Here, here Tim Martyn. Very well said. The Federal Government knows damned well that there ARE no jobs for unskilled workers, however they keep on with the same old "blame the bludgers" line to explain the runaway cost of social security whilst at the same time slurping from the trough of their greedy lifestyles. For thirty years, I lived modestly off the income derived from mostly factory work. In 2001, I left a full time factory position due to poor health caused by excessive lifting and dust inhalation and took up nursing as a mature age student. I had to survive two years on "Newstart" to put myself through the TAFE course at my own expense. Even though the job agency knew that my best hope of obtaining employment was to complete the course, I was still made to jump through the demoralising hoops of Centerlink despite the fact that I'd paid taxes for thirty years prior. After wearing all that, the best I can obtain at my age is part time work in my chosen career. I've now become one of the working poor with little hope of anything better than the part time contract I'm now saddled with. Time all Governments got their act together and sorted this mess out. Wildcat.

Last night on Today Tonight there was a segment on "skilled" workers being hired overseas in the Phillipines. Australian workers with the necessary skills were also interviewed and they said that the jobs the Philipinos were taking had never been advertised in Australia. The program also mentioned that migrant workers were often paid less than award wages.

A friend who had worked for the railways asks
"which is better?
to have a person doing a low paid job that involves a lot of hanging around,
or leave them on centrelink benefits?"

Blaming the victim is mean, cruel and ultimately doesn't solve the problem.

Tim Martin you have the right idea, but it will be difficult to put your proposals to the test. for a start the government have a economic management system in place that ensures we always have 6% of surplus workers, if we had no surplus,, workers would be paid what they are worth, one day we will all be working for the dole if the present trend continues, we should give all the surplus workers a job or train them, this does not happen, instead workers are brought here from overseas, to ensure the majic figure of 6% is not lowered, this is what drives the labour market, keeps wages low, profits high
Calling surplus workers unemployed workers shifts the blame onto those who do not create jobs. the job creators are responsible for the surplus, social security is also a handout, the government should be handing out jobs not money. it is time we blamed those who are responsible for creating jobs,
We need to force the government to give every person who has no job a start, instead of ensureing profits keep going through the roof, we need to be truthful , workers who have had no job create for them are surplus , full stop.

Having worked for a large international corporation I was tangentially involved in a social program run to bring long term unemployed into the work force in the Bedford-Styvesant district of Harlem, New York. The company set up a factory initially hiring about 50 people (later expanded to 150) to assemble computer cables.

The program was ultimately successful and the factory was able to bid on more technologically advanced production. However, getting to the point of being a productive manufacturing facility was a long and difficult process for both the company and the employees.

Many of the employees did not know what it meant to show up at work on time every day. Initially there were many discussions about the importance of being at work every day and then if the truancies continued employees were not paid for time not worked and their semi annual personal performance evaluations were lowered. This affected annual salary increases or in some cases negated them. Ultimately most of the workers were able to conform to a normal working day. Some were left behind

Most of the employees were required to attend remedial reading and writing classes (paid for by the company) due to semi illiteracy.

This company also paid university or tech school fees for any employees desiring to better their skills on their own time.

PART 2

It took about 3 years to get this factory running at a dependable rate of production with an acceptable level of quality.

It was several years later before the factory was able to take on more high tech manufacturing. At that time the factory had acquired the level of cost management and quality control required of other corporate manufacturing facilities world wide.

This program was not taken on lightly by the corporation. It was done to prove a point. The long term unemployed could be taken on and, with adequate training and incentives, perform at a competitive level. Also it was imperative that the company have a free hand to be able to sack workers that were not willing to contribute or conform to reasonable work/safety standards (mostly these were a lot of drug/alcohol problems).

A government could never have run this type of program on it's own. The only way to make this type of program work successfully is through incentives to private corporate enterprise. Tax breaks to cover the years of substandard productivity and corporate investment are required as is protection from union meddling.
As has been demonstrated over the past few years in Australia farming this type of skill training out to non-profit organizations just does not work

Bruce,
Were the wages paid to these people the USA basic wage of $5.15 per hour? If so no incentive was provided for people to turn up every day. Government subsidies amont to corporate welfare, instead of private welfare. If private welfare in this countery is suppoesed to carry a mutual obligation, what obligation does corporate welfare carry?

Inspiration comes from people bettering their lifestyle, which does not occur when the wages paid $12.75 Aus, offers no incentive to people to work, let alone work hard. It's time this country assessed its view to raising the basic wage, if not you will continue to see a shift of low income workforce to other locations where they can afford their rent, and to do more than merely survive.

When this occurs, who will do the console operator job at the servo's, the clerks jobs, the shop assistants jobs? Low wages lead to low work performances, and in a nation of rising property values, low income families are forced out of the very places that need low income labour. Townsville, N.Q. for example is experiencing this at the moment, rents consume 40-50% of low income pays, food is also expensive, people move on.

I was job seeking for 4 mths, and though I have many skills in many areas, I needed to undertake some courses to upgrade my skills, get the necessary 'certificates' to get back into the jobs I could do. Most of the upgrades were on the computor. As I had NOT been unemployed for 6 mths, I was not allowed to access any training program and had I undertaken a course on my own (which I could not pay for) I would have been penalised for not fulfilling my obligation booklet rules. Had I been given the chance I could have gone back to being a medical secretary, back into property management, or back into administration.

After a time in a call centre,(disaster) I was then back on Newstart, I then had to complete 30 hours of training and coaching in a classroom on how to fill out resumes, and find work on-line (basic skills), only then would I have been able to do a course in computors to open doorways to a job. It would have saved the Government a lot of money, and I would have been back working and paying taxes. For the over 50's - the situation has to change and immediate re-training must be offered. We are not kids living at home, we need to work to survive.
Life has turned full circle and I am now self employed, but how many highly skilled, intelligent people are left behind all because they need a course in wordperfect or excel to get the job to match their skills? How many people only need a short course to open doorways to employment? Howe many people over 40 are having to take jobs which would be back breaking for a younger person because they cannot get another job, due, only to, needing an upgrade of the skills they already have? We may be baby (boomers) but we are definitely being thrown out with the bathwater. Wake up Australia, we are sinking fast.

I left school at 15 and remained gainfully employed untill I was 35, when I was faced with having to apply for the dole. Being deaf, I was told by centrelink I could not get a newstart allowance- they put me on a pension instead. That's right, I didn't even have to look for work. Didn't even have to front up every week as others did. and I got about $30 a week more into the deal. I'm 43 now and still can't find a fulltime job in spite of having a Cert 3 in horticulture, a forklift licence and a truck licence. The only work I can find are casual jobs, and this casualization of our country's workforce, I fail to see how it's a good thing. In fact, I fail to see how a welfare system is a good thing at all. What did people do in the days before centrelink? They were self sufficient and proud of it, they looked after one another and actually knew who lived next door. It seems part of our social interactions have been replaced with an artifical system where one has to rely on the government to survive, a system that is eternal because it robs Peter to pay Paul and will always have the support of Paul.

Well said, Gitmo Guy.

Government policies can be very blunt instruments indeed – Paul just doesn’t sense the source of his pain. Perhaps the state’s objectives are more focused with redistribution of unhappiness.

It shouldn’t be this way and I sincerely wish you better.

Housing affordability also impacts heavily on work incentives. When my father was young, many workers could buy a home on a single income. Now, for a single person to be realistically hopeful of owning a home one day in a large city needs a high income in order to:

meet rent on a property of adequate standard and reasonable commuting distance to work;
meet motor vehicle or travel expenses;
adequate, vis a vis basic, living expenses;
savings to raise a reasonable deposit.

Unless you have a partner, you'll need lots more than minimum wage to do it. Investors have pushed up market prices for property with negative gearing handouts from government deepening their already deep pockets. Single persons will be a great future pocket of hidden poverty in this country. While some may be assisted by families able to do so, others whose families will not, or lack the capacity to, will languish in poverty for most of their working and retired life unless they can earn in excess of average weekly earnings.

Why go out and work if the pay is so hopelessly inadequate that you'll merely be fattening up your landlord and destined to eat soup in retirement to afford your private rental, or if in public rental pay inflated rent during your working life for what is essentially a shoebox in a slum. Work is about money, and the best incentive to work is if people can honestly be assured that they will be SIGNIFICANTLY AND SUBSTANTIALLY better off for their whole lives, not merely through taking poverty-level remuneration subsidizing the wealth building of someone who will derive this money through minimal personal exertion at all.

Firstly i would like to thank Seeker for the kind wishes and others for their input. I'm not sure I'm going off topic with this but here it goes - I recall the government gives a 'baby bonus' , of, I think, about $2000 per child. This goes direct to the parents of the child and appears to have no conditions, and many just spend it on playstations and other garbage (I'm sure some do use it wisely) and it seems this is nothing but the government buying votes. Now, if the government was to continue to give $2000 per child, but instead of giving it out to the parents, they put in into a long term investment account linked to a tax file number (or similar) where the money would become available when the child reached retirement age. I think this go a long way towards easing the burden on taxpayers given the number of pensions that will have to be paid in the coming years. Now I'm not exactly an accountant but I wonder if anyone else sees the merit in this idea, and has it been discussed before? Or maybe such ideas are doomed to the scrapheap of good things that have no political value.

Gitmo Guy - $2000 does not go far when a new baby arrives - especially if it is the first one and the mother has given up paid work. It costs this much in nappies alone for a year so I don't think many will be buying playstations with it. It is supposed to be an alternative to paid maternity leave which is often considered a good thing even by the same people who dislike 'middle class welfare' as I do. Personally I think it should be means tested - but this could be because they only introduced it just after our youngest was born and we missed out ;-)

An incentive to start superannuation funds earlier is a good idea. The government has just informed me it has added $1500 to my superannuation fund based on a contribution made on my behalf by my husband who got some sort of tax deduction from it - very nice too and I will no doubt appreciate it one day but surely there are better ways to spend taxpayers money? Something similar at the birth of a child would encourage parents to keep investing. The State government has just given me another $150 as a back-to school allowance - yet another waste of taxpayers money that should go directly to public schools.

So much money is wasted in these schemes and in inefficient bureaucratic organisations that could be put to better use. When I decided to retrain after taking time off for children I had to pay full course fees of $7000 myself - no allowance or even a tax deduction for that. Most would not be able to afford this and HECS places are very limited. This is where money should be directed - assisting the unemployed (not just those on benefits)to gain the skills that are really needed - that means apprenticeships, TAFE certificates and University degrees, not just useless short courses in introductory computing etc.

Sajo, your comment:not just useless short courses in introductory computing etc

These useless courses may be the only thing standing in the way of a highly experienced person, getting back into the workforce. To you, it may seem trite, but to those many such as myself who only need to learn a new skill - it can mean the difference of a great job and a lousy job.

I agree on good Uni courses and TAFE course, but its the people who are not chasing degrees,who are looking for work within the fields they have worked for many years. These people were often working in another sphere and did not ever get hands-on computer knowledge. The over 45's have much experience and knowledge to offer, and yet many really only need a short term course to get them back up and running. Any course which enhances and furthers a persons ability to gain solid employment is worth the funds to have them off the dole and into work as soon as possible. These people have paid taxes and are usually not the traditional dole bludger. There are many out there and the list is growing longer all the time. Of course, its also a matter that employers need to take their blinkers off, and see the value in older workers.

Well fair enough but I think Sajo missed my point just a little. I figure $2000 would buy a lot of babyfood, but I must remember that todays kids are infected with consumerism from an early age, as can be witnessed by their love of overpriced designer clothes, mobile phones and brain defillibrators (iPods). Guess I'm old fashioned. I miss the days when saturday morning cartoons were cartoons and not toy advertisments. Whoopsy daisy, our unaffordable lifestyles just got more unaffordable. As far as useless courses go, I'm up for another next week to get a OH&S green card, where I will be informed of the dangers of getting out of bed. This will cost me $130, 4 hours. The fact I did a 40 hour course in OH&S as part of my horticulture apprenticeship and have worked in heavy industry most of my life without managing to get myself killed means nothing these days. I get a feeling we might just have a little too much government and too little personal responsibility.

tinkerbell1952 - point taken - I was thinking more of the younger unemployed who we really need to be filling the skilled positions where the vacancies are. Obviously if all it takes is a couple of short courses to make all the difference then go for it. I am under the impression though that Centrelink makes the decisions as to what courses would be useful. I have known several over 45's who have been made redundant however it had nothing to do with lack of basic skills - most needed to change job entirely. For example a bricklayer who has hurt his back would need a totally different set of skills to get another skilled position which requires more than a basic training. Not trying to be trite - just practical.

"The more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." —Benjamin Franklin

To Gitmo et al:

With due respect for Ben Franklin, public provision needn't prevent poor people from providing for themselves too. Conditions on welfare payments may. Give everyone a liveable universal basic income regardless of their employment status, state of health etc. And fund it through progressive taxation. If capitalism can't afford that, it needs to be replaced.

Auntie
Disability Pensioner & Writer