The Subjective Well-Being of Workfare Participants: Insights from a Day Reconstruction Survey

In this paper, we shed more light on the subjective well-being of workfare participants and compare it to the well-being of unemployed and employed workers. We use data from a self-conducted survey among participants in workfare schemes in Germany. We examine two subdimensions of subjective well-being – life satisfaction and emotional well-being – separately to obtain a more comprehensive view of the subjective impact of workfare jobs. Our results show that the life satisfaction of workfare participants is between that of employed and unemployed people. More surprisingly, perhaps, we find that their emotional well-being is the highest of these three groups.