Decommodification by Dispossession? (Non-)Volunteering Long-Term Unemployed on the Security Market
In January 2005, the then Social Democratic-Green Government of Germany introduced the so-called Hartz Laws (Hartz IV). With this legislation, long-term unemployed were to lose their insurance-based entitlements for unemployment benefits.
In turn, their benefits were substituted by a fixed monthly amount of €359 and the requirement to work for 30 hours per week in order to get an additional €1 per hour (called expense allowance).
In 2009, more than 670,000 long-term unemployed worked under the Hartz IV legislation (workfare), out of them around 7 percent on duty in the fields of safety, order and security. Besides state police (270,000 officers) and rent-a-cops (180,000), thus a rapidly growing new security workforce emerges. The paper will discuss several consequences.