Win-win. The deployment of disabled workers between common good and free riding

Abstract

The paper focuses the use of direct and indirect financial incentives, in particular temporary wage subsidies for hiring disability insurance clients and different forms of fixed term work trials to address employers. For employers, these work trials constitute free labour because workers receive disability insurance benefits instead of a salary. Again, financial incentives pose a policy (and moral) dilemma. On the one hand, they serve the common good by promoting the em-ployment of a category of workers who by themselves are not competitive in the labour market. On the other hand, private businesses profit from subsidized labour without being obliged to offer long-term regular employment. In an ethnographic study on the relations between disability in-surance and employers we found three main patterns of (not) using disabled workers: categori-cal exclusion, temporary tolerance and systematic use of subsidised labour. The paper discuss-es the function of wage subsidies and work trials for these deployment patterns and under what circumstances the use of subsidized disabled workers is framed as serving the common good or constituting ‘egotistic’ profit-seeking.