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?

……would rather people be unemployed than take ‘crap’ jobs. Leave those to migrants.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ……

“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.