Young & out of work
A lifetime sentence to poverty?
By Tracy Sorensen
SYDNEY — "I met this lady who was going round asking everyone if they wanted a job. I said yes, and she gave me an appointment. I went up to the company and basically the work was sales. I was there for about three weeks and I found out the structure was commission. It was really hard work and I wasn't making any money.
"I was selling kitchen products and everything from shirts to solar powered walkmans, stuff like that. We were going around the factories trying to sell it. No-one would buy the products. After three weeks I realised it wasn't paying off. So I just dropped out. About a month later I found out the company got busted because it was all illegal. Stolen goods."
That was eight months ago, and the last time James Gomez had a job. He lives at home without any money of his own: at 17, he is ineligible for the dole.
Rachel Cooper was sacked from her last job a year ago because she had to take three weeks off to recover from chicken pox.
"And I was too old, they reckoned. I'd just turned 19. It's bad financially, especially when you've got debts and can't afford it. But what's the use of going to the CES? There's nothing on the boards. There's nothing in the papers. I'm 20, and they want 25 and over, or 18 and under. So it's really hard to find a job."
According to recent reports, Fairfield, the south-western Sydney suburb where James and Rachel live, has the highest unemployment rate in the country. While the national average is just over 10%, Fairfield's rate now stands at 15.5%. Unemployment among young people is conservatively estimated to be about 30%.
On November 21, just over 8000 people were registered as looking for work in the Fairfield area. That day, the local CES advertised 22 jobs. In the words of local community worker Ken Locking, job prospects in the area are "virtually nil".
The area boasts one of the country's largest manufacturing parks, with rolled aluminium factories, food importers, clothing factories, can makers, motor mechanics, window framers, neon light makers, breweries. In relatively buoyant periods in the past, there has been process work for thousands of workers, a large percentage of them migrants. During recessions like this one, the dismissal notices go out and the dole queues lengthen.
Long term
But that's only part of the story. Over the past decade or so, new technology has eliminated thousands of jobs from the process lines and small-to-medium sized workshops in the industrial clusters around Smithfield and Wetherill Park; the current recession simply worsened a situation in which job growth failed to keep up with population growth.
The danger is that those young people who can't find jobs now may never get into the workforce.
According to John McCusker, an unemployed fitter who helped set up the Unemployed Action Group in Blacktown, about 10 kilometres north-west of Fairfield, high levels of unemployment have been a feature of some areas in Sydney's western suburbs for many years. "For a lot of people, things aren't a great deal worse today than they were four or five years ago", he told Green Left.
"A lot of people I think don't really understand yet the implications of what is happening. There's a lot of low-skilled work in industry that has now completely disappeared. And it's disappearing at an increasing rate. There's going to be an awful lot of people who are going to be more or less permanently unemployed."
While out-of-work executives and unemployed graduates make nice television, those most at risk of the long-term poverty sentence are people from non-English speaking backgrounds and those leaving school early: those who traditionally looked to get the types of jobs now disappearing into thin air.
Meanwhile, the individual disaster of being out of work merges with other personal disasters to create the depressing statistics of recession: crime, drug use, alcoholism, domestic violence, homelessness and suicide.
Coping
How do people cope? With no money to go out and the (private) public transport system rather expensive and hopelessly inadequate, most tend to sit at home and watch television. There is little to look forward to, and no point in making plans. Most are depressed and angry.
Young people stay at home and put up with their parents when they'd rather move out. Parents put up with their sons and daughters well beyond the time it would suit everyone to part ways.
Margie Azzopardi, at 19, is doing everything she can to avoid the poverty trap. After she left school three years ago, she worked in banks, McDonald's and solicitors' offices and studied drama. Now, she is studying her HSC at TAFE, spending hundreds of dollars on text books and $20 a week on public transport. She is paid to teach drama to children a few hours a week at the Fairfield Community Resource Centre, and even finds time for voluntary work in Fairfield's youth centres.
But even this highly motivated person worries about the future. "If I don't get into uni next year, I'm going to be one of the thousands of people out of work. It's very hard to get unemployment benefits, and it's hard to get a job if you are not skilled in certain areas."
Margie's brother, at 21, found a six-month period of unemployment confidence-destroying.
"He just sat at home all day watching television", Margie said. "He collected the dole and sat doing nothing with himself. It was found him a job at McDonald's at North Parramatta and he's working there. Whether or not he is happy is beyond knowledge."
Government programs
There are government programs which help to soften the impact of unemployment: examples include the after-school "Circuit Breaker" scheme for high school students from non-English speaking backgrounds who appear to be at risk of unemployment, and the "HELP" program, which teaches numeracy and literacy skills to young unemployed people who left school early. Both programs are voluntary.
According to Ken Locking and Rosa Sgro, who run the HELP courses from the Villawood Community Cottage, the success rate is high in terms of getting those who do the courses into other courses — but not into jobs.
"The courses are good", said HELP participant Ulisses Pereira, "but when you finish the course, there is still no job."
The level of education needed to get a job keeps shifting further and further out of reach. Not long ago, a year 10 level education was considered enough for a job on the checkout at Woolworths. Now, employers choosing from hundreds of applicants for a job are starting to demand the HSC as the "bottom line". And the HSC itself is certainly no guarantee of success.
Kaye McCormack, unemployed for seven months and helping out with the HELP course as a volunteer, finished the HSC and still found nothing.
"Sometimes I think we are nothing but a tokenistic gesture", said Ken Locking. "We are put here to appear to be doing something. The reality is that we can do only minimal stuff, because we are lacking in resources."
Existing community programs are continuously evaluated by increasingly miserly governments in terms of "performance", with those failing to produce the right sorts of numbers threatened with loss of funding. But social welfare provision has a long-term benefit to a community beyond short-term reductions in unemployment or crime, argues Michael August, regional development officer with the Western Sydney Community Forum.
"If you have community development workers, youth workers and so on employed in an area, then the hidden costs of things like crime are alleviated."
John McCusker points to the shocking level of suicide among unemployed young men in rural areas as evidence of what can happen when support schemes are lacking. (Youth unemployment has been twice as high in rural areas as it is in urban areas, putting the rate at about 60%.)
Barter system
For Locking, and for many other community workers operating out of the Fairfield Community Resource Centre, the answer to the problems of communities hit by long-term unemployment is to look to developing an
"A lot of people these days are looking into the barter system", he said. "Most people have got some sort of skill or another. It may not be wanted in the broader marketplace, but they may be able to use that skill to acquire some commodity that they're lacking. So if someone's a hairdresser they might cut someone's hair in exchange for a loaf of homemade bread, or something like that."
It's not an idea confined to discussions in the local hotel: the FCRC has been working on such ideas for a couple of years. A goods exchange day will be held at the Fairfield Community Hall on December 14.
"I can't see any other way for people these days", said Ken Locking. "People need to make ends meet, and they can't do it while they are depending on unemployment benefits. To expect them to get a job is probably unrealistic. People have simply got to find alternative means of making ends meet, and if that's swapping one commodity for another, then that's what has to be done.
"I think this is a green philosophy. It's getting back to an old style of living; it's getting back to a village style of living, the small community where people actually help one another and look out for each other's interests. The capitalist system is getting too large, too impersonal."
For state metalworkers' union secretary David Goodger, such schemes are no substitute for more government-led investment in industry.
"We've been hammering away at this for four or five years", he told Green Left. "Our slogan is: 'Manufacturing jobs, not excuses'."
The metalworkers' union, he said, was in the forefront of finding ways to make Australian industry more competitive internationally. Thus, the union's strategy included award restructuring to take account of new technology, and the introduction of multiskilling (the "operator technician" would replace the older, more narrowly defined trades) and career paths (from apprentice to professional engineer, for example).
But what of the jobs lost through multiskilling, where, with new technology and higher productivity per worker, one person could now do the work of two or three? What would the future hold for those now missing out on apprenticeships (new apprenticeships in the metal trades were down 28% in NSW this year)?
Goodger explained that a series of engineering production certificates was being developed, so that in future, those missing out on the current round of apprenticeships and coming into the industry without formal training could begin to "access the trade structure".
Nick Southall, from the Wollongong Out of Workers union (WOW), told Green Left that his group, which had watched the BHP steelworks shed thousands of jobs through the introduction of new technology, had had no choice but to think through these questions. New technology, he said, was to be welcomed for its ability to improve the quality of products and workers' living standards.
But this potential was not being met in reality. "The implementation of new technology is being used to destroy jobs, to attack working conditions and restructure the workforce in the interests of more profits."
Multiskilling, he said, was going to be "part and parcel of the workforce in the future, as production becomes more complex. But how this is done, whether this is done to replace workers, whether there are other jobs for people to go to, are important questions. We wouldn't reject multiskilling as such; what we'd say is that multiskilling, as it has been implemented, has resulted in unemployment."
While a barter system might alleviate some problems experienced by unemployed people, "the answer to unemployment is not some sort of way of surviving unemployment; the answer to unemployment is for a job, for work".
WOW had a log of claims, he said, which included proposals for ensuring the right to work. Central to these were demands for a shorter working week to spread the work around, increased taxation, and worker and community control over the implementation of new technology.