By Marina Cameron
Feigning concern that unemployed young people risked becoming demoralised, or losing a "work ethic", Prime Minister John Howard announced a new work-for-the-dole scheme on February 9.
Funds will be set aside in the budget for 20-30 pilot programs for up to 5000 16-20 year olds.
Young people will be placed in rural areas, with small businesses and community organisations like Apex and Rotary for six months, doing mostly unskilled work. They will work 15-20 hours per week for the amount of their dole â $140.60 per fortnight (16-17 year olds), or $169.10 per fortnight (18-20 year olds). Some of the new projects will be compulsory.
The government is not claiming that the scheme will create jobs or provide any training, and doesn't intend to take participants out of official calculations of unemployment figures.
Months of worsening unemployment have necessitated some sort of response. The government needs to look like it is doing something, and distract attention from the fact that it has directly contributed to higher unemployment by cutting thousands of public sector jobs, reducing options of study by raising student fees and slashing labour market programs (including around 120,000 placements for youth).
Business spokespeople made it clear, however, that business would not be eager to take on the young long-term jobless as part of the scheme â unless the price was right. As Garry Brack, executive director of the Employers' Federation of NSW, stated in the Financial Review on February 11, "Subsidised employment is not ordinarily attractive unless the amounts of subsidy get higher and higher.
"If there is a subsidy which only meets part of the cost, that by and large will not be enough to overcome employers' reluctance to take on people they don't really need."
Employers are much more interested in taking on people whom they can train over a longer period, pay low wages and use as a lever against their existing work force. The federal government has obliged by cutting the wages of apprentices and trainees by up to 40% in legislation introduced last year.
Although this new scheme is not tailored for big business, it is part of a bigger ideological drive aimed at delivering more profits.
The scheme is part of winning the idea that young people should not expect real jobs. One in three young people are currently unemployed, and many have little chance of finding full-time, permanent work. The government wants people to accept that it can't do anything to change this fundamentally, except promote economic growth.
There is no guarantee that growth will encourage employers to take more people on (and indeed, evidence suggests otherwise). Undeterred, Howard repeated again this week that growth is the key to solving unemployment, adding that so is removing "impediments" in the labour market (i.e. unions, awards, minimum wages).
Young people are being told that they have no rights and should accept what they are given. The plan is also part of a continuing push for a lower youth wage, which leads on to worse wages for all workers.
Ted Evans, the secretary to Treasury, was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald on February 12 as saying that the community sets the level of unemployment it is prepared to accept. By this he means that cutting minimum wage rates is key to solving unemployment, and the only thing stopping this is that it is politically unpopular.
In reality, reducing wages only replaces existing workers on higher wages, or in more permanent positions with better working conditions, with low-wage workers.
Work-for-the-dole schemes are less about keeping people "work-ready", than pushing the idea that the dole is not an entitlement, but a privilege. Once that idea is accepted, it's open to the government to further reduce the dole, or even abolish it altogether.
Labor, the Greens and Democrats have all come out against the scheme, taking delight in dragging up past comments from Howard that the Liberals would not implement work-for-the-dole schemes. Many have correctly noted that the scheme targets the victims of unemployment and does nothing to create real jobs for young people. However, few are putting forward any alternative proposals that do.
Australian Council of Social Services president Robert Fitzgerald told the Australian of February 10 that compulsory schemes fail because they are costly to administer and are generally not linked to recognised training.
However, Fitzgerald wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald the next day, "ACOSS has never objected to compelling unemployed people to participate in properly structured programs which provide relevant work experience and widely recognised training" (i.e. ACOSS's view of the sort of labour market programs that existed under Labor).
The ACTU also defended Labor's strategy of labour market programs, which provided temporary subsidies to employers to take on long-term unemployed. After three to six months, most found themselves back on the scrap heap, but "at least Labor's program was accompanied by training", ACTU president Jennie George told the Sydney Morning Herald of February 11. Through ACTU-style unionism, we have the benefit of well-trained scrap heaps.
The Australian Youth Policy and Action Coalition strongly criticised the plan, but responded by outlining a limp alternative proposal for an initiative to allow the unemployed to undertake up to 25 hours of volunteer work per week, for which the government would provide a $30 subsidy to employers, and $10 per week for travel to and from work. It too fails to step outside the idea of channelling young people through training for non-existent jobs, and handing more subsidies to business.
Sean Healy, the national coordinator of the socialist youth organisation, Resistance, told Green Left Weekly, "More places in training and labour market programs are not the answer. Without a large-scale effort to create jobs, they are merely a band-aid solution.
"Resistance rejects claims that there is no alternative. We are circulating a petition which calls on the government to end its program of privatisation and job cuts, massively expand expenditure in the public sector and introduce a shorter working week with no loss in pay."
(For more information on Resistance's "No work-for-the-dole" campaign, phone (02) 9690 1230 or see pages 30-31 for contact details of local Resistance branches.)