There are 700 workshops for adapted work in Germany. According to the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, they support 268.000 people with disabilities. The complex integration workshops provide is aimed to provide more support than „just“ employment.

The political discussion about workshops and their kind of integration services often concentrates on costs. It is said that alternative institutional forms would have less demand for public financing. In particular, the public funds necessary to finance education and work in workshops are constantly questioned.

But this line of thought, namely to only look at the public funds that workshops receive, does not cover the entire picture. It is a solely input-oriented analysis. The cash-flow from workshops back into the public hand is left out. But workshops not only receive money from the public hand, they also pay into public funds in an amount that must not be neglected. These transactions would not take place, if workshops did not exist.

In order to receive a correct figure for the actual amount of public financing, both payment flows have to be regarded. The net-financing then is the difference between payments of the public hand to the workshops and of the payments the public hand receives from the workshops.

In order to provide arguments and figures that correctly reflect the real proportion of the public financing of workshops, BAG WfbM initiated a study on this net-financing in cooperation with Stuttgart University. Now, the results of this study have been published.

They can be summarised as follows:

The real amount of public financing workshops receive adds up to approximately 56 percent of the sum usually supplied in the discussion. Additionally the study shows that over the past years cash-flow form workshops to the public hands has increased more than the cash-flow from public funds to workshops. The net-financing has decreased.