Reform check: Citizen's income in practice

It was one of the major reform projects of the traffic light coalition: since 2023, the citizen's income has replaced the Hartz IV regulations that were previously in force. How is the change being received by those who deal with it on a daily basis in their work? This question is answered by a study conducted by the Institute for Employment Research, which surveyed employees at job centers about their experiences and opinions on the subject. Job center employees are the key professional group here: their responsibility is to put the political goals of the relevant laws into practice and to work with citizens' income recipients. Since job centers thus act as a central link, their opinion is of great importance. Both managers and employees from the areas of counseling, placement, and benefits processing were surveyed for the study. The main focus was on how useful individual provisions of the citizen's income reform are considered to be. Two instruments were considered particularly useful: one is holistic support, which involves intensive individual coaching. The other is “participation in the labor market,” a wage subsidy for a period of up to five years. Both measures are aimed at citizens' income recipients with so-called “serious placement barriers” and take into account individual needs as well as potentially long placement processes. At the bottom of the rating scale, on the other hand, is the newly introduced arbitration process, which is intended to resolve disagreements within the framework of the cooperation plan between citizens' income recipients and their job center contacts. This is mainly because the cooperation plan is not legally binding and conflicts are therefore more likely to arise in the context of the legally binding “request for cooperation” – for which other departments in the job center are responsible, which do not participate in the arbitration process. Overall, there are major differences in the ratings of the individual regulations, which range from very useful to moderately useful to not useful at all. Due to the continuing high momentum of reform in the area of citizen's income, the IAB sees potential for further research here and is planning additional surveys.

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• Inequality in Germany: How can current distribution issues in Germany be resolved? This question was addressed at a recent DGB conference, the results and key findings of which are summarized by Tagesspiegel.

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