One of the themes I’ve been trying to hammer on a number of posts about Centrelink and on threads here and on other blogs is the huge disconnect between abstract discussions of welfare policy and the lived experience of people on the dole. Occasionally stories hit the papers about rorts and scams in the welfare services quasi-market, but the structural insanity of the fact that the incentives given to employment services providers push them in the direction of only “assisting” those who can obtain employment by their own efforts for minimal cost and maximal gain really haven’t been subject to much debate.
Nor do abstract policy-wonk discussions of the right mixture of carrots and sticks often address the fact that many people on the dole have severe and intractable problems – lack of access to stable and affordable housing, substance abuse or addictions, severe deficits in literacy and numeracy, poor physical and mental health, and for many, redundant skills which the much glorified labour market simply doesn’t want.
No, such debates as do occur are dominated either by punitive talk of “bludgers”, a naive belief in markets which ignores the many factors leading to sustained disadvantage, and Third Way hype about social entrepreneurship or whatever the latest catch phrase is. So it’s great to be able to link to a post from Robert Bollard at Left Writes which comprehensively exposes the absurdities, inanities and insanities and everyday cruelties of the system from his own experience as both a CES employee and later as an employee in the job network sector.
Obviously, if they got a job they would leave the caseload, and this would financially benefit the provider. Also, if they got a job and we were able to find out who the employer was, and got the employer or the jobseeker to confirm after 13 weeks off benefits that they were employed, that was an “outcome�. The company got paid another massive sum for each “outcome� regardless of whether we had anything to do with getting the client the job. More importantly, the proportion of the caseload that became outcomes was the key element in determining whether the company got its lucrative contract renewed. That was the market incentive that was supposed to make us work harder than the old slack public servants in the CES.
In reality, however, it was actually much harder to help people in the Job Network than it had been in the CES.
hey, didn’t you say you was retiring?
Cross posting Crikey is one thing, but this looks like a fresh post … welcome back to the dark side!!
Well, I decided not to go out anywhere this weekend and it’s a rainy afternoon anyway, so why not? Still gonna be gone during the week – except for midsemester break I guess!
Additionally, Mark, an ‘outcome’ is a job with as little as 1 hour per week. The changing of the definition was a cynical attempt by the government to pad the real unemployment figure.
Proclaimed at the start of a recent B.A. meeting in a Bribane backroom:
“Hi, my name is Mark, and I’m a blogger.”
I do recall some discussion of this at the grogblog, EC. Some people seemed to think that being a blogger and a grogger were comparable in some strange way!
I find it amazing that Howard Government Senators like Mason can forget to fill out forms for months with immunity and excuses such as ‘it was just an oversight’ while Centrelink clients are punished and treated like criminals if they make an oversight when it comes to filling out their forms.
Nice post and link, it’s good to have some long-standing suspicions confirmed.
The strange thing is that the government seems enthusiastic about paying for outcomes that the job network member had no part in achieving. After 13 weeks it used to send out questionnaires demanding to know details of the person’s new job, presumably to trigger a payment to the job provider (this might still happen but I can’t speak from personal knowledge). If you sent back the questionnaire telling them it was none of their business, they’d send another one with officious demands that it be returned without delay. No threats of what would happen if you didn’t though, probably because they had no authority to do anything.
I believe that’s still the case, Ken. Now often dressed up as “post placement support”.
Personal Experience:
I helped my son (19yo) find a job about 4 years ago.
I was surprised to hear him say, “take me to the Salvation Army offices”. They are an employment agency… when did that happen, I’m thinking. So I take him. They give him a phone number regarding a job. He rings it when we get home. An appointment is made. I ask my son about this company and he say something like “Ajax”. I drive him to Ringwood the next day, and “Ajax” turns out to be “Ajax Employment Centre”. He’s going to get a job working at an employment centre?
No. He comes out after 30 minutes and explains to me that its the place where the job was first advertized. They own the phone number of the company and you have to thru them first. The Salvo employment centre only points you there. And so the people at Ajax, they take down his particulars and now he is on their list as well as the Salvos. He finally comes out with an actual phone number to ring to get an actual job. Finally.
Not quite. When he rings up later, he gets told the job went 2 weeks ago, and the prospective employer complains to him about all the calls he is getting.
We go this charade 3 times before I tell him to find another way. Its a racket. Its Multi Level Marketing without a product, as far as I could see.
All’s well that ends well and he has just finished his apprenticeship last month.
Some one is making bucks out of this, for sure.
Thanks for the link Mark. In reply to Ken, regarding the question of Job Network members being paid for outcomes they had nothing to do with. Case Management/Intensive Assistance (I believe it’s now called something else) was always supposed to be more than just referring people to jobs. The idea was that we would pay for training, motivate them, fix up their resumes, etc, etc. It’s impossible for the government to know whether a provider has actually helped anyone get a job. So they decided to pay for every outcome, assuming perhaps that if the provider had done nothing for the client the client would refuse to provide the necessary verification.
Of course, bribery in the form of “post placement assistance” makes it easy to get such verification.
My point, however, is not that the system is unfair and should be fixed. My point is that it’s impossible to construct a fair system on this privatised/market driven model. You cannot accurately measure a service like assisting the unemployed. You can’t turn help into a commodity that can be quantified like wheat or pork bellies.
Moreover, the inevitable corruption built into the system distorts all measurement of performance. It reminds me of certain Marxist critiques of state planning under Stalinism. One reason why it never worked was that under a hierarchical and undemocratic political system managers would always misreport their performance.
Totally Off Topic – where’s the leftwrites server gorn to, today? Or is it just my machine?
That’s a good analogy, Robert! Dressed up as a quasi-market, what we actually have is a nutsoid central planning bureaucracy allocating dollars for “outcomes” to private businesses and charities.
Not completely off the topic – now that Stalinism’s been mentioned – my favourite tale of Soviet Central planning is the one about the nail factory that easily met its quota of 10,000 tons of nails by producing 10,000 tons of railway tie spikes. When the quota was changed to a couple of millions of nails to fix that little rort, the management tooled up to produce shoe-tacks.
I’ll try checking Robert’s post tomorrow, see if he’s mentioned anything that absurd. If not … [insert your favourite Centrelink absurdity here]
“Additionally, Mark, an ‘outcome’ is a job with as little as 1 hour per week. The changing of the definition was a cynical attempt by the government to pad the real unemployment figure.”
Actually, it is an internationally agreed definition that has been in use for decades. There is a separate number for underemployment (or ‘labour force underutilisation’). It has been trending down too, though much higher than the unemployment rate. See figures here.
There is a case for reporting this number more regularly, but the headline unemployment rate enables comparisons over time and between countries, so we should not give it up.
“Additionally, Mark, an ‘outcome’ is a job with as little as 1 hour per week.”
No, Alex, an “outcome” for the purposes of a Job Network contract is something like employment of at least 15 hours per week for more than 13 weeks.
And no, Andrew Norton, there is no “internationally agreed definition” of such an outcome, because why should there be an internationally agreed defintion of how much our federal goverment decides to pay Job Network members under each tender round?
Of course, there is a perverse incentive Job Network agencies to deliberately ‘split’ jobs to create multiple short duration placements which are not related to the time constraints of the employer but which maximise outcome fees. With the increasingly common association between job placement agencies and labour hire or temporary help agencies, it became possible for labour hire companies associated with the Job Network agencies to employ jobseekers who then undertook work, through short duration placements, for the Job Network agency itself.
A celebrated case involved a Job Network member who also ran a labour hire firm bulk recruiting job seekers through the firm to conduct job search for themselves for 15 hours over five consecutive days — the minimum requirement for the agency to get its outcome payment. A departmental inquiry found no fraudulent intent on the part of the agency but observed that the ‘practice of paying (and claiming a fee) for employing a job seeker to undertake their own job search activity is contrary to contractual requirements, is a breach of the Code of Conduct and has the potential to bring the Job Network into disrepute’
“Actually, it is an internationally agreed definition that has been in use for decades” says Andrew Norton for as little one hour, over a fortnight, as being considered ‘employment’.
“Poo” might have been defined as chocalate, internationally, for decades but that does not make it correct. The use of this definition to pretend that all is well, on the one hand, for the financial markets while requiring newstart recipients to have 50 hours in the bag, over the same period, to officially not be required to look for more work, because they are then considered adequately employed, is a con job. It is most obvious to the individuals who live this craziness rather than those who love to play with statistics for political purposes.
In the Job Network, before I left it in January 2002, an “outcome” was an Intensive Assistance client in employment that reduced their benefits by 70% a week for 13 weeks (that was called a secondary outcome) or that took them off benefits totally for 13 weeks (a primary outcome). The secondary outcome paid a modest fee but was good for brownie points. The primary outcome paid big bucks. The benefit reduction was determined by an interface with the Centrelink computers.
Where the “1 hour a week” thing comes from, I suspect, is the fact that the ABS surveys which establish the official unemployment rate count anyone working 1 hour a week (it may even be a fortnight) as “employed”. Internationally agreed standard or not this is a fiddle. When I worked for the Job Network I estimate that, at any one time, up to a third or even a half of my supposedly long-term unemployed caseload would not have been considered “unemployed” by the ABS.
Other countries have different ways to artificially lower their unemployment rate. In the US unemployment benefit is a form of insurance – otherwise there’s food stamps and stuff. Because they don’t have a form of dole that encourages people to pretend that they’re looking for work when they’ve given up – a lot of their unemployed are not counted (as, of course, are unemployed illegal immigrants).
“because why should there be an internationally agreed defintion of how much our federal goverment decides to pay Job Network members under each tender round?”
There isn’t. Government agencies are free to use their own definitions, and do. From a policy perspective, clearly working a small number of hours is not a satisfactory outcome.
The latest ABS data on underemployment is from September last year, with 5% of all workers preferring more hours and so underemployed (4% of male workers, 6.3% of female), plus 4.8% unemployed, equals 9.8% of workers underutilised.
There is no fudging of the data, even if some people do not know how to interpret it correctly.
Mark, you said
Yes and then there’s lack of transport, ridiculously inappropriate qualification demands, the uncertainty of getting actually paid for some, the undependability of jobs that appear to be on offer, etc,. etc,.
There is a disconnect between this failed government [is Labor any better?] and the realities of everyday life for an alarmingly increasing numbers of ordinary Australians.
Robert Bollard, you said
That’s very interesting ….. because that sort of thinking is what seems to underpin the Dept. of Veterans’ Affairs screwing of veterans whilst continuing to blow public money on its unfair and inefficient determining system that works out to be welfare for doctors and lawyers.
The Centrelink office is a sad joke. My office processes every form at the time and so it takes 20 to 40 minutes to put in a from. (or longer if the computer system is glitschy) There is a long queue with a winding row of chairs in the front office so that people can sit down and wait.
There are a few healthy looking people but by and large there are old and sick people clutching their job diaries and limping to the counter to have them scrutinised at the counter and being told yes we are paying you today you will get x dollars in your account tomorrow.
I am sickness exempt. I’ve received letters saying you have 21 days to respond to this letter – it is not explained that you have actually have 21 days from the date of the letter to respond or you will be breached. I once rang up to find that i had already been breached at the time of my responding at day 16 or 17. Because i was easily re-instated due to the error i didn’t follow it up – but surely in these circumstances respondents need to be given a firm date upon which to respond and have the consequences of not doing so outlined.
In relation to sickness exemption it is now possible for sick certificates to be refused. Also, Centrelink requires certification on specific Centrelink forms which are not supplied to Drs in state run hospitals. So when i was recently pregnant i needed to go back to my GP in order to get 3 monthly certificates – he is now giving me monthly certificates to minimise paperwork for himself.
If my sick certificate runs out on the 25 of the month i need to have a certificate in prior to this date in order to stop my file automatically being sent to a network provider and me receiving a letter on the 26 saying you have an appointment to attend and if you miss it you’ll be breached.
I have even received letters from Network providers saying this is your reminder when i’ve had no previous correspondence about being required to attend an appointment.
An acquaintance/friend is on the intensive assistance merry-go-round after exhausting all avenues of doing volunteer work etc and i am quite literally on suicide watch with her as she goes from one dodgy provider to the next dodgy ‘training’ course. Her last ‘course’ was aged care and she described the fiasco of providing ‘training’ to shower clients. With the trainees having to strip and shower each other – she was mortified as she had no ‘decent’ bathers or under garments to wear… And it was all for a certificate level below the industry standard.
I guess we don’t want to turn the thread into a general whinge about Centrelink but another aspect worth a mention is the way they communicate with people on benefits, viz by way of long letters written in typical bureaucratese. For years I had to translate them for someone – two pages long some of them, full of tortured English that might just as well have been in Japanese for all the sense my friend could make of it. The irony of course is that many unemployed people are unemployed because they’re functionally illiterate … and of course they get breached if they inadvertently disobey these written instructions that they can’t understand.
Ken Lovell:
the mention of Centrelink was only a warm-up, just wait until everybody gets started on all the swindles, rackets, rorts, rip-offs, dodginess and corporate handouts in the private employment provision [should it be called "prevention" instead?] system.
No, no, you’ve got it all wrong
You are right about convoluted bureaucratic letters and forms ….. these are sometimes unintelligible to university graduates too! Some of the stuff I have had from Veterans’ Affairs have run into several pages shot-through with errors [deliberate or otherwise and sometimes ridiculous and contradictory]; understanding and complying with what is on these “wastes of forests” sometimes defies both logic and common-sense.
Still, I’m luckier that the recipients of DIC-head generated documents; English is my native language ….. how do the poor non-English-speaking recipients get on? Poor devils!
Alex
Do you know when this change was implemented? Is it different from other OECD countries? I simply cannot imagine very many people indicating they only worked for one hour in any week. This would presumably involve, for example, an unemployed person who babysits a neighbours child for one hour per week!
I wonder if there are any stats, hiding somehwere, that show the sensitivity of the official unemployment rate as that one hour minimum is raised? For example what would happed in the one hour minimum was lifted to say four or eight or twelve?
Of course the data would exist and, I imagine, very thoroughly analyzed; but how to access it.
Andrew Norton
Oops. I have just seen your link. Before I try and sort through it all, do you know if the answer to the question in my previous post is easily accessed?
Leftwrites is up again today, in case anyone wants to check out my original post. With regards to Centrelink – I also posted regarding that Department last year.
There is a problem with conflating the mendacity of Centrelink with the separate, albeit related, corruption of the privatised Job Network. It’s a problem I have with Mark’s title for this post – “Abolish Centrelink” (even though I know it’s only meant as a joke). The Coalition’s wish list involves privatising Centrelink’s functions as well and, I can assure you, a privatised Centrelink would be far, far worse than what we’ve got now.
Andrew Norton writes:
“The latest ABS data on underemployment is from September last year, with 5% of all workers preferring more hours and so underemployed (4% of male workers, 6.3% of female), plus 4.8% unemployed, equals 9.8% of workers underutilised.
There is no fudging of the data, even if some people do not know how to interpret it correctly.”
Au contraire -it’s still a fudge. Has anyone ever read a press report that quotes the combination of unemployed and underemployed? Of course not. The fact that the real picture can be obtained by a detailed reading of the ABS stats is beside the point. The political impact of artificially reducing the unemployment figures is the same.
There is, besides, another aspect to this fudge. It is part of neo-liberal orthodoxy that economies with “rigid labour markets” like France have high unemployment rates because employers can’t afford to hire people. The standard answer from the left is that there is no advantage in lowering unemployment by allowing employers to hire people for crap wages. Another argument is suggested by the existence of this fudge. How much of the “high” unemployment rate in places like France and Germany has to do with the fact that most jobs are full-time? Ie. in deregulated Anglo-Saxon economies employers are able to hire a number of part-time employees where in France they would employe one full-time worker. It would be interesting to compare the “underemployment” rates in different countries.
Mark:
Back to the title of your post .
No, Centrelink won’t be abolished …. but once any federal election is out of the way ….. my guess is that Centrelink, Veterans’ Affairs and Immigration [less Citizenship] will all be fully privatized and sold off for a few fast bucks …. by whoever wins such an election..
Spin-doctors will get rich selling the sell-off to the mugs ……
Robert’s comments quoted in the original post were about payments to Job Network members for “outcomes” in placing job seeker clients , but it seems to be that many people – such as Mr Norton – are desperate to have a debate about the OECD/ILO definition of unemployment. The issue with Job Network and Centrelink does not turn on statistical definitions of unemployment, but how the government constructs a quasi-market system that is meant to “reward” employment agencies for getting people jobs, without creating perverse incentives for JobNetwork agencies to “park” difficult-to-place clients or to split jobs to maximise outocme payments
As for the problems with the accepted defintion of unemployment, this is partly related to the one-hour cut off, but surely the bigger problem is that unemployment is measured as the numerator over a denominator calculated by reference to active labour market participants. If a country puts most of its youth in education (ie. out of the labour market), the remaining unemployed youth will register as a high percentage of youth unemployment. Conversely, if a country keeps most of its youth out of education and competing for jobs, the denominator goes up and the unemployment may well go down. Yet which country is doing beter as regards its young people?
I think the United States does well on unemployment statistics by placing a hell of a lot of prime age men in prison.
Though the un and under-employment figures could also be considered misleading in an over-stating sense, in that the similar numbers reported each survey could be taken as meaning the same half mllion people are unemployed, when in fact there is some turnover – some people get jobs, others lose them.
I’d be the first to agree that there are still problems in the labour market, and I doubt anyone who follows the issue would disagree on that basic analysis – it is what to do about it that is controversial. The left is bitterly opposed to the right’s attempts to create more jobs through liberalising the labour market and using the welfare system to push discouraged workers back into jobs. As Robert Bollard’s comment above notes, some on the left would rather people be unemployed than take ‘crap’ jobs. Leave those to migrants.
On the other hand, I think it takes a perverse determination to only see the bad in the world to pedantically deny that the labour market is a lot healthier than it has been for the last 30 years.
John G – Sorry, not sure of the answer to your question.
Alex and Co, you need to understand that it’s impossible to agree with an absolute level of hours we call ‘employed’ or ‘unemployed’. That’s not the point of the 1 hour definition, although it’s easy to understand. People who are not working any hours and say they are able to and want to work, are definitely ‘unemployed’. Yes I know it’s possible to work half an hour in a week but how likely is it? About as likely as ‘employed’ people only working 1 hr per week. They usually work a lot more although perhaps some work only 8 hrs/week and are comfortable with that (mum with kids or retiree) Andrew points out the stats on underemployment, but the crucial thing we are often interested in is changes in employment. That doesn’t vary if you use the 1 hr or say 8hrs as your reference point. To repeat, it’s almost humanly impossible to measure absolute unemployment (a bit like happiness), but we can measure changes in it. We are usually interested in the direction of its change, preferably down, like it is at present. If you don’t feel ABS unemployment data serve your purpose, you can always supplement them with underemployment data as Andrew shows, or Centrelink payment data, anecdotes from your experience, or blind bloody prejudice if you feel like it. Get the picture?
“As Robert Bollard’s comment above notes, some on the left would rather people be unemployed than take ‘crap’ jobs. Leave those to migrants.”
Apart from the cheap and nasty gibe about leaving crap jobs to migrants, this argument is easy to turn on its head. Most (not just some) on the right have been trumpeting for the last few years, and Howard and co are doing so with a vengeance recently, that a race to the bottom on wages is the answer to unemployment. Just what we need – a US style underclass of working poor!
The argument is not new. It was made to defend slavery. “Them poor blacks would be thrown out of the plantaions without a crust if massa has to pay them wages”. And, in fact, that was often what happened. Similarly the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 led to widespread misery.
But is that an argument for feudalism or slavery or (in today’s context) for attacking workers’ rights? Some of us on the left have a different answer to the dilemma. Give the slaves the plantation!
In any case, you don’t have to be a socialist to understand the basic logic. Even an old-school 19th century liberal like Higgins understood that if an employer couldn’t afford to pay decent wages he/she didn’t deserve to be in business.
Andrew Norton, you said
I happen to live in a part of Australia where many native-born Australians have seen their jobs go to imported labour; they had no choice in the matter but their former employers had plenty of choices!. These displaced workers would love to be working again. The “skills shortage” is nothing but a load of utter bollocks. These people cannot help but become racists ….. and so would you be too if you were in the same situation.
This is an interesting debate.
I’ve been unemployed for a long time and I can assure you the chances of me landing a decent job are slim to none.
I am literate, intelligent, sober, etc and would actually make a decent employee if someone were to take the chance.
But there is a mentality within the workforce, or it’s an idea perpetuated by Job Search Agencies, that if you have gaps in your employment history, you are unreliable.
The company policy of “Manpower” is to not refer anyone over 40 or who has been unemployed for over 6 months to jobs.
Most employers don’t care because they have a high turn over of staff.
I went through hell this last Christmas, to get them to fix something that would’ve taken “two keystrokes”.
I’ve witnessed the amount of times that Salvation Army staff drop the term “breached” casually into a sentence as a fear tactic.
“Can you survive 8 weeks without money…”
Not to mention the Nazi terminology like “Jackboot”, “Zero tolerance”, etc. used by Centrelink staff.
“We will be ringing up the places that you mention on the forms before allowing payment”. What a waste of time.
Work for the Dole is a scam. For the $20.80 I got, I had to spend $16 on lunch at the placement and was ridiculed when I didn’t want to.
People don’t realise that those who genuinely need to be on the pension are those that are finding it hardest to get on it.
It’s because the Liberals want more people in the workforce to make the unemployment figures look good. I have to wear hearing aids and they want me to work in call centre!! I mean it’s completely inappropriate!
So, because job search agencies are quota based, they try and coerce you into doing the worst jobs.
I even seen that the right to refuse work on religious grounds has to be backed up by proof of your religion. How do I prove I’m a buddhist?
Oh there are jobs, if you can get out to local farms at 5:30am when public transport doesn’t start until 5:30am.
Will Labour change the welfare policies?
Who knows?
I am an employer who has advertised for the past 9 weeks for casual staff to work 15-33 hours per week. I am flexible with hours, pay above award rates and offer training. I CANNOT FIND ANY INTERESTED PROSPECTIVE EMPLOYEES!!! My fellow business owners report the same story. How can anyone claim to be long term unemployed and not able to get a job? If you have no serious impairments and have basic literacy skills, I would employ you. The few applicants I have had through the Job Network Agencies have not turned up, turned up an hour late, or just asked me to not hire them, one younh VERY able bodied man said “it’s not worth me working as I am happy living on NewStart”. One Mum said to me the job isn’t good enough (it is a basic admin job and she has no admin skills but I offered to train her).
The staff that work with me are completely dumfounded as am I.
I say cut off the dole after 3 months, clean a toilet, work at Maccas – there IS WORK available.