Sur la ligne de front de l’emploi

Les politiques wallonnes d’accompagnement des demandeurs d’emploi dans l’isolement du bureau

Abstract

During the last decades, literature has highlighted the emergence of the active welfare state. In the field of unemployment insurance, this shift resulted in the active support and supervision of job seekers. Unemployment is henceforth going to be dealt with under specific modalities in Belgium, hence in Wallonia. Those modalities are characterized by the personalized support of each job seeker. Employment policies must be carried out as close as possible to the job seeker, through supervised and personalized coaching by civil servants. The following research project will highlight the consequences of such a change regarding public action, which is now based on a close connection between state agents and beneficiaries, happening in the office’s isolation. Through a qualitative sociological survey (interviews and observation) among employees within three Belgian public career offices, we managed to identify the potential significant features of the activities of such agents, that are very far removed from the classical Weberian bureaucracy. This change carries the hope of a getting out of the depersonalized and suffocating stranglehold of the bureaucratic action but also the risk of introducing a potential disparity of treatment and a moral variable in this new way of supporting the unemployed.