This contribution draws some conclusions from the experience of attempts by the German government at integrating the most vulnerable groups into the labor market, in particular the long-term unemployed and the low skilled. There has been a sort of paradigm shift that goes beyond active labor...

The working poor were long thought of as people toiling away in lousy, under-protected and underpaid jobs in places like fast-food joints, supermarkets, hotels and bars. The perfidious consequence of that perception was that in-work poverty was seen as a non-issue in countries with extensive...