Workfare - A Threat to the Safety Net in the Israeli Social Security System / "מסעד לעבודה": איום על רשת המגן במערכת הביטחון הסוציאלי הישראלית

Income support and other welfare payments to population groups in need have increased significantly in recent years. The growth of these payments and the opposition to them among various political groupings have raised the issue of welfare reform to the top of the national agenda in many countries, among them Israel. The common remedy offered nowadays to deal with the problem in the US, Britain and other countries are "Welfare to Work" programs, or as they are more commonly known "Workfare". The article reviews some of these programs as they have evolved, mainly in the US, and examines what effect they may have if introduced in Israel. A number of issues emerge in regard to any attempt to introduce such workfare programs in Israel. First, is the country's economy, which has been in a severe recession during the last years and is suffering from high unemployment rates, able to absorb many thousands of additional workers with low employment skills? US and British Workfare programs, which have been claimed to be relatively successful, were introduced at times of mostly full employment and actual shortages of manpower. Second, the question is, what will be the effect of the influx of thousands of former recipients of income support, mostly with limited education or occupational skills and many of them women, on an already thight labour market? Already a large sector of the Israeli labour force is barely earning a minimum wage. The flooding of the labour market with those removed from income support may increase the danger of further reducing the low level of wages among a significant part of the labour force. In addition, their entrance into the labour market may cause, as Robert Solow claims, the cost of adjusting to spread to the working poor and to the working justless poor, in the form of lower wages and greater job insecurity. Third, Israel has a long history of relief work programs that, in practice, could be seen as a sort of workfare. These programs served in the past as a substitute for welfare payments. At the time it was recognized that these programs were "bad for the country and bad for the people employed in them". They "paid no worthwhile wages and provided inadequate conditions of work". It is, therefore, doubtful whether it would be practical or feasible to return in the new millenium to programs that failed in the past. The dilemmas facing policy makers in Israel concerning the introduction of workfare programs are thus of a twofold nature: b