A Requiem for the Work Shy.
By: The questionmark collective
The recent debate over welfare reform has seen an unprecedented focus on the fate of the individual social security recipient. Welfare experts on the Right increasingly see the solution to unemployment as lying in prodding and cajoling people back to work. Those on the Left focus on rehabilitation and training, advocating a system of one on one counselling for the unemployed.
Both approaches are fundamentally flawed in that the overwhelming majority of unemployed people not only possess the necessary skills, but also the desire to re-enter the workforce were they to be given the opportunity to do so. By focussing upon the individual the reform process has all, but ignored structural causes such as the use of unemployment to control inflation and to implement economic reform. The fact that there are up to eight job seekers for every job vacancy further underlines the fact that most people are out of work simply because there is no work for them to do.
Proponents of individualised solutions however argue that that there is a hardcore minority of welfare recipients who for whatever reason either deliberately choose to avoid work or have fully adapted to the lack of it. To their mind these are the people who are in most need of help. But is opting out of a nine to five lifestyle such a terrible thing or is it in fact an intrinsic part of our national make up?
During the 1980s for me, as an outer suburban school leaver, "going on the dole" loomed as a definite career option. It was a way of life that was half serious and half a joke and one that a lot of us looked up to. We'd seen friends and relatives take the plunge and the idea of trading off money for time and freedom seemed quite viable. Indeed the survival of whole subcultures of artists, punks, surfers, activists and musicians was contingent on the majority of their members taking a government sponsored permanent holiday. As more than one friend has commented "My time on social security was the most interesting and productive period of my life."
Going on the dole meant embracing the concept of genteel poverty, of doing whatever you wanted, even if that meant not doing much at all. It meant the right to be lazy, to dither about, to travel, to spend the rest of your life working out what you wanted to do because you already knew what you didn't. You could potter around with your writing or your music or your acting or your heartbreaks or your drinking your days away. A lifestyle that was low on consumption because you couldn't and free of work because you wouldn't. We always thought it was too good to last and it now seems that it was.
Yesterday's dole bludger increasingly appears to have been an historical aberration. As the ranks of the unemployed have grown so too have the hoops they must jump through in order to survive. The idea of taking a leisurely course through life was always considered by many to be beyond the pale.
From the Keating government onwards the number of obligations placed upon the unemployed has grown to the point where hundreds of thousands a year are now "breached" and fined for minor infractions. Concurrently social security payments have failed to match the rising cost of living with the result that people are desperate to take whatever work they can find.
Despite its seemingly never ending economic woes Australia remains a nation of relative affluence and wealth. In such a society the work shy have always been the ones to flag the notion of "Unemployment for all and not just the rich", to push the idea that we should all be able to take it a bit easier, that we should kick back and enjoy our lives. Despite the importance of such an attitude these concepts are out of vogue in a time when the mantra of "productivity" is constantly waved before us and where we are expected to sacrifice all for the good of our jobs.
The challenge to such thinking that the "bludger" provides is where his/her true threat is seen to lie. It is certainly not in ripping off the tax payer as for all the welfare cuts of recent decades taxes just seem to keep on coming at us in new and ever more complicated forms.
The quest to root out and banish "welfare dependency" has grown to the point where even the disabled and sole parents are now being targeted for work for the dole. In the end the growing belief that our usefulness and self worth should be pegged to the level at which we interact with the formal workplace is one which can only serve to further morally and spiritually impoverish our society as a whole. Dole bludgers of the world unite and take over!