Dr. Tom Boland:

Our interviewees experience of JobPath is that it is a scheme that actively undermines their personal reservation wage and labour market expectations so that they will accept any job however unsustainable, unsuitable and precarious. It is inspired by behavioural economics and the idea of subtle nudges. JobPath assumes that the problem of unemployment is idleness and that a work-first approach will ultimately lead to sustainable, high-quality employment. In practice, these measures constituted a stressful and unwelcome intervention in people's lives and was even described as traumatic in some cases.

All of these interventions are made under the threat of sanction for non-compliance. This pressurises jobseekers to find any work. That may explain why 25% of people commence work but only 9% are still employed after 52 weeks, which is the same percentage as if participants had not gone through the process. International research has begun to re-evaluate the maxims that any job is better than none, and that work is always the quickest route out of poverty, which is not the case.

Many of the JobPath interventions were already emerging under Intreo and were part of the traditional local employment service that supports the unemployed. What is distinctive here is that they have intensified and become aggressive, and more punitive, under JobPath. This is due to the pay-by-results model or the recruitment of staff on short-term contracts without necessarily having professional careers in the welfare system, as per guidance supplied by Education and Training Boards Ireland.

Given what JobPath aspires to do, the contract has an unfeasibly short horizon that does not facilitate the building of durable institutional resources on the awardees part. If Ireland has a perpetual need for the complex and highly-contextual pastoral skills of nurturing disaffected jobseekers back into the labour market, it takes time to build such a capacity and, if done correctly, can be valuable. However, a four-year contract is an unsuitable instrument for this activity.

I shall talk about the so-called "creaming and dumping". Our interviewees mostly reported being acutely aware from their experience of JobPath of the so-called payments by results model that drives the initiative, and so they all had a realistic understanding of their own personal labour markets. They actively encouraged and supported their JobPath caseworker in "creaming and dumping" but tended to grow frustrated when asked to do things that they perceived to be harmful to their career prospects or responsibilities. In effect, they tried to negotiate the "creaming and dumping" that they knew to be going on.

It is worth noting that there is a very significant inconsistency in the geographical distribution of sanctions. The distribution does not correspond to the level of population of the unemployed and ranges from an 8% sanction rate in Louth or Limerick to almost 0% in Mayo. This inexplicable variation is consistent with our long-held view derived from research that there is a significant variation in how rules and eligibility are applied and interpreted office by office, day by day and welfare officer by welfare officer. The thicket of schemes and their constant reform, adjustment and modification make the rights of a service user unclear and contingent on both user and front-line staff.

In conclusion, activation in the form of human capital building and supported job search can have long-term positive effects on the supply side of the labour market. We suggest that investing in training and the back-to-education scheme are the best tools for doing so.

Policies that emphasise welfare conditionality and sanctions are short sighted. They require compliance under threat of being put below the minimum level of income and this mainly has negative consequences. There is significant international research on the consequences of sanctioning from short-term poverty to long-term health, and negative future effects on earnings and employment. The knock-on effects on the economy are to foster precarious, low-wage or no-wage cycles and alienate those who are already most disadvantaged, and to unfairly pressurise those who are temporarily out of work. Rather than using the stick and carrot approach we suggest removing the threat of sanctions as a core administrative tool because the benefits of an education opportunity or a job should be sufficient motivation in themselves. Sanctions may have some part to play in the benefits system but their current role is out of all proportion and against the principles of natural justice. Clearly, sanctions should be subject to stronger regulation and oversight, and we have recommended stronger and more specific measures elsewhere in our previous research and submissions.

In terms of JobPath, the payment-by-results and short-term orientation of the JobPath contract are unsuitable policy instruments. The power that providers wield over the unemployed is neither appropriate nor commensurate with the vulnerability of this population. The "work first" approach involves market coaxing, which involves reducing the choices and expectations of jobseekers, reduces public faith in the social safety net and undermines the entire labour market.

The impact of JobPath on individual lives is decidedly negative even when sanctions were not imposed. We envisage a long-term impact on overall social cohesion for these policies as a result of the experience and throughput of so many citizens through these initiatives. We suggest that the committee should advise strongly against renewing JobPath and that we need to learn lessons from this expensive, costly at the point of use and broadly ineffective misadventure because we must seek to build a high-quality labour market welfare policy.