Activation and Precarity: The Rewards of Investing in the Vulnerable

As part of a broader process of transferring of responsibilities to civil society in Spain, including the privatisation of welfare services and resources, the Third Sector plays an increasing role in the provision of care against a backdrop of structural unemployment and low levels of economic growth. With state funding, assistance programmes are intended to target the most vulnerable, excluded and unemployable following the principle of activation, as the way to social integration through the labour market. Ethnographic evidence shows that in a context of neoliberal austerity policies that goal is difficult to accomplish. The employment programme implemented by a local assembly of the Spanish Red Cross ended up assisting the most employable, who had lost their jobs during the economic recession, to re-enter the labour market as a trained, flexible and precarious workforce that suited the needs of the private companies collaborating with the Red Cross.