Your main remaining point, to me, is: people will go for jobs if they get more than in social benefits. In America, benefits were slashed in the '90s so that people were forced to take jobs at wages they can't possibly approve of. I don't think people get a sense of value out of being forced to accept low wages. Or rather, the sense of their own worth they get is a low one. (No better than on redistributed income, you might reply -- but on benefit their time is their own).

And my main point above, of course, (measly and unfeeling as it may be), is that creating shitty jobs (unstable, short part-time, low-wage slavery) fixes a nation's labour figures just fine.