Carrots rather than sticks

In the last years of the Keating government the forerunner of what was to morph into the Job Network was set up. I won a contract to look after the needs of the long-term unemployed from Non English Speaking Backgrounds (NESB): one of the most difficult groups of people to place in employment.

Over the period that we held this contract we looked after about 3000 people as our income was closely tied to our success rate I monitored this section of the business closely. There was an incentive for us weed out any dole bludgers. I found a grand total of two who could be described as dole bludgers and they knew the system so well that they were virtually immune.

Consider this example. One of my case managers came to me very proud about finding a job for a client. This young Vietnamese guy had come in and said that he wanted to work in a Vietnamese bakery. My case manager knew all about bakeries – his parents having migrated to Australia as bakers. Because we were aware that language problems could play a part in preliminary interviews, we had staff that between them spoke about ten languages.

More often than not the offer to conduct the interview in their first language was rejected as it was with our young baker. After the client left my case manager had got busy on the phone and found a Vietnamese bakery that would take him. To make sure he could get to and from work he was able to get some financial assistance and so contacted him that day, got him the interview, and he was to start the following day. But he did not show.

All sorts of excuses but after spending a week trying to get him to actually show up for work we made the decision to breach him: this would effectively take him off the dole. He appealed and after six months of appeal hearings he won his case. He had played us like a fish, and it turned out that this was not the first time he had been breached and had successfully appealed. He had leartthe system and will no doubt be drawing down the dole until he becomes eligible for the pension.

So here was my first lesson: all the punitive provisions are powerless against the genuine dole bludgers.

Lesson number two concerned how we place people in work. When you are unemployed it is your responsibility to find work: any job that is available you must take: if you don’t you can be breached. This provision is rarely questioned but is also the biggest weakness in our system.

Consider this case. I was scheduled to interview a new client. The appointment was for 10 am and he arrived fifteen minutes early. Smartly dressed, suit, tie polished shoes. One of our policies was that we gave new clients at least a twenty-minute interview but it could go for as long as an hour. The reasoning was simple, these people were long term unemployed, they had been in the system for at least three months and I had witnessed at first hand how your self respect and self confidence suffers under those circumstances. 

At this first interview they were able to tell their story, we would offer no false hope all that we could offer was our willingness to work along side them and help them succeed.

It was very clear why he had been unemployed for so long. He had worked for twenty years in a small firm as a technician repairing washing machines. That firm had been bought out by an interstate company that had taken the customer list, and closed the business down. After twenty years he was on the street with no experience in looking for work and every job he went for seemed to be taken the moment they saw his age on the application form. Older employees are perceived as a work cover risk, they run the danger of driving up premiums.

Of course I had no jobs for technicians but I did have lots of onion picking jobs. Strictly speaking I should have directed him to one of those. This is the first weakness in our system. There are lots of unemployed people with no skills whatsoever. If the unskilled have to compete for jobs with people who are skilled and can work in more skilled occupations then it has two effects: we are making it harder for the unskilled to get into the workforce (and there is by no means an abundance of unskilled work available); and secondly we are deskilling people who can work in skilled occupations. This is not a good way to manage your human resources.

The story does have a happy ending. I had previously interviewed another person who was an excellent sales person. I put the two together to go on NEIS. They were going to set up their own white goods repair service. The sales person did the marketing and he went back to working with his machines.