"Making work pay" : from justifications to implementations

The aim of this paper is to discuss the relevance of «making work pay» policies from within. We first discuss the various justifications of the motto and then connect them to the existing variety of implementation experiences in Europe. We compare the classical organization of arguments behind the motto "making work pay" to an hourglass, the diversity of national institutions regarding work and social protection being one of its top parts ; work incentives constitute the narrow part ; lastly, the variety of implementations corresponds to its other wide end. We show that this unifying reasoning is not relevant and propose a model which corresponds to a more complex logic : the diversity of national institutions and implementations being matched by a set of different and conflicting objectives regarding work, whose dynamic dimension is gaining more and more importance. The policy debate should then be summed up by another motto : «Making transitions pay».