‘A little more humanity’: placement officers in Germany between social work and social policy

Abstract

By definition, no social work is supposed to be carried out in the labour administration. However, what do German placement officers reveal about the implementation of social policy when they describe their activity as social work? Classical research studies on public employment service (PES) as well as our own empirical research reveal the following: while it emerged from earlier studies that placement officers described themselves as ‘social workers’ in order to lend greater meaning to their activities, interviews conducted with today's placement officers indicate their criticism as well: dysfunctional effects of an organisational means of achieving the social policy goals set by the Hartz labour-market reforms (2003-05) are specified – including the welfare-to-work principle being made unnecessarily stricter, thereby increasing the risk of the unemployed becoming ‘genuine’ social work cases.