does it encourage job-hunting? Not exactly.
As of January 2012, the unemployment benefit payment period was capped at three years, meaning that a first wave of unemployed stopped receiving payments in January 2015. Moreover, the tightening of the rules of maintaining unemployment also adds its share of rights. ‘To understand what happens to these people, the Brussels-based employment monitoring centre Actiris commissioned us to take an inventory’, explains Marc Zune, a researcher at the UCL Institute for the Analysis of Change in Contemporary and Historical Societies (IACS).
Meeting the excluded
To do so, Dr Zune and his colleagues Elise Ugeux (UCL) and Didier Demazière (CNRS, Sciences Po Paris) interviewed 55 people whose unemployment payments had been terminated in accordance with the new limitation, to hear their points of view and to find out how they were – or were not – getting on. ‘To get a diverse sample,’ Dr Zune said, ‘we made sure to meet a wide range of people based on age, gender, education, where they lived.’
Looking for a job: rules vs. reality
One of the first major observations was how differently the authorities and the job seekers define looking for a job. ‘The difference is huge! Most of the latter don’t spend their day in front of the computer, sending CVs and following up for interviews, which is how the authorities would like it to be. In general, these people look for unskilled jobs, and the “system” for finding them is completely different: word-of-mouth, pounding the pavement, proving their meddle by first working for nothing or getting paid under the table. Which they of course can’t say to the people monitoring them.’ So the tightening of unemployment benefits has the effect of pushing people toward marginal forms of work and away from the conventional norm of stable full-time employment. Interviewees often go back and forth between employment and unemployment, the durations varying, and only rarely do they land the so-called desirable norm of a permanent contract.
In addition, those in particularly precarious situations have more pressing concerns than searching for work all day long. ‘For example, they have a family to feed and do the rounds of the open-air markets to scrape up what’s left after they close, they’re over-indebted, they need a roof over their heads – they already have so many demands on their time that it’s almost a fight for survival. That’s why they often have to put a job search on the back burner, and yet the authorities who control the unemployment payments demand specific, formal, incessant, vigorous action.’
No confidence in institutions
These two opposing points of view tend to drive a wedge between the excluded and the excluders. ‘First of all, this huge contradiction between the search for employment from an institutional point of view and the search for employment from the excluded person’s point of view eventually results in a loss of trust: the latter don’t see any interest in submitting to the institutional way of looking for a job because it simply doesn’t work for them. Then, when the exclusion was announced, some interviewees told us they rejected the institutions. Their job searches don’t take place in an institutional framework, so when they were asked to justify themselves, they couldn’t, and so they experienced the institution’s terms as an injustice. Their job-seeking efforts were constant but they weren’t acknowledged and so didn’t count.’ On top of the trauma of reading the letter announcing their exclusion, six months to a year later nothing has changed, the dispute remains, the injustice rankles, all the more because it has to be expressed to cold, impervious institutions indifferent to individual lives.
What now?
When the decision is made and unemployment payments stop, no recourse is provided. Everyone has to fend for themselves. Sure, they can make an appeal to the CPAS (Centre public d'action sociale, ‘Public Social Service Centre’), but the option to appeal is not systematically indicated or granted – individuals living with someone who works generally don’t have the right. ‘Moreover, in most cases, making an appeal to the CPAS is a humiliating, demeaning experience’, Dr Zune explains. ‘On top of that, what it offers is rarely appropriate. Such marginalisation clearly generates demeaning, degrading treatment on top of impoverishing both the excluded and those nearest to them.’ And what about work? ‘Most interviewees want to work but they’re limited to working to improve their difficult situations rather than to pursue a particular career. Most of them feel that standard employment in inaccessible to them anyway.’
What improvements can be made?
The failure of this policy as a means to stimulate the search for employment is indisputable, because it stops unemployment payments to people who are still in the labour force and define themselves as workers. But how to get it right? How can the institutions adapt? Dr Zune and his colleagues have several ideas.
‘It’s hard to explain them all in a short time,’ Dr Zune says, ‘but here’s the general outline: it’s essential to review employment search evaluation methods, which are based on an abstract, supposedly universal standard of employment search behaviour, especially by developing more comprehensive and personalised support for the unemployed. In addition, all work experiences should be recognised: odd jobs, assignments, freelance gigs, and volunteering and various other undertakings. Unemployment eligibility standards must be redefined more in terms of budgetary concerns than in the sociology of employment. In the same vein, it would be invaluable for the monitoring institutions to acquire a better understanding of the methods for recruiting parts of the unskilled labour force for whom it is rare to apply for a job by sending a CV by email. Finally, we insist on a public discourse on employment-related inequalities and the grounds for selection during recruiting. This could help create a collective consciousness of all kinds of stigmas related to employment.’
Elise Dubuisson
A glance at Marc Zune's bio
1998-2002 FNRS Candidate
2003 PhD in Sociology (Université de Liège, Belgium)
2003-2007 Postdoctorate, Laboratoire Printemps de l’Université de Versailles, St-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Centre for Globalisation Research, Queen Mary
University
FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre Metices-TEF, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Since 2007 Associate Professor, UCL
Member, GIRSEF research group, Institute for the Analysis of Change in Historical and Contemporary Societies (IACCHOS), UCL