Active Labour Market Policies and Undeclared Work. Reflections on an Understudied Relationship

The contribution aims to provide insights into how employment services and, more specifically, active labour market policies (ALMPs) relate to the policy field focusing on Undeclared Work (UDW). To deal with UDW, attention is increasing to the so-called holistic approach, which includes preventive and curative policy measures, besides the more traditional one based on repressive measures. In this approach, there is a focus on policy measures able to transform UDW into declared work rather then ‘simply’ repress it. Within this scenario, active labour market policies (ALMP) gain in importance, given their potential for supporting the workers from irregular to regular jobs.

We analyse this unexplored relationship in three steps: in principle, in policy design, and in street-level actions and discourses. Based on (European) policy models and guidelines, we unpack ALMPs into their fundamental components (employability, personalisation, activation and conditionality,) and explore how they intersect with and confront undeclared and informal work. Second, we use Italy as a case study to explore the links between two recent policy measures, introduced with the Recovery and Resilience Plan: the ALMP reform and the national plan to tackle undeclared work. From the in-depth analysis of policy regulations and policy instruments, we shed light on both smooth links and critical knots and contradictions of policy design. This documentary study forms the context for the third step, which delves into how and to what extent undeclared work is considered in the daily activities of employment services. Ethnographic data concerning the street-level implementation of the ALMP reform serve to depict how the relationship under study takes concrete shape.