Bryan
http://alternativenews.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=436&Itemid=70#Adut
Welfare to Work in Israel— Policy of Disempowerment
News from Within Vol. XXII, No. 5, May 2006
by Rami Adut and Shir Hever. Rami Adut is an international advocacy researcher for the AIC. Shir Hever writes the economic bulletin for the AIC and is completing his Master’s at the Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University.
I. Background on the Welfare to Work (Wisconsin) Plan
In July 2005, Israel began the implementation of a Welfare to Work program, a two-year pilot program with an option for a year-long extension. The program is the first step in a radical shift in the Israeli labor market, and in the privatization of employment services. The program aims to encourage groups who are currently dependent on Income Support (the basic form of welfare in Israel) to find paid work and to stop collecting payments from the government. It is currently implemented in four locations: Hadera, Ashkelon, Nazereth and Jerusalem.
Severe cuts in welfare came into effect immediately preceding the implementation of the Welfare to Work program, and at the same time total per-capita Income Support paid by the government fell by over 31 percent between 2001 and 2005. The implementation of the welfare to work reform adds insult to injury, by attacking an already impoverished and disempowered population.
Graphs here: http://alternativenews.org/images/stories/nfw/graphs_adut_may.jpg
The welfare cuts were challenged in the Supreme Court, under the claim that the reduced stipends do not allow people to sustain themselves with dignity. While the Supreme Court rejected the appeal, many studies support this claim.
Despite the low stipends offered, the income-support system was severely criticized by Israel’s neoliberals, and was dubbed inefficient, costly and an encouragement to long-term unemployment. Neoliberal economists and policymakers pushed for privatizing the government’s welfare system. However, in 1998 an inter- departmental government committee recommended that the system should not be privatized. Israel’s treasury, eager to make a move to reduce the “incentive for laziness,” rejected the committee’s recommendations and pushed forward with the privatization of the welfare services.
The program, labeled “Mehalev,”—the acronym for the program’s motto, which also means “from the heart”—is the Israeli version of the Welfare to Work programs that have been implemented in Europe and the US since the mid-nineties, usually through a private company which acts as a contractor for the state.
Among the various Welfare to Work programs, those implemented in the US are considered less sensitive to the needs of the poor than the European programs. Israel has chosen to adopt the most aggressive of the American models known as “Work First,” which focuses on eliminating people from the welfare lists as soon as possible. This makes Israeli welfare reform one of the harshest in the world.
In the ten years since the plan was first implemented in the US, a great deal of criticism has accumulated against the program. The main argument has been that the program is unfair and damaging to people who were already impoverished. So far, Israel seems to have learnt nothing from these experiences.
In Israel, a large-scale campaign was launched to win over public opinion for the plan. Radio broadcasts promoted the plan as a valuable tool for finding jobs for people, and the financial papers quoted officials promising that the plan will solve much of the unemployment problem in Israel. Due to massive public protest against the Welfare to Work program, however, the radio campaign was terminated.
Four companies won the tender to operate the program in the four cities selected for the pilot. Initially 14,000 people were slated for inclusion in the program, but the number rose to 18,000. The estimated annual budget of the program is US $54 million, more than twice the total of annual income support payments to those enrolled in the program. So far, the costs of the program have not been addressed in any form of public debate.
The 2003 Economic Policy law and several additional regulations mapped out the general outlines of the reform, the training and counseling that participants will receive, as well as their rights and duties. Some of these are posted on the program administration’s website. However, the companies have discretion over the particular practices they choose, which are documented only in the confidential contracts signed between the Israeli state and the contractors. Thus, with the companies’ insistence on protecting their “commercial secrets,” important information on their actual policies remains obscure.
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