In work-oriented societies, gainful employment is considered key to social participation. At the same time, unemployment, underemployment, low income or limited labour participation are typical risks. They pose particular challenges to those affected and can combine with other individual and structural risks to create critical points or times in a person’s life, unequal opportunities and social exclusion.
Employment risks are thus a major driver of economic and social inequality and can contribute to the emergence of poverty and jeopardise social cohesion. This requires academic study, welfare-state intervention as well as scientific monitoring and evaluation.
In this focus area, the IAB shines a light on characteristics and processes at the individual, household and institutional level that are particularly relevant to inequality. The causal connections between these characteristics are also of interest here.
Transitions from school to training or work can present particular obstacles when people receive basic social security benefits and can have negative long-term consequences for their employment history. Projects on the situation of young recipients of basic social security benefits for jobseekers (“SGB II”) are thus an essential component of this focus area as are analyses on the influence of education and vocational training on employment and poverty risks. A further focus is on interactions within the provision of basic social security benefits, for example, job-counselling and placement in Jobcentres, on the interpretation and perception, practical implementation, efficiency, and effectiveness of socio-political interventions as well as their effects on life courses, distribution relations, and social stratification, on labour participation, and economic, social, and cultural participation.
The evaluation of the Participation Opportunities Act (Teilhabechancengesetz) is set to be completed in 2024, with particular attention paid to how the instruments the act creates might affect social inclusion.
Work on evaluating the reform of citizen’s benefit is another key task, with the initial analyses focusing on the implementation of the new legal provisions by the job centres, for example with regard to the replacement of the integration agreement with the cooperation plan, and the introduction of coaching under section 16k SGB II. Elsewhere, research looks at work being done to reintegrate people being reintroduced to society into the labour market, and to get parents with children under the age of three and in receipt of benefits under the German Social code (SGB II) back into work. It also explores Ukrainian refugees’ propensity to work and their prospects for remaining in Germany or returning to Ukraine.
Activities
- Publications on the topic: Labour Force Participation, Poverty, and Social Policy
- Projects on the topic: Labour Force Participation, Poverty, and Social Policy
Departments
- Staff Unit Research Coordination
- Research Department Joblessness and Social Inclusion
- Research Department Basic Income Support and Activation
- Research Group Basic Income Support and the Labour Market
- Research Department Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security
- Regional Research Network
- Working Group Gender Studies
- Working Group Quality of Employment
- Working Group Social protection in changing times
