I guess I should simplify it a bit.

My opinion is, setting up yet another hoop for the unemployed to jump through, only will make them more resentful and less motivated.
To use them as cheap labour (like Greencorps), serves only to demoralise them and devalue environmental work. Why would people pay to have a rehab planting, when they can have free Greencorps? It generally only leads to more volunteer work anyway.

Welfare reform is a little bit deceptive, as it generally only means taking a free kick at unemployed people. It might be more sensible to give them enough to survive, so they dont have to resort to crime to feed themselves.

The disability support pension is by far the biggest rort of them all. The majority are out mowing lawns etc. for cash. Some are genuine though, and any crackdown will certainly affect the genuine ones first and hardest.

Basically, I think leave it as it is and try to create new jobs and opportunities rather than bending over for a crumb.

The jobless should have to do a minimum amount of hours on a community related project to receive their payment. Only one or two days a week to keep their hourly rate around the minimum wage.
Posted by mikk, Monday, 8 November 2010 1:23:07 PM

This is Work for the Dole minus one day!
This is also like the Community Work program for mature age Centrelink customers.
This is also like the Community Engagement programs for those on Parole or serving their time as Community Service.

What is new in what you suggest aside from nothing much?

Most customers on Centrelink payments are working casually picking up what ever work they can, but still receiving a partial payment because they rarely get enough work. They do not count in the unemployment figures because of their work commitments. Their problem is under-employment and not unemployment. How are you going to treat them?

The Liberal Democratic Party proposes welfare, tax and minimum-wage reform in one package, called 30/30 as follows:

First $30,000 income, no tax.

Income over $30,000, flat income tax rate of 30% for everyone including companies.

For incomes under $30,000 you get a handout equal to 30% of the difference between your income and $30,000. So frinstance, if you earn $0, handout = 30% x $30,000 = $9,000.

If you earn $10,000, handout = (30% x $20,000) = $6,000, total income = $10,000 earnt plus $6,000 handout = $16,000.

Minimum wage is abolished.

This has a number of benefits:
1. it abolishes the welfare trap, where people on welfare cannot earn more because it's not worth it. It means it's always worthwhile for people on welfare to earn more and be independent. Abolition of minimum wage makes much more employment opportunities.
2. abolishes tax pack and a zillion complications
3. abolishes jiggery-pokery by shifting income and expenses between entities such as companies.

* * *

The crazy thing about the current system is that the minimum wage laws make it illegal to employ people at the market rate. But the dole may be even lower, so its supporters are effectively arguing that people are better off unemployed on the dole, than employed at a higher income!

mikk argues that employment is intrinsically exploitative but has never been able to defend this proposition when challenged, apart from by assuming it in his premises, which is circular and therefore irrational. But he doesn't have the honesty to admit this: he just slinks away each time he is defeated and re-appears running the same refuted argument every time.

According to mikk's logic:
a) all employment should be banned, and even if it's not
b) it is no less exploitative for the government to employ people at below the minimum wage.

Goerge Jetson wrote
<<What is new in what you suggest aside from nothing much?>>

You obviously missed where I said

"Close the job network of privitised employment agencies"
"No looking for work test, no monkey tricks and no paternalistic job network pushing you around pointlessly"
"to get paid all you have to do is not have a job and do your allotted couple of days community work."
"One thing I would do is make the jobless find the work project themselves, the same as finding a job."
"They could even submit proposals for their own community improvement job if none were available to them locally."

It is about removing the pointless, and costly, spying, control and punishment centrelink is tasked with meting out to the unemployed.
So that no matter who you are, a young person with little experience, someone socially awkward and inept, a skill-less 50 year old, or even an antiauthoritarian anarchist who would rather starve than be subjugated by a boss, you can still survive without having to resort to crime and give something, anything, back to the community, without feeling like an outcast, scorned and punished by society and treated as worthless.

People who already have a job, even only part time/casual would likely continue in that. Work will still exist and people will still get employed just as they do now. This is about a safety net for the worst off, that dosent encourage/reward idleness, without the vilification and punitive aspects, that are so expensive, that characterise the current system.

"This is about a safety net for the worst off, that dosent encourage/reward idleness, without the vilification and punitive aspects, that are so expensive, that characterise the current system."

I agree with all of that. But why is it okay for the 'safety net' to be the dole? Why shouldn't the safety net be employment at a rate above the dole, but below the arbitrary minimum wage?

I knew a guy once who had 21 children. The first 8 he raised himself working as a grave-digger. The last 13 were paid for by the state - ie by everyone else - after some genius of a doctor decided that this guy had a 'disability' - he couldn't read and write.

One day he gave me a gift he had made - a picture of a parrot made with coloured metal paper - Easter egg type paper. He told me he sells them to tourist shops for $100, and they sell them to tourists for $200. I asked how long it takes him to make one. "Two hours" he said.

Do the maths. If he just worked a normal 8 hour day, with virtually no capital equipment, he could make $400 a day.

What's stopping him?
a) why would he bother? He's already getting paid to do nothing (all his kids were in state care or with their numerous mothers).
b) if he did it as a business, he would need to get an ABN, submit quarterly business statements, and he just couldn't cope with all that paperwork. Yet one of the main justifications for our tax system is specifically to provide for people like him!

This is a problem entirely created by government. No the welfare bureaucracy shouldn't persecute this guy. But neither should everyone else have to subsidise him.

I know another disabled pensioner whose hobby is doing up houses for capital gain.

There's loads of work that most disabled pensioners, single mothers, and unemployed could do. The solution is to strongly prune the thornbush of tax, employment, welfare and licensing regulations, not to make more of them.

Peter Hume
<<and be independent.>>
I hardly call working for the man "being independant".
"The man" is the only one who has independence.
<<Abolition of minimum wage makes much more employment opportunities.>>
It increases opportunities for the employers not employees.
All existing employees should fear this notion. A starving horde offering your boss cheaper labour than what he pays you!
<<abolishes jiggery-pokery by shifting income and expenses between entities such as companies.>>
Hardly the province of the poor is it Pete? More like evidence of the real criminals and parasites among us.

Sorry you see me as "defeated" and "slinking away" but I do have a life you know and can only contribute here when I have the time and something gets me steamed up enough. Your posts are right up there LOL.

I have previously pointed you to material to support my views but you have pointedly ignored it. Because if you read it you will not be able to refute it. You and your capitalist ideology are the ones failing to defend your proposition. As every wage slave knows and feels all too painfully every day. I dont even need to back up my statements as the reality proves my point for me. A vastly unequal and unfair world, wracked by crises and decay, an environment raped and pillaged to the point of no return, failing societies and backsliding civilisation. Thats what 200 years of capitalism has brought us and no airy fairy economic dogmas will change that reality.

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionC2