Readiness for the labour market and self-sufficiency

The primary objective of employment efforts is to get unemployed people into employment. However, many recipients of cash benefits, who are not ready to take on a job, have such large and complex problems that it would require long-term and intensive intervention to get them into employment. In the short term, the success criteria for interventions will therefore be to help unemployed people become more ready to take on a job rather than to help them obtain ordinary employment quickly.
However there are no measurements for readiness for the labour market that make it possible to measure whether the public interventions are moving unemployed people, who are not ready to take on a job, closer to the labour market. This report investigates whether the physical and psychological health of recipients of cash benefits, their alcohol and drug problems, as well as their job-search activity can be used as measurements for readiness for the labour market.
This survey has been financed by the Ministry of Employment.