Cabinet gives green light for unemployment law experiment without job application requirement

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The outgoing cabinet agreed on Wednesday to a proposal from outgoing Minister Karien van Gennip (Social Affairs and Employment, CDA) for a different implementation of the unemployment law. The UWV, the Employee Insurance Agency, is expected to start an experiment next autumn in which not all unemployed people who are eligible for unemployment benefits are no longer obliged to apply. They still have to do that now. The experiment will last four years.

At least one hundred thousand unemployment benefit recipients who will participate in the study will be randomly divided into three groups. Individual agreements are made for one group and an action plan is drawn up. There is no longer any obligation to apply for the second group. In a third control group, the job application requirement is still there.

The aim of the long-term experiment is to see what the most effective way is to get people without work back into the labor market. Little research has been done into this yet. The government writes that having to apply again and again can be “demotivating” and that the UVW does not look at how someone applies when applying for a job.

However, the obligation to apply for a job can also be an incentive in the search for work. “With this experiment we can test what really works,” says Van Gennip. “In this way we provide a basis for effective policy to help unemployed workers return to work.”

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