Tackling unemployment digitally? The Jobnet Platform

• In Event: Welfare After Digitalisation: Siting values, affordances, and politics

Abstract

Jobnet is a multifunctional website and online database used both by jobseekers and employers, but also by caseworkers in Danish Jobcenters. Implemented in 2003, it was originally a CV and job vacancies database. Since then, it has been gradually upgraded to include self-service personalized planning and registration of job-searching or skill-acquirement activities for the unemployed (mandatory for receiving unemployment benefits), as well as an efficient toolbox which enhances employers’ abilities in navigating the CV database. Jobnet’s self-service nature has two explicit goals, the first being to digitally and socially empower the unemployed and the second to reduce administrative costs at Jobcenters. However, in practice, the rise of private social-networking and job-searching platforms challenge this public platform’s primary role as a matchmaking tool for employers and jobseekers, tending to transform Jobnet more to an activity-monitoring tool for the documentation of job searching performance for receivers of social benefits. This paper aims to scrutinize how do Jobnet’s digital tools perform “politically desirable behavior” of the user and through what technological configuration is such performativity pursued. Digital registration of unemployment-related activities makes citizens’ lives easier but also more easily put under surveillance and managed by the state. This study aspires to investigate this double nature of digital public services by conducting document analysis and also a number of interviews so as to dive deeper into unemployed citizens’ and caseworkers’ perceptions, experiences and expectancies when using the platform.

Author

• Konstantinos Floros, IT University of Copenhagen