There is widespread scholarly recognition that migrant long-term care (LTC) workers experience relatively poorer work conditions than local LTC workers. We focus here on the ways in which migration and employment regulation intersect in formal LTC markets to produce working conditions for migrant workers. Drawing on cross-national comparisons between Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom we explore: firstly, the forms of employment regulation that can protect migrant LTC workers or expose them to additional risks; and secondly, how migration regulation can work to amplify employment protection gaps for certain groups of migrant workers. We find that while historically there have been better employment protections in Australia and the Netherlands, the reshaping of work in all three LTC systems creates a context within which migration regulation can exacerbate the risks of precarious work for migrant workers and for those on temporary visas in particular.

Informal care provision is an integral part of the long-term care system. However, it has been shown to have negative effects on the carers’ economic activity, and understanding the mechanisms behind this is crucial for social policy design. This study provides new insight into mid-life carers’ decisions to reduce their economic activity through a convergent mixed-methods design. Quantitative analysis of a sample of 2,233 carers aged fifty from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) Wave 8 with follow up at age fifty-five, and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews of forty-eight carers between 2008-2010, were used. The combined results indicate that being female, single never married, having financial issues, being an employee, and frequently meeting a parent are associated with economic activity reduction; the carers’ own perspectives further elucidate key factors, such as their value and identity, family structure, life course events, and care intensity, which affect their decisions.

Welfare states allocate and redistribute resources across different groups. For the social legitimacy of welfare states, public support of redistributive processes and outcomes is crucial. An important aspect in this context is the deservingness or non-deservingness of benefit recipients from the perspective of those who both financially contribute to the system and potentially benefit from it. We invited a random sample of the German labour force to participate in an online-survey. Using a factorial survey experiment, we described fictitious unemployed persons with different attributes and asked survey participants on the just maximum benefit duration for each particular case. Judgements regarding just benefit durations vary along the criteria of reciprocity, control, attitude and need: Respondents grant longer unemployment benefits to older jobseekers, as well as to jobseekers who became involuntarily unemployed, had stable employment careers, have to care for the elderly or are sole earners in the household.

Universal Credit (UC) has been rolling out since 2013 to radically alter the UK welfare system. Several UC design features, and its changes to benefit generosity, can lead to claimants struggling to afford rent payments. This article uses fixed-effects panel modelling to investigate UC’s housing insecurity impacts within English local authorities (2014 Q1 - 2019 Q1) by bringing together official UC data and Citizens Advice ‘advice trends’ data on rent arrears/homelessness issues within the social/private rented sectors. The results suggest UC rollout is associated with increases in rent arrears advice issues (though not homelessness advice issues). This impact tended to be greater when UC had been rolled out for longer (and therefore reached more claimants), and was greatest in the social rented sector where people are more vulnerable to arrears. This highlights a need to increase the level of UC payments and address its long wait periods and harsh sanctions.

We examine an early ‘red flag system’ in the Finnish social assistance system and its efficiency in reducing the length of social assistance spells. We utilise the age-threshold in the policy that requires notifying social services on beneficiaries under twenty-five years of age after four months of social assistance receipt. Using monthly administrative data covering all twenty-three to twenty-six-year-old social assistance beneficiaries in Finland in 2018-2019, we compare the social assistance receipt of those below and above the age-threshold. Our findings show that those who are ‘red flagged’ do not exit social assistance earlier than others. On the contrary, four months after the notification is sent to social services, they are more likely to still have social assistance as their primary source of income compared to the twenty-five to twenty-six-year-old individuals. Our results shed light on the little discussed question on how to combine social work with digitalised and automatised welfare.

This article examines why employers struggle to include disability as part of their active diversity approach. Drawing on cross-national interview data from Norway and the USA, we point to the common finding of employers – who are the target of regulatory disability employment policies – typically falling into the passive employer category of employer engagement, with positive attitudes but negative hiring behaviour. As a partial explanation, we demonstrate the difficulty of identifying and demographically monitoring disabled people among job seekers and employees. We argue that these problems are linked to unique aspects of disability as a diversity category, and tie these to the significance of disability heterogeneity, lack of disclosure and the difficulty of acquiring information related to health. We conclude that organisations need to go beyond mere legislative compliance and be more proactive towards disability as a distinct diversity category.

Welfare states in Europe and around the world are experiencing growing numbers of people with limited or unclear rights to public welfare within their borders. These are refugees, undocumented migrants, EU-migrants and other groups of displaced or deprived people seeking a better life. In Sweden, this situation is trying the highly held principles of social and human rights, as charities are becoming an increasingly important complement to rights-based public welfare services. This article will show how eight different City Missions in Sweden are seeing a new role for themselves in an emerging social landscape. The findings will be analysed in terms of social and human rights, using the classic theories of T. H. Marshall as well as more recent research.

This introduction to our themed section on social policy responses to the recent cost-of-living crisis spells out this topic and the key issues examined in the section’s main contributions before summarising their findings and overall contribution to the literature. More specifically, to frame this themed section, the present Introduction begins with a concise, up-to-date overview of the inflationary crisis that emerged in late 2021 and evolved throughout 2022 and the first half of 2023. It then charts, and reflects upon, the diversity of responses enacted in a variety of countries reflective of different models of welfare provision in Europe and North America.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) reached political agendas as a proposal to radically reform welfare systems, followed by scholarly interest in its public legitimacy. While surveys find UBI support to be mostly redistribution-driven, the discussion in science and media suggests a more nuanced understanding. To comprehensively grasp the public response to UBI policy, this article explores the controversies surrounding UBI policy through a content analysis of Dutch tweets. In addition to identifying established controversies, our analysis points to two avenues for the study of UBI legitimacy. First, a multidimensional measure of UBI support should include redistributive, conditionality, and efficiency aspects. Second, dissatisfaction with targeted activation policy and ‘post-productivist’ attitudes should receive greater attention as drivers of UBI support. Overall, we find the pressure to reform welfare is more than the promise of a ‘free lunch’: it is anchored in fundamental critiques of economic and welfare institutions.

Consumption taxes are a policy tool that shape the income distribution and potentially thwart the redistributive goals of social policy. Different household types might be affected differently due to diverging income positions and consumption levels. This study examines the change in poverty across household types when accounting for consumption tax payments. To this end, the study draws on harmonised data from eleven OECD countries in the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Implicit indirect tax rates are estimated from national accounts and poverty rates before and after subtracting consumption taxes are investigated. The results indicate significant variation across household types. In most countries, large family and single parent households experience the highest poverty increase. Ultimately, the increase in poverty across countries is positively associated with the consumption tax level.

The cost-of-living crisis that began in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis and the attempted Russian invasion of Ukraine has major implications for social policy. In advanced industrial countries, this is the most dramatic cost-of-living crisis since the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s. In this contribution, we explore the inflation and social policy nexus to identify the nature and sources of inflation, its redistributive and policy implications, and the specific nature of the current cost-of-living crisis compared to two other recent crises: the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on advanced industrial countries and drawing on the available scholarship about these topics, we offer the background necessary to understand the challenges facing welfare states in times of dramatically high inflation. As a way to provide broad context to the present themed section, our discussion stresses the economic, social, and political dynamics shaping social policy adaptation to inflationary pressures.

The following article is dedicated to the empirical case study from Ukraine and focuses on the work of Ukrainian courts resolving the cases of internally displaced persons in the realm of social policy. Based on interviews and secondary sources in terms of data, it explains the problem area of the legal regulations and administrative practices applicable to internally displaced Ukrainians in the sphere of social rights, and it analyses selected decisions of the courts in the cases brought by them, including the courts’ approaches, motivations and limitations, all while doing so from the combined perspective of security, law and internal migrants’ agency.

Labour market participation by refugees in their new host country is crucial both to the integration process and in terms of reducing public spending on income replacement benefits for refugees. In this article, we explore workplace factors associated with employment of refugees. For this purpose, we use a survey of Danish employers, in light of the fact that with some notable exceptions, the employer role has been somewhat neglected in existing research on labour market integration of refugees. We find that many different workplace factors are associated with employment of refugees. In addition to objective workplace characteristics, existing social responsibility practice, contacts by public employment services and the attitudes and preconceptions of employers towards refugees are of importance.

Despite serving as the Philippines’ main social protection strategy, debate continues surrounding the ability of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) to meet its long-term goal of breaking cycles of intergenerational poverty. To engage with this debate, this study brings together the constructs of entitlement and agency to analyse how different actors associated with 4Ps understand and experience the program. Drawing on forty-three semi-structured interviews with 4Ps beneficiaries, non-beneficiaries, and implementers, we provide a provisional explanation as to why a disconnect exists between the long-term goals of 4Ps and the experiences with the program among these different actors. In addition, this study highlights how challenges associated with the design and implementation of 4Ps, including limited transparency and communication of the program’s eligibility requirements, rigid monitoring of beneficiary compliance, and delays in receiving cash transfers, may constrain the transformational potential of this social protection strategy.

Social policies’ responsiveness to rising inflation depends in large part on whether they contain automatic indexation mechanisms, which ensure that the real value of wages and benefits expands during inflationary periods. Here we compare how the indexation of Canadian and U.S. policies on pensions, minimum wages, and food security have affected their responsiveness to the recent cost-of-living crisis. Three main conclusions emerge from our analysis. First, automatic indexation is not necessarily a silver bullet to avoid policy drift. Second, automatic indexation and its design are not the only factors that matter to determine whether high inflation leads to policy drift. Finally, in times of higher inflation, social programs that lack automatic indexation can avoid policy drift, as long as a strong political consensus allows for ad hoc social policy expansion capable of offsetting the negative effects of inflations on social benefits.

Rising inflation in the Nordic societies has changed the living standards for many families. The situation differs not only between the four Nordic countries analysed, but even within each of the Nordic countries. The needs for intervention have varied. Several elements have been used to determine who is facing the most risks. This article shows how to combine automatic stabilisers with temporary policy interventions to deal with increased inflation in general or specific sub-elements (such as oil, natural gas). Focus is on the degree of and criteria for targeting. Possible distributional consequences of the adopted measures will be discussed. Lastly, the article considers whether the observed responses to the crisis have implications for the understanding of the Nordic welfare state model. The article investigates institutional, political and economic reasons for the variations in the interventions. The article concludes that in managing the crisis, the Nordic countries have adopted stronger targeting towards those considered to be in need, displaying some innovations in their social policy approach. Yet, one can trace a high degree of path-dependency, with the countries adhering to universalist principles, with an aim of redistributing resources.

In response to growing evidence that cultural values and behaviours are key drivers of men’s use of domestic violence against women, states across the globe are increasingly implementing prevention policies aimed at mobilising cultural change within the community. Through an examination of one Australian state’s recent and significant domestic violence policy reform, we demonstrate that, although state-led efforts to change community culture hold merit, they can also be undermined by exclusive constructions of the community. As a result, efforts to change community culture exclude the very group whose values and behaviours are most problematic: men who perpetrate domestic violence. We argue that broadening conceptualisations of community is of critical importance for policies seeking to change community culture. Such conceptualisations must necessarily include men who perpetrate domestic violence, as theirs are the values and behaviours that most urgently require change.