‘Poor people don’t plan long-term. We’ll just get our hearts broken’

[quote=“tserong, post:18, topic:300”]
This seems an opportune point to link to another interesting article, “[What prospects do Burnie’s young unemployed really have?][1]”[/quote]That brings back a lot of bad memories.

The article mentions one particular bugbear of mine: the business habit of luring young people out of education, then abandoning them. When I was working in that field, award wages for the young were age based. That might still be the case; I don’t know. When a young person ages to the point that they qualify for a wage greater than the employer is willing to pay, the employer simply replaces them with someone younger. The jobs are casual, so the employer just stops calling. The former employee rarely returns to education. Skills acquired on the job are not marketable beyond a certain age. We end up with another long-term unemployed statistic. To my mind, the practice is criminal.

[This article][2] adds to the picture. The interactive graph is revealing. For Tasmania, the scale has to change to fit the statistics. Tasmania is unique in that it’s a state. There are regions that are worse off, but they don’t have the impact of a whole state.

Over the years, we’ve dug ourselves into a hole. When I started with the CES in the 1980s, one of the staff who had been there since the 1940s could trace many problems back to the 1950s. The way I see it, we’ve taken generations to get into this mess; getting out of it will take generations more. Thinking in terms of electoral cycles won’t do the job.

Poverty is a symptom of deep-seated malaise. Treatment demands a holistic approach. Markets have failed, so we need to figure out what governments can do. I reckon a bit of courage and daring could achieve great things.
[1]: http://m.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/what-prospects-do-burnies-young-unemployed-really-have/story-e6frg8h6-1227024011118
[2]: http://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2014/sep/29/the-tough-fight-for-jobs-is-not-getting-any-easier

[quote=“MarkG, post:19, topic:300, full:true”]What do we think of opt-in community service programs like the green army? Are they a good way to fill the gap between jobs and people?[/quote]A deceptively simple question.

[This comment][1] seems germane:

… my friend could not even give her work away as she was told when applying for a volunteer position “sorry but we have plenty of more experienced candidates” so they will not even train you in a training position.

Community service/volunteering don’t substitute for participating in the labour market, they are part of that market. Education/training and the labour market are inextricably linked. Work is education/training; education/training is work. That’s why we need sufficient meaningful occupation to keep everyone who wants work moving forward (if you’ll pardon the expression).

People don’t need to stop for long before they stagnate and it’s difficult for them to get moving again. Market capitalism repeatedly fails to provide for all in the labour market. We need government to step in, to keep everyone learning.

We don’t need to fill the gap about which you asked; we need to eliminate it.
[1]: http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/41535194

This thread reminds me of the Buckminster Fuller quote from NY magazine in 1970 when he said:

David’s argument appears to be based on the idea that people feel like they must be participating in the labour market. If that were the case then I’d rather focus on programs that fixed that feeling rather than shoe horn them into an artificial market.

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[quote=“devdsp, post:23, topic:300”]David’s argument appears to be based on the idea that people feel like they must be participating in the labour market. If that were the case then I’d rather focus on programs that fixed that feeling rather than shoe horn them into an artificial market.[/quote]My argument is based on observations of thousands of people over several years. People seem to need to feel that they’re doing something meaningful. We consistently fail to provide that for part of the population. Those affected are poor in more terms than the financial.

The causes are many and solutions complex. This thread is about poverty. I believe that the problems that lead to poverty must be tackled from the foundations. The solutions should benefit not only individuals, but the nation.

I’ve observed the feeling. To say that the the feeling must be “fixed” is arrogant beyond measure.

[quote=“Frew, post:20, topic:300”]
Technology is meant to liberate us from the drudgery of long hours of work, …[/quote]This thread is about poverty. Does poverty spring from “the drudgery of long hours of work”?

[quote=“Frew, post:20, topic:300”] My experience of unemployment doesn’t gel with your observations. I am a musician by vocation and having spare time to rehearse is important to me.[/quote]My experience is of thousands of people over several years. Is yours representative or are you, like those who pretend that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1998, extrapolating from an outlier?

[quote=“Frew, post:20, topic:300”]Every full-time job I ever had required 3 hours travel a day. Work completely consumed my life due to 12 hours a day being taken up with traveling, waiting for trains or working. I now work part time locally and despite the lower income I am much happier than I was working full time.[/quote]Been there, done that. After 15 years of 12 and a half hour days, I retired at 58. Just didn’t have another seven years in me.

Tony Abbott would say that the problem was with where you chose to live.

Is your solution for the poor or for you?

There’s some interesting points raised here.

David, I appreciate this is a reasonable issue you are raising. I accept being unemployed must have a negative psychological impact on some people that perhaps only meaningful employment can solve, but I wonder if factors like social isolation or the stigmatisation of the unemployed aren’t major contributors to this? So much of our society has sought to demean the unemployed and create a social expectation that one must be employed that this must surely influence the way many unemployed people look upon their situation. If we had a society that wasn’t so eager to denigrate jobseekers and characterise them all as ‘dole bludgers’ would the psychological impact of unemployment be so bad?

If the psychological impact of unemployment is indeed a major concern, then I wonder how our society will adapt to a likely future where technological advances may significantly reduce the amount of meaningful employment available, irrespective of government intervention.

Personally I do agree there’s a lot of potential to create many jobs in major government projects that I’d support. High speed rail, the NBN, renewable energy infrastructure, undergrounding power lines in high fire risk areas, just to name a few, and sure I’d fully support an Australian space programme. Simply seeking government projects that create more jobs though isn’t the same as seeking to implement a government scheme that guarantees employment to all, which would be a different matter to simply seeking to increase the number of jobs available through government investment.

I’d also feel the need to point out there though that there’s other government investment done in the name of jobs that I don’t support, such as building expensive military hardware. I also worry when people talk about jobs as an imperative because it so often morphs into justification for opposing environmental protection, such as in the demands to protect jobs in fossil fuel industries and those who talk of securing employment for ‘the next generation of coal miners’ and such (there shouldn’t be a next generation of coal miners!). I’m not suggesting you’re making these arguments, but just pointing out where some may see the logic as leading.

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ISTM there’s at least two axes here: Is the psychological impact of unemployment due to not receiving money, or due to not feeling like you’re achieving anything? Or due to something else (combination of factors, etc. etc.)?

Thought experiment: Imagine technological advances were such that basic necessities (food, clothing, …) could be produced en mass, and this production was relatively cheap and employed almost nobody (robots!). What would society do with all that stuff? Give it only to the people with cash (of which there would be progressively less, due to less people actually needing to work to produce this stuff)? Or transition to some other type of economy not largely based around money? Where then does one obtain a sense of achievement or meaning?

(If my nuttery is veering too far into fantasy land here, feel free to bounce replies to a separate thread)

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The economics of “job creation” is fraught. Large infrastructure projects are funded by tax, and the tax reduces income, and the reduced income leads to less consumer spending and lower job creation elsewhere in the economy. Consumption taxes probably have less harmful effects on job creation, but they are also more regressive because poorer people spend a larger share of their income on consumption. The best way I know of to sponsor job creation is to tax things like coal exports (a very low employing/high polluting industry) and to use that money to invest in high-employing/low polluting industries like renewable energy.

Automation of huge numbers of jobs is coming at us like a bullet too. Nobody really knows how that will affect things, but the job-growth industries of the future will likely be healthcare, education, tourism… areas that are relatively hard to automate and also likely to benefit from people having more free time.

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I think there is a psychological aspect of this independent of actual income.
It’s about recognition by fellow humans.
It’s not about having a job in itself.
It’s about having some actual autonomous agency in your life.
Doing something, anything really that you chose to do, with a sense of purpose and engagement and being seen to do so.

Work-for-the-dole is missing the agency aspect of this, which is why it just feels a bit off.
You don’t have a choice. It is imposed upon you. There is no autonomy.

There ends up being something to lose for a charity project taking on work-for-the-dole staff,
Firstly, they get a lot of people who don’t want to be there and worse, actually feel bad about being there.
Second, people who actually volunteered would find themselves acquiring the stigma of the work-for-the-dole’ers unless they walked around like a complete dick-head wearing an “I Actually volunteered for this” tee shirt.

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There’s far more to poverty than money. As the author of the subject article points out, the poor don’t necessarily make the most prudent life choices. They do things that will probably shorten their lives, or at least damage them in the longer term. In my experience, that can be attributed to a perception that the lives they’re living aren’t worth optimising. The all too common extreme reaction is suicide.

The hazards of sit-down money are well documented. Those hazards aren’t restricted to any one recipient group. At the extreme, providing the necessities of life can fund the means to end the life.

Income support plays a necessary part, but it isn’t a complete answer. Making sure that people can stay alive is part of the solution, but they need to feel that there are reasons to live; that they are worth their keep.

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What about non economic activities though? When there is no paid job, or anything that benefits the LNP model of economy needing to be done, why can’t a person devote time to endeavors that aid the spirit, but perhaps not the economy?

[quote=“aisehino, post:31, topic:300”]
What about non economic activities though? When there is no paid job, or anything that benefits the LNP model of economy needing to be done, why can’t a person devote time to endeavors that aid the spirit, but perhaps not the economy?
[/quote]That’s why, when the term “employment” caused confusion, I chose “meaningful occupation”. If the occupation is meaningful to the person, then I believe there’s a case for facilitating it.

I reckon the potential benefits to society, economy and individuals are substantial.

Chipping in after a few weeks and skimming a bit, so apologies if I miss something.

That 1970 quote is inspired and even more true today. Instragram is 11 people and toppled the Kodak empire that had six digits of employees. We can 3D print functioning cars. As much as the political mainstream love to laugh at the idea, the concept of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” is tantalisingly close.

As for the psychological effects, having some experience with living paycheck to paycheck (or Centrelink to Centrelink) i would hesitate to say that it’s the money that causes the emotional impact, but more the feeling that without money you’re not worth anything to anyone with the power to improve your condition. Right now I’m a house dad and I find it very satisfying work because the reward was never going to be financial. When I was looking for work it was the feeling of worthlessness that got to me; specifically of not being able to play the game in the way that the MBAs doing the interviewing expected me to.

AndrewDowning also makes an excellent point about work-for-the-dole schemes being rather pointless. In a society that’s rapidly automating anything resembling a low-skill entry level job what is the volunteer position going to teach them, exactly? I honestly suspect the measure is simply there to ensure a steady number of people circulating through the volunteer sector to plug holes that the inevitable cuts to the social safety net will cuase, but I realise that particular musing is a tad off topic.

Whatever you do has to thread a lot of needles. It should deal with problem of inadequate centrelink benefits, meet the desire for autonomous work, and link the fact that there’s a lot of work to do and a lot of idle hands. A job guarantee scheme might work. Something that guarantees 10 minimum wage hours per week to all comers with a choice between environmental work or infrastructure maintenance or maybe something like an expanded army reserve. You would need $5-6 billion a year but at least the trains would run on time.

In regards to autonomous work.

One minor thing to add, is the possible amount of wasted time spent trying to find positions on the side of both the business and the prospective employees. E.g. Companies spending lots of money trying to streamline their employee search. Job seekers missing out on job positions because they didn’t check on enough websites or locations.

So essentially what would it be like if we had a centralised governmental jobseeker registry, where businesses can actively search and request potential jobseekers to send their coverletter and resume to them. You can make it such that the only obligation that unemployed should do is to periodically update their entry. The stigma of using such registry can also be reduced, by not making it exclusive to unemployed but to employed workers as well who may want better future opportunities.

Before I left the Commonwealth Employment Service in the early 1990s, they were working on just that. I even implemented a small system for a regional office. Roughly quantifying experience and skills isn’t terribly difficult.

The only complaint I got was from employers saying that the people I sent were over-qualified. The job-seekers seemed to love it.

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Really? That’s pretty interesting that it seems to be working on your end. I wonder why it never became big. Was there any report on scalability issues of such programs? I imagine such system could get quite tricky when data processing thousands of jobseekers as well as business request, especially with computing power of yesteryear.

I left the CES shortly afterwards. Mine was not the only such project, there were many, confined to individual offices. I believe ideas were being collected for a coordinated effort. Then the CES was disbanded and employment services outsourced.

The trick was to keep the computer systems as simple as possible and let the human element sort out the fine details. It seemed to work.

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