Job search training
After being on New Start Allowance for three months, four to six weeks of job search training is compulsory, or your payment is affected. I have just started job search training and have found it to be patronising, often outrageous and sexist, and mostly a waste of time.
So far I have been taught that "self esteem comes only from within", which involved reading passages from the Bible. Under the guise of interview preparation, I was told that "all women should wear make-up". My trainer suggested to one of his overweight female trainees that she wear a lot of make-up on her face to distract potential employers from her other "weaknesses". A dark skinned man was told he should wear white or light coloured clothing so he didn't appear so dark.
On my third day, I and other trainees were taught anger management in the workplace. While it is probably true that a few people lose their jobs due to having bad tempers (no doubt in reaction to an awful working environment), most of us don't have jobs because of the simple mathematical reality that there are roughly seven times more job seekers than job vacancies.
Job search training places the blame for unemployment on the job seekers. Apparently, the reason we can't get work is because we have bad tempers, crappy appearance and low self-esteem. Actually, the blame belongs on the government which privatises, the companies which "rationalise" and discriminatory employers.
The people who do have anger control problems, or who want to learn about writing a resume, should be able to ask for classes, counselling or assistance, but it's pointless forcing everyone else to do it.
Tamara Pearson
Granville NSW
Health rebate
Russell Schneider from the Australian Health Insurance Association has begun pre-election lobbying to increase the private health insurance rebate to 40%. Abolishing it would be better.
The rebate probably costs the government well over $1 billion net a year. By itself, the introduction of the rebate did little to increase the percentage of people with private insurance and reduce pressure on public hospitals. Therefore, most of the rebate is just a financial transfer from government to the private health industry and people with private insurance.
Schneider talks about battlers and pensioners but rebate expenditure strongly favours higher-income people. When compared with spending the money on public health care (which low-income people disproportionately use), the rebate sharply redistributes overall wealth from poorer to richer.
Theoretically, the rebate could be means-tested but even money allocated to a means-tested rebate would do more good if devoted to public health care to help the sick and/or increasing social security payments to help the poorest.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere NSW
Working to the grave
A quick check around my workplace found that it was not exactly the dream of my colleagues to keep on turning up to work until the grave, as proposed by Treasurer Peter Costello. Nonetheless, current Labor leader Mark Latham has offered support for Costello's plan to keep more of us working for longer and supposedly impede our drain on the government's coffers.
So Tweedledum and Tweedledee continue to shadow box over how to most effectively rip money from the hands of ordinary workers and shift it back to big business. Meanwhile, former tweedle, Paul Keating, has weighed into the debate.
Remember back in the 1980s when the ALP government (and the ACTU) told us it was in our own best interests to sacrifice that immediate pay rise and hive it off into superannuation for our future comfortable retirement? What started as a forfeited pay rise of 3% has risen to around 9%.
Of course, most of us don't even recognise this money as pay. In reality, it is a dirty big honey pot used by the corporate super funds to invest at their whim.
According to Keating, this super pool holds some $600 billion in assets. So does he propose to do something socially useful with this vast pot? No, he decries it as inadequate and proposes that Costello's scheme needs to go further by increasing workers' compulsory contribution to 15%. Another pay cut disguised as a diversion of funds!
Those of us with jobs can go without even more of our disposable pay now so we can provide for our personal survival in our later years. This is most correctly labelled as privatising the pension system.
Melanie Sjoberg
Clovelly Park SA [Abridged]
Cuba and homosexuals
As a supporter of Cuba, a socialist, and a gay liberationist, why do I get irritated reading the articles GLW has been publishing for years saying that although Cuba had some problems in the past with anti-gay prejudice, now it's better?
It's because these articles both understate the problem and refuse to analyse heterosexism in the overall context of workers' rights in Cuba. And because it shows that faced with a choice, uncritical solidarity with the Cuban leadership will be chosen over solidarity with lesbian/gay liberation.
It is disingenuous to admit there were problems, now past, when at that time publications such as GLW ignored or attacked those critical of oppression of Cuban homosexuals.
Of course Cuban heterosexism predates the Revolution, and derives in part from machismo and Catholicism, but it was more specifically a symptom of Soviet bureaucratic influence in the Cuban Communist Party in the 1960s and '70s. But prejudice is not simply a matter of bad politics or ignorance; heterosexism is generated by the persistence of the nuclear family and gender roles. Homosexuals were excluded from the definition of Revolutionary Man (and woman).
The often-cited mid-1960s arrests of homosexuals for forced labour camps are not the only instance. In 1980, when a flood of people left or were pressured to leave Cuba by boat, (called "Marielitos", a name used as a term of abuse inside the DSP), often for imprisonment in camps in the USA, it was widely acknowledged by both US and Cuban authorities, that significant numbers were homosexual. Initially, homosexuality was used as one of the key aspects of Cuban mobilisation against the Mariel "scum".
Although there was liberalisation in 1994, with the influential film Strawberries and Chocolate and the emergence of tentative gay/lesbian groups, this ended in 1997, with the groups repressed and gay social venues closed.
As is evident in the interview printed in GLW #573, the crucial questions are whether Cubans can exercise the right to organise and speak out publicly against oppression, or read/publish what they want. This is what makes the situation of Cuban homosexuals a key test of the nature of democratic rights in Cuba.
Michael Schembri
Bondi Junction NSW [Abridged]
From Green Left Weekly, March 17, 2004.
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