Obowiązek szczęśliwej pracy? Koncepcja usług sąsiedzkich Jules’a Gazona
A duty of happy work? Jules Gazon’s concept of neighborhood services

Summary/Abstract: We present the forgotten theory of neighborhood services developed by Jules Gazon. Gazon’s concept is known to some humanist economists in Poland, although it has not been included in the broader debate on the shape and meaning of social employment policy in the 21st century. From a European perspective, Jules Gazon has outlined the direction and defined the conditions under which a certain program of activities can be implemented, which could be called a “solidarity model of the social economy”. It is a project for the organization of the social employment system that combines professional activation, employment policy and welfare protection of the state. According to Gazon’s initial assumptions, neither traditional forms of social welfare nor free-market laissezfaire provide an ethically satisfactory solution to the problem of unemployment and the related problems of social exclusion or economic inequalities. The argument is based on the methodical analysis of the documentation of many macroeconomic studies, which – apart from traditional measures of changes in the economic situation – also refer to new conditions caused by the processes of capital flow globalization, technological progress and local conditions of labor markets, i.e. the scope of interventionism or the developed standard of living of citizens of individual countries. The key to a different way of thinking about the labor market is the idea that the subject of this market is not a commodity, as in the case of the goods and services market, but precisely a (holistically understood) human being, whose role cannot be reduced to the operation of a simple market mechanism.

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