As it happens, I recently started doing work-for-the-dole myself, so I have some personal experience. However my experience is not typical, I'm not pulling weeds. Actually I'm not doing a damn thing I wasn't doing before. The Job Network has simply decided to call the voluntary work I was already doing, as Secretary of my little housing co-operative, work-for-the-dole.
The reason for this, oddly enough, is that the officials at Centrelink have refused to "recognise" my voluntary work as legitimate. Us dole bludgers are officially required to either do work-for-the-dole, or APPROVED voluntary work. In effect this "approved" means that only voluntary work for for a community group approved by the government, through Centrelink, counts. Centrelink has the power to arbitrarily refuse to "recognise" voluntary work, if the mood takes them. Without needing to give a reason. Which the arseholes did. Centrelink giveth and Centrelink taketh away, bessed be the name of Centrelink.
I made it quite clear to the poor chaps at the Job Network that I would be thrilled to get the chance to appeal against the refusal to "recognise" my voluntary work for an organisation which happens to be endorsed as a charity by the Australian Taxation Office. An appeal against cutting me off the dole for refusing to participate in APPROVED voluntary work would be a way of getting judicial review. Given that I have something of a reputation for making waves, they somehow found a way to get round it by making it a work-for-the-dole scheme instead.
You have to think this means that standards for work-for-the-dole must be somewhat lower than for voluntary work.
But I can't complain I guess. Work-for-dole participants get a few perks that unemployed "volunteers" don't get. (The English language is crying out for a word to describe people who "volunteer" under duress, don't you think? Oh wait, there is one already - "SLAVE"!)
Where was I again? Oh yeah, work for dole SLAVES get a few perks that "volunteer" SLAVES don't. Not only did I get a pay rise of $10 week to cover my non-existent expenses, but a full set of work clothes, including sunglasses, leather weeding gloves and a handsome pair of steel-capped Blundstone boots. (I can only afford the cheap Chinese-made elastic-sided boots on the dole, so was just thrilled to acquire a pair of Blundstones.)
The clothes aren't much help in my office work, I don't wear boots at all while working on the computer and thick leather gloves would lower my keyboard productivity to even more ridiculous levels. But of course these are standard. It is taken for granted that everyone doing work-for-the-dole will be weeding.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/01/10/1105206046029.html
How not to get people into jobs by Simon Castles
Melbourne Age January 11 2005
The work-for-the-dole scheme is not intended to get people working. It never was, writes.
It was recently announced that the work-for-the-dole scheme would widen this year to include drug addicts and the homeless. You don't hear much about the scheme these days, but there it is, still running. It remains the Federal Government's major response to youth and long-term unemployment - the flagship of their mutual obligation policy.
So why do I hate it as much now as I did when it was introduced, nearly eight years ago? Let me count the ways.
Work for the dole is a flawed and cynical program. A piece of populism masked as policy. A cruel hoax played on unemployed youth by a comfortable generation of politicians more concerned with winning the support of taxpayers than with doing anything to help the jobless. It is an odious exercise in creating scapegoats. A program designed purely to appeal to us, the employed, which fails even in its limited aims to help those without work. I could go on.
But work for the dole is not about to be scrapped. I may be out of step with popular opinion, but I'm not naive. Once you've introduced it, there's no going back. No government would dare. But we should know what we're stuck with.
Work for the dole sounds OK. Reasonable, even. That's the secret of its success. Unemployed people are asked to give something back in return for their benefit. What could be wrong with that?
That depends, I suppose, on what we want from programs aimed at the unemployed. I would have thought most people - from hard right-wingers to bleeding hearts like me - would want a program that actually helps the unemployed get jobs. That helps them get off benefits.
Well, here's some news: work for the dole has never had any success in this area. Indeed, research by the Melbourne Institute (commissioned by the Government itself) found work-for-the-dole participants were 12 per cent less likely - repeat, less likely - to find a job than unemployed people not in the scheme. The institute blamed the stigma attached to the scheme, and the fact participants had less time to hunt for real jobs.
The research warned of possible permanent scarring effects on participants, and found that the program had significant adverse effects in getting people into work.
We can interpret our backing of such a program, then, as tacit support for keeping people on the dole rather than helping them off it.
According to data from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, only 21.9 per cent of work-for-the-dole participants were in jobs three months after finishing the program. (Most of these jobs were part-time.) By comparison, three months after completing Jobstart - the program that was scrapped to make way for work for the dole - 59 per cent of participants were in work.
In other words, the Government trumpets a program with little more than one-third the success rate of the program it replaced. In any other area of public policy, this would be met with outrage. But hey, it's just the unemployed, so we not only let the program's architects get away with it, we pat them on the back.
The Government has an interesting response when it is pointed out how unsuccessful work for the dole is in getting the unemployed into work. It blithely states that work for the dole was never meant to help people into employment.
And the incredible thing is, it's true. The scheme never had as one of its objectives helping the unemployed get real work.
So the Government ditched a program that had some success in moving the long-term unemployed into work, and replaced it with a program that doesn't even aim to do this - and so, of course, fails to. Someone please explain how this makes any sense.
I mean, if work for the dole isn't about helping people get a job, what the hell is it for? As we cheer on this pointless parade, the jobless have every right to shout that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
What the long-term unemployed need is real training in real jobs, backed by intensive assistance tailored to them, as individuals. What do they get instead? Hoops to jump through. Scarring roles in a circus.
Sure, occasionally the Government will make a big song and dance about some work-for-the-dole project that could at least loosely be described as interesting and challenging. Call it the anomaly that heads the media release. But to read down the list of work-for-the-dole projects on the Government's website is indicative, and almost funny if it wasn't so distressing. Certain words and phrases keep jumping out: gardening, revegetation projects, weed eradication, grounds maintenance, improving the environment. Who would have thought there were so many ways to describe weeding?
There's nothing wrong with weeding, of course. We should all do some. And maybe in 1950s and '60s Australia, when our leaders' views were being formed and then hardened, a commitment to such odd-jobbing was enough to land you a paid job, perhaps even start you on a career.
But in 2005, in an economy as modern and ruthless as ours, and with youth facing work challenges their parents can't even imagine, having weeding programs as a response to unemployment is a sad joke.
And just as sad is that we continue to support such a program.
Simon Castles is a former editor of The Big Issue. scastles at theage.com.au