Not everybody wants to work, says report

Press, 15 October 1986, Page 2

Not everybody wants to work, says report

PA Tauranga Labour Department policy wrongly assumes that everybody who registers as jobless wants to work, according to a report for the department. The report says the Government should recognise that there will always be a number of unemployed people who do not want to work. These people should be the Social Welfare Department’s responsibility, not that of the Labour Department, it says. Labour Department funds and staff time are being wasted on people who do not want to work or train. The report is the work of a sub-committee of the Tauranga district employment training and advisory committee. This week the subcommittee will examine the finished report before it goes to the committee next week for discussion. A sub-committee member, Mrs Melanie Southworth, said the present system of handling unemployment was based on a fallacy. “The whole present system is based on the premise that everybody who registers with the Labour Department wants to work,” she said. “The truth is that some or most, of the people registered with the s

Labour Department want to work, but everybody has to pretend that they want to work if they want an income. “So the present system does hot identify — because it does not ask who wants to work’ — who wishes to train and who would be willing to be unemployed for a time,” she said. “If you filled every job in New Zealand there would still be some people left over, that is what we are saying. There is going to be unemployment for a time.” Mrs Southworth said people who could maintain a satisfying lifestyle not working should be allowed to do so, because there were not enough jobs to go round. “The bottom line is we are not acknowledging at the moment that we do not have enough work for everybody,” she said. People should be able to “take time out” for activities such as retraining, raising a family, doing voluntary community work, or taking a sabbatical after finishing a job to think about what to do in the future, she said. That system was appropriate in a climate where there was not'full employment.

One requirement for collecting a benefit could be to do a spell of community work each week.