The European pillar of social rights and the instrumentalization of the right to minimum income benefits: Work-related sanctions in welfare to work benefit schemes in 22 EU Member States

This paper compares sanctioning policies of 22 different EU member states to the national social policies and national social protection schemes. The comparison focuses on sanctions imposed on recipients of social assistance who do not comply with work-related obligations. For this purpose, this paper constructs a quantifiable sanction indicator that is based on the length and height of the sanction; the number of faults that must be committed before the sanction is imposed and the presence of mitigation clauses. This sanction indicator that is developed in this paper is more sophisticated compared to previous versions. The analysis shows that member states that have legislated relatively high work-related sanctions tend to spend less money on social protection, in particular, regarding benefits and provisions that reduce the risk of poverty rate. In addition, the investments of these member states in enabling policies (i.e. ALMP) are considerable lower compared to member states that have legislated relatively low work-related sanctions. Also, the access to the threshold of 50% of the median equivalised income is less well secured in member states that have adopted high work-related sanctions, compared to member states that have adopted low work-related sanctions.