Towards policies of dignity? The German Participation Opportunities Act as a response to long-term unemployment

Abstract The Participation Opportunities Act (POA) came into force in Germany in January 2019 with the aim of making publicly subsidised employment accessible to the long-term unemployed, whose prospects of regular employment are poor. The POA responds to a two-fold exclusion suffered by this group: exclusion from the labour market and a kind of ‘internal exclusion’ from social services. We argue that the POA can therefore be understood as a ‘policy of dignity’ and thus as a challenge to the neoliberal recognition order. The aim of this paper is an empirical examination of this thesis based on qualitative interviews with managers and professionals at German job centres. We apply Honneth’s theory of recognition as a theoretical framework and examine two levels of implementation: the interpretation of the law and how it is put into practice from 2019-2023.