Excluded by the State: Profiling the Unemployed in Poland

The traditional criteria put in place when it comes to social rights were based on collective statuses and payment of social contributions. They are no longer sufficient to obtain and keep some of the previously universal entitlements (see for instance, Serrano Pascual, Magnusson, 2007; Dubois, 2009). Instead, access to benefits and services becomes increasingly dependent on the assessment of an individual: his or her strengths and weaknesses, work attitudes and individual behaviours (Van Berkel, Valkenburg, 2007). Public employment services (PES) are encouraged to search for methods of processing this complex information on individual job seekers and to customise employment services accordingly. Profiling, that involves statistical or the software-guided assessment, has been promoted worldwide as an answer to this informational challenge (Konle-Seidl, 2011; Hasluck, 2008; Loxha, Morgandi, 2014; Wiśniewski, Wojdyło-Preisner, 2015). It has been praised for its accuracy, objectivity, efficiency in contrast to subjective, discriminatory and ad-hoc judgments of frontline staff or too broad eligibility rules (ibidem). Interestingly, profiling procedures are also presented as a means to equalise labour market chances among job seekers in the context of scarce public resources. One objective of so-called “customer differentiation” and “targeted resource allocation” (Konle-Seidl, 2011; Hasluck, 2008) is to direct as quickly as possible the intensive support to those diagnosed as the most needy due to their low “employability” level. Another goal is to limit public spending on jobseekers, who are categorised as “easy to place” and capable of self-help. This universalising rhetoric is used to justify the introduction of different or even opposing policy solutions in various institutional contexts. In this paper, we would like to distance ourselves from this rhetoric. Instead of assuming the equalising effect of profiling as such, we would like to take a closer look at the operating principles of one concrete profiling instrument, introduced by a recent reform of PES in Poland. More specifically, we would like to understand the principles according to which differentiation of the unemployed into three “profiles of assistance” is performed. Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we claim that this profiling mechanism does not reduce public spending on those deemed “having high employment potential”. Instead, it serves to exclude from most of labour market programmes almost one-third of the whole Polish unemployed population, classified as the group “lacking employment potential” (Niklas et al., 2015).