Help activating. Employment agents at the ambivalences of “Full Occupancy”

Abstract

The economic recovery, after the crisis in Spain, has been operated through the intensification of work and the precarious employment, and in both processes the policies of unemployment management have played a fundamental role. Oriented to the activation of unemployed people through the exchange of aid in exchange for employability, there are many studies that link these policies to a kind of “neoliberal commodification of social assistance”. But there are few who try to understand them from own theoretical schemes and practical devices of the Keynesian theory of "full employment", formally opposed to neoliberalism. Public employment services, whose social legitimacy derives from their apparent role as guardianship of the unemployed, are today oriented, on the contrary, to their activation. The work of the employment agents is revealed as a privileged analyser to show how these contradictions are managed in practice.