The parallel labour market: social costs and benefits in practice

Despite the economic growth of recent years and increasing tightness, there is a growing group of people who are not participating in the labour market. According to the Start Foundation and labour market professor Ton Wilthagen, this paradox calls for a radically different approach than has been applied to date. This approach is to set up a parallel labour market, where benefit money can be used as ‘social venture capital’ to create jobs that perform social tasks that currently remain unfulfilled. Commissioned by Start Foundation, Ecorys is conducting a social cost-benefit analysis of three local parallel labour market initiatives.

In these initiatives, jobs are created for welfare recipients in which they perform socially useful work. Ecorys pre-maps the costs involved and the expected effects and social benefits. This provides insight into the possible social returns of these initiatives and shows which parties benefit from these jobs. The latter provides starting points for approaching parties for co-financing the jobs and thus making them structural. As the initiatives are still under development, we look ahead to the expected social return.

Ecorys is conducting analyses for the initiatives in Groningen, Lelystad and Tilburg during 2020.

For more information on this project, please contact Annejet Kerckhaert.