Activating Welfare States

This paper investigates how welfare states may actively contribute to promote employment opportunities, i.e. participation in the labour market through various operations and policies. The principal operations concern in particular the de-familiarisation of caring tasks through social services for children and the elderly, which in turn allows in particular women to (re-)enter the labour market, de-commodification of labour through easy accessible and relative generous cash benefits providing a more flexible labour market, and re-commodification of labour through conditioning of benefits and active labour market policies giving long-term unemployed and people with low skills better opportunities to participate in the labour market, whether the ordinary or in special activities.