By Pip Hinman
"The ALP has stolen most of our industrial relations policies — so why don't they take the rest of the package?", asked John Howard, opposition industrial relations spokesperson, on March 10. Howard was commenting on the Labor government's plan to pay under-award wages to the long-term unemployed.
The scheme is likely to be nothing but "a dressed up work-for-the-dole scheme or the undermining of award wages", as the Catholic Social Welfare Commission put it.
While the ACTU is yet to give its final approval, the government plans to extend the youth "training wages" scheme to cover the long-term unemployed.
Employment, education and training minister Simon Crean announced the government's position at a meeting with the ACTU executive on March 9. Under the plan, unemployed people would have their benefits withdrawn if they did not accept "any reasonable job offer" and complete specified on-the-job training.
Also, the under 18-year-old dole looks set to be abolished.
The government will detail its full proposals in a white paper next month. In the meantime, the ACTU executive has agreed to support the package in return for a meagre 60,000 government funded training places. (The number of long-term unemployed is 343,000 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and 472,000 according to the Department of Social Security.) ACTU president Martin Ferguson called the training wage a "potentially workable course of action."
In the 1992-93 budget, the government introduced the youth "training wage", which allows employers to pay young employees less than the award rate on the pretext that they are still learning skills and therefore not as productive as someone with more experience.
Youth "trainees" currently receive approximately $140 after tax for a five day week. This works out at $3.50 an hour, and is marginally less than one would receive on the basic above 18-year-old unemployment benefit. In effect, these young people are working for the dole, and employers reap all the benefits.
Carla Gorton, a spokesperson for Resistance, told Green Left that the radical youth organisation had heard of a number of cases of employers replacing full-time workers with trainees whose wages are paid by the government.
Gorton pointed out that the Crean plan to replace the under 18-year-old Job Search Allowance with a youth allowance based on education and training participation "will be paid to parents through the Family Payments System, penalising those who are not ready for further study or cannot live at home. The government is just not willing to treat young people as human beings."
According to Dick Nichols, co-editor of the national labour bulletin Solidarity, the extension of the training wage to the long-term unemployed will undercut awards and isn't a solution to long-term unemployment. "Many of the long-term unemployed are already skilled people. In fact, there are many people with degrees who cannot get jobs, and many of those who are over-qualified."
The reason there are so many long-term unemployed, continued Nichols, is "the long-term structural crisis of an economic system which is geared for profits at the expense of people's needs. The government and ACTU's method is to look for individual solutions to the unemployment problem. They say that by improving individual employability, the problem will be solved. It ignores the systemic problem that in a profit-driven economy, there will always be a need for a pool of unemployed to keep wages low.
"While Treasury is busy revising upwards its forecast for growth, the government, in cahoots with business, is telling us not to expect much change in the unemployment figures."