Unemployed said to be getting poor deal

Press, 5 October 1984, Page 5

Unemployed said to be getting poor deal

The unemployed get “a very poor deal” from Government departments, said the former director of the Social Welfare Department, Mr Charles Waters, in Christchurch yesterday. Sections in the Labour Department and the Social Welfare Department which dealt with unemployment should be merged into one department to improve the service to the unemployed, he said.

Mr Waters, who is director of the Canterbury Aged People’s Welfare Council, was presenting a paper on the consumer’s view of the Public Service to the New Zealand Institute of Public Administration conference.

Government departments treated unemployment as two separate problems. The Labour Department tried to find work and Social Welfare paid out the dole, he said.

“There is no easy answer to unemployment, but surely there must be a less cumbersome way of dealing with it. The client has only

one problem — no job and therefore no money,” he said.

Efforts to provide easier access to the departments in Christchurch had been unco-ordinated. The departments had set up suburban offices, but so far only Papanui had both a Social Welfare office and a Labour Department office. Other suburbs had either one or the other. The Labour Government must have recognised the need to bring the services together, since it had appointed a Minister of Employment as well as a Minister of Labour. Mr Waters said he hoped it would follow that move by giving the Minister of Employment, Mr Burke, a department of his own.

“The unemployed deserve it and the tax-paying public deserve it as well,” he said.

Public servants sometimes forgot that the consumer was “at the bottom of the pile.” Mr Waters said that as a public servant he

had wondered at times who was there to serve whom and whether district departments were there to serve the head office, or viceversa.

The Public Service had to make sure that its information, forms, and correspondence were clear, simple, and accurate. There bad been problems when young, inexperienced staff were put in the “front line,” dealing with the public. The State Services Commission had been reluctant to recognise the importance of counter staff and to give them proper grading. Office facilities were important because that was often where the public had the first contact with a Government department. Facilities in Christchurch had been improved, but there were still problems. The worst was the State Insurance Office in Worcester Street, which lacked adequate public reception space and provided little privacy for customers.