Victoria to trial 'training' scheme
By Wendy Robertson
MELBOURNE — In response to a 46% youth unemployment rate, the state Labor government has announced that it will pilot a controversial youth training scheme. Critics say it will undermine existing awards and wages, and create a pool of cheap labour.
Under the scheme, young workers will be employed for 12 months for a training wage of approximately $117 a week. The poverty line is $194.08 a week.
The plan is being promoted for its supposed job creation ability; 100,000 new jobs nationally is the figure being touted by Premier Joan Kirner. Union opposition is unlikely because the broad principles of the scheme were originally floated in a report to the federal government by former ACTU assistant secretary Laurie Carmichael.
Youth will be paid for only 20 hours of their work week; the remaining 18 hours have been designated as unpaid "training leave". The scheme is expected to cost the federal government $300 million a year.
According to John Sullivan, a policy officer with the Department of Premier and Cabinet, the scheme would be implemented in "high growth industries" such as the hospitality and tourism industries. He said that the precise details of the scheme were still being negotiated with the ACTU, but it was likely to cover either people between 15 and 19 or those between 19 and 24. He said it is likely that the government will subsidise the employer by about $40 a week per "trainee".
When queried about the fact that the traineeship wage would be less than the poverty line, Sullivan replied that young people had the option to work for that amount or remain on Job Search allowance. (Current rates for those on the allowance vary between $64.15 and $105.90 a week.)
After 12 months' training, the workers are supposed to go on to full-time employment. Implicit is the assumption that extremely low wages will encourage industry to employ more people.
But if low wages automatically mean higher employment rates, why is it that Third World countries such as Bangladesh where wages are approximately 25 Australian cents an hour, still have huge levels of unemployment? And in first world countries such as the United States and New Zealand where capitalist restructuring has gone furthest, lower wages have not brought full employment.
Even the managing director of K Mart admitted in the June 17 Age that there was a risk the jobs would not be there after the training period. He said that K Mart had a backlog of thousands of trained people who work only four and eight hours a week but are desperate for
McDonald's, one of Australia's largest youth employers, with about 75% of its 30,000-strong work force aged between 15 and 20, has said that it is not considering employing more people.
Instead of the training leading to the creation of new jobs, it could undermine older full-time workers' jobs, replacing them with a continuing stream of young workers on the lower traineeship wage.