Alison Thorne, Melbourne
Craig Hall lives with a diagnosed mental illness and receives a Disability Support Pension. He's smart, hard-working and keen to get part-time work.
Although his work experience is scant, he's qualified in food handling and applies for kitchen jobs several times a week. But given the choice of hiring a worker with a disability or one without, the employer's answer always seems to be the same: "There's the door". Undaunted, 42-year-old Hall moves on to the next low-paid "opportunity". Some employers consider giving him a trial, until he checks that he'll actually be paid <197> at a union-scale wage.
In May, PM John Howard unveiled a "Welfare to Work" package of changes to pensions for people with disabilities and single parents. These were part of the annual budget proposal, which also included tax cuts for the rich. Peter Dutton, Minister for Workforce Participation, argued that "people's self-esteem is much greater if they are off welfare and into work" <197> a transition that the new program, presumably, would facilitate. That was the spin. The question was, would this really help Hall and others like him?
Australia's old-age and disability pensions were introduced in 1909, and a pension for sole parents was added in 1967. But hundreds of changes have been made to the social welfare system since the mid-1970s, all of them cutting benefits or restricting eligibility.
Howard's May budget, now passed, features some of the harshest "reforms" yet. They will be implemented starting July 1, 2006, to the detriment of an estimated 300,000 people. They affect all welfare recipients of working age, but impact the most gravely on people receiving disability and sole-parent pensions.
Name aside, the government's plan is not a welfare-to-work strategy but a welfare-to-welfare strategy <197> moving people from one payment type onto a lower one, cynically called Newstart.
Among its barbs, single mothers and fathers whose youngest child has turned six and people with disabilities assessed as capable of working 15 hours per week will be required to look for part-time employment and will get $20 per week less than currently. When paid work is obtained, welfare payments will be cut more sharply than is the case now and payments will be cut off entirely at a lower level of earned income. This will also cause many people to lose reduced rates for things like healthcare.
Those already receiving welfare payments will still be paid the old rate <197> for now. There are several Catch-22s, however. People on the Sole Parent Pension frequently move on and off welfare. If a woman attempts reconciliation with a former partner and it doesn't work out, she will only be eligible for the new, lower payment when she next makes a claim. The same would occur if she got a full-time but temporary contract job.
Payments also can be suspended for making a mistake. A mentally ill person who misses a job interview, for example, faces eight weeks without income.
Instead of threats and coercion, job-seekers need assistance finding suitable employment, access to affordable childcare, training, workplace modifications at times, and an end to the sometimes subtle but all-too-real discrimination against people with disabilities and sole parents in the workforce.
Howard's Newstart doesn't offer aid to people looking for jobs; it takes it away. It eliminates, for example, extra assistance for those who are studying. Woefully underfunded welfare agencies who help job-hunters will not get enough resources to cope with the increased demand.
Strip away the hollow rhetoric about the dignity of work, and what remains is a policy that will cut incomes to those most in need while providing the lowest-paying employers with a conscripted labour force. Welfare payments provide a floor below which wages cannot be forced. By slashing social security, the government opens the way to drive down wages for everyone.
Resistance to the proposals is coming from feminists, church groups on the front line of delivering emergency relief to the poor, welfare rights bodies and disability organisations.
This is important, but unions must also take up the fight. Welfare to work slices at the very heart of the right to a decent income and job conditions, just as Howard's anti-union workplace reforms do.
[Slightly abridged from Freedom Socialist. See < From Green Left Weekly, October 12, 2005.
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