The long term unemployed – economy not psychology
The ACRS seminar will provide insight for retailers
Recent debate over unemployment and the degree to which people who are unemployed need to make active decisions to move from welfare to work have highlighted a range of flawed assumptions that underpin that so-called debate. After outlining a number of individual cases, the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, noted in her speech to the Sydney Institute, ‘I see a person, a person who can work. I offer only opportunity. I ask only responsibility in return.’ In these words we see a return to an old blame the victim approach which turns major structural economic problems into individual, psychological problems.
A skilled, functioning labour market is the product of the collective national efforts of school education, on-the-job training, as well as post secondary education such as TAFE and the University sector. In all of these areas decisions are made about resourcing, and about the level of intake, the nature of selection and the kinds of typical and special entry programs that enable people to move into formal training or education.
These decisions are shaped by the available resources and the particular capacities of the specific organisation. For the federal government to claim that the issue is simply giving people an appropriate push into the right opportunity or berating them to change their attitude is an appalling blame the victim approach. The long term unemployed are the clear product of decades of under-investment and poor planning by governments and major companies.
Take the federal government for example. Real rates of investment in the University sector per student have fallen dramatically in the last twenty years. Students and Universities now pick up a much larger proportion of the funding. Less than 1% of Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) is spent on higher education. School completion rates are languishing compared to other OECD countries, and those with lower levels of education have a greater chance of becoming long term unemployed. Total levels of spending in education is less than 5% of GDP which is below the OECD average and well below some of our trading partners including New Zealand, Britain and the US.
The federal Coalition can take no comfort from the above comments. The inexorable shift towards disinvestment dramatically accelerated during the Howard years. As the Labor party’s own election material in 2007 noted, Australia was falling behind many OECD countries. Investment in pre-school education was among the lowest in the OECD (along with South Korea). The returns from the resources boom were returned in tax cuts, while rates of private investment in education rose appreciably to counter the falling government contribution.
In the case of the major mining companies now decrying the labour shortage, this is the same industry that dramatically cut back its regular investment in on-the-job training. Apprenticeships have been cut since a high in the late 1970s. Whereas large mining companies once had significant intakes of apprentices in all areas of their operations, the norm now is paired down firms with smaller contract workforces and less investment in long term labour supply and training.
After two decades of under-investment in training and education we are now supposed to believe that this all the unemployed’s fault. A workforce is made as much as or even more than it chooses its own destiny. People pick up opportunities where they are available and where their families and peers find realistic options for the future. If some of the long-term unemployed have very low expectations, this is only the result of the material circumstances that present to them.
And if the Prime Minister is seriously advocating fly in-fly out as a solution to the geographical mismatch between labour supply and labour demand then she needs to talk to communities in North Queensland, the Goldfields in Western Australia, and elsewhere, where fly in-fly out is creating serious family and community dislocation. Local communities are emptied out of their skilled workers, their volunteers, and physically present parents. It would be far better for workers to be offered incentives to relocate, and became active citizens in mining towns, with lives beyond paid work that can encompass community participation in sport and other volunteer organisations.
A labour market is a complex amalgam of government policy and funding, private sector practice and individual choice. So far we’ve heard all about an individual’s responsibility – but the least powerful and most vulnerable people in our community are not responsible for decades of government underinvestment. Nor are they responsible for new employment patterns which reduce corporations down to a basic shell, which seek the cheapest workers on a contract basis all working 12 hour shifts where possible. Responsibility for those actions rests elsewhere so let’s hear from those forces in the economy that really shape the labour market. What are they doing to address the needs of the long-term unemployed?
Professor Erik Eklund is a historian who has been studying the lives of working people in mining and industrial towns throughout Australia. His work, Steel Town: the making and breaking of Port Kembla was published in 2002 by Melbourne University Press and won the NSW Premier’s Prize for Community and Regional History in 2003.
A major new monograph on society and identity in Australian mining towns will be published later this year.