Abstract: This book examines welfare-to-work programmes in the United States and Britain, and develops a normative perspective to analyse and critique the theoretical and doctrinal justifications for welfare-to-work programmes. The book sheds light on the contractual paradigm that is advanced both as a new interpretation of citizenship, and as a jurisprudential mold for the configuration of the relationship between rights and responsibilities. Viewing rights as demanding responsibilities carries the threat that rights will lose their strategic role in practical reasoning. When this conceptualization is couched in social contract rhetoric that implies a continuous contract between citizens and the state, many conditions on welfare are supposedly legitimated. These include workfare, the obligation to accept any job offer, and several moral and social preconditions, based on a vague notion of reciprocity. This phenomenon has exacerbated over the last decade in social discourse in general, and in the field of welfare unemployment in particular. Following a critique of the prominence of the contractual conceptualization, the book suggests a structure of legitimate conditions on welfare benefits. This takes account of the contemporary appeal of personal responsibility, and reconciles it with the traditional fidelity that is owed to equality in the welfare state ideal. It is shown that equality's concern for the worst-off supports a recognition of a strong legal right to welfare. It concludes by showing that rather than undermining social inclusion and labour market integration, strengthening welfare rights and relaxing preconditions on entitlement would serve the very objectives that welfare-to-work programmes are supposed to advance.

Keywords: rights, employment, social contract, welfare state, welfare rights, reciprocity, equality, social inclusion, responsibility