Community service for the unemployed

For the third time in a few years community service for the unemployed was recently proposed again. Superficial evaluations of these experiments abroad often indicate a reduction in the number of benefit recipients. However, more profound studies suggest that the results are disappointing in terms of flow to the regular labor market. Let us add to that the counseling of older employees. For some this might be too ambitious. However, even today there exists already the system of social workshops.

There is nothing wrong with a good debate on different possibilities, but let us involve as much as possible serious evaluation studies of what works best. Initially, we must make every effort to actually activate people.