I see the coalition is revisiting the work for the dole scheme.

It's just a pity they are referring to it as unpaid work.

The math is simple, take the basic wage rate, divide it into the dollar amount, gives you a number of hours and that's the hours that MUST BE WORKED during that fortnight.

If you choose to live where no jobs are available, either travel to your designated place of work, move, or be cut off. It's that simple.

The time is here to stop the scammers because our tax dollars are être he'd enough without having them wasted on misfits with no intentions of finding work.

Rehctub,
I am all for it but one problem is the amount of administration, supervision, insurance etc involved offsets the productivity or cost benefit of employing the recipient.
It could in many cases cost more to have some of these people about the shop than it would just to pay them.
Solve that and you have a goer.
Take it easy.
SD

Ah! Work For The Dole, I remember it well I had an underpaid supervisory position with a tourist railway.
Mainly track maintenance and ground beautification around the Station; overall it was a disaster although we did get some good workers.
One of the reasons for its limited success apart from the plain hopeless was being sent slightly built girls to do heavy manual labour.

Another aspect is that if businesses can get cheap labour then they are not going to get the local handyman to do a bit of repair work.
I saw WFTD cost some people in country towns a goodly slice of their expected income because their services weren't required.

Bring in a scheme by all means but make it full time work on National or State projects and at award rates of pay otherwise it is just a waste of time and money so that politicians can be seen to be doing something.

It wont work, rehctub. It will only be a short term fix. Technology is moving faster than we could create chain gangs. Just look at the implications of something like Bitcoin. If it were to be widely accepted and in my mind will be in the future. When that happens, the whole financial industry will be lining up to sweep roads!

You have major retailers installing self serve checkouts, Google have just purchased Boston Dynamics, a quite advanced robotics innovator and another company making net enabled smart devices for your home. Another company has just released a burger making machine that can make 350 burgers and hour, to order. Restaurants are now taking advantage of cheep tablet devices and imbedding them in all their tables, negating the need for waitresses. A computer gaming company has written an AI that can write and create new games. Technology is fast making humans obsolete.

In the not too distant future, your chain gangs will be longer than the longest road!

I don't like it either rehctub.
While these dole recipients are supposedly working for the dole, they aren't looking for real jobs.
Meanwhile, people looking for real jobs will be undercut by those forced to work for the dole. What 'jobs' would the dole recipients do that wouldn't cut others out of jobs?

And you can't just cut anyone off the dole. What happens if they have kids?
Crime would rise terribly as these people stole to survive.

I don't know what the answer is, but I always thought giving the dole recipients more coupons than cash, so they have the food, rent etc covered, but aren't too comfortable with much cash to use. Maybe that would push them towards paid employment?

On the other hand, there are obviously many people out there who are virtually unemployable, and we can't force these people into working at anything.
I think our country is wealthy enough to wear those dole payments.

"Bring in a scheme by all means but make it full time work on National or State projects and at award rates of pay otherwise it is just a waste of time and money so that politicians can be seen to be doing something."

Is Mise, that smacks of communism or national socialism at the very least. For years we had many unofficial forms of what you speak of. Here in NSW the biggest public employer, used to sop up the unemployed, was The NSW State Railways. One of the incentives for many of the past state infrastructure projects, like the Sydney Harbor Bridge was to relieve unemployment. In its basic form it was called relief work. On a international scale Hitler used socialism like that in Germany in the 1930's, he also stuck lots of people in the army as well, I wonder why. In America a center piece of Roosevelt's 'New Deal' policy was exactly that. Not to mention the cost factor to all this, one off the biggest "problems" trying to do what you say is today, unlike yesterday, huge projects do not require huge numbers of unskilled or semi skilled labour. You simply don't need 10,000 people to build a bridge, no matter how much you try to inflate the work force.

cont.