THE PRESS THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 1988. The wages of sin is work

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 12

THE PRESS THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 1988. The wages of sin is work

The Minister of Employment, Mr Goff, has provided a response to this week’s news that the number of unemployed now exceeds 97,000 — up 20,000 in 12 months. It was a response that would have done fiddling Nero proud. The Government, he says, is considering work schemes for “socially alienated” people who pose a threat to the community. As an example of who is being considered for this special chance to work, Mr Goff mentions only glue-sniffers. The Opposition’s spokesman on employment, Mr Winston Peters, and the president of the Council of Trade Unions, Mr Ken Douglas, who became unlikely allies in their condemnation of Mr Goff’s announcement, will not be far from the mark when they describe the probable beneficiaries of the Government’s jobcreation plans as anti-social misfits and villains.

Perhaps a justification on the ground of greatest need is that the need of the community for relief or protection from antisocial activities is greater than the need of people who are equipped for jobs but cannot get them. This would be a nice conflict to debate; but the Goff answer is cold comfort for jobless school-leavers, redundant and displaced workers, and family breadwinners reduced to the ranks of the unemployed by the rapid restructuring of the economy on which the Government has embarked.

Most of these people, understandably, would agree with Mr Peters that it is sick logic indeed to put misanthropic and antagonistic elements from the fringes of society before the interests of tens of thousands of normal, law-abiding people whose ambition and enthusiasm for work is languishing through no fault of their own. The community’s health suffers from their despondency as well. Mr Goff falls back on a recommendation of the Roper committee on violent offending for support. The committee said that the community would be better protected from violent elements if contract work schemes were continued for gangs and other groups that benefited from them in the past. This is an endorsement of a sort; though the Roper committee did not suggest that work schemes for gangs should be thought of in isolation and certainly did not recommend that they should be supported to the exclusion of concern for other unemployed people. The Roper committee reported, for instance, that “it is important to note that violent crime (in New Zealand) began to rise prior to the major increases in unemployment” and that the relationship between violence and unemployment was not a simple one. The reliance that Mr Goff places on the link between unemployment and anti-social behaviour is not altogether misplaced. Not all unemployed people become violent, or turn to crime; but anger and depression triggered by unemployment can lead to family violence, property crimes, suicide, alcoholism, and a range of other personal and community damage. Some might argue that Mr Goff’s acknowledgement of this fact should lead him to pay special attention to the needs of unemployed people who have not become apathetic or anti-social, in order

to prevent them from doing so, rather than concerning himself with those who have shown that they have already opted out of society’s mores and depart from its reasonable expectations. Mr Goff’s problem is the increasingly squeaky wheel of unemployment and a diminishing amount of oil. The Government has resolved that it will not return to largescale work schemes. There is no solution to be offered other than an eventual improvement in the economy that will lead to a growth in job opportunities. This leaves Mr Goff with a limited ability to do anything for employment other than offer perpetual promises of better things to come and excuses for why they have not come yet. Unemployment continues to show an upward trend and the peaks that Mr Goff and his predecessors confidently predict every so often come and go not as peaks but as further rungs on an ever-extending ladder.

The assurance that the proposed schemes will have improved accountability over the contract work schemes abolished last year under a cloud of mismanagement and excessive costs is welcome and necessary. Whether Mr Goff can deliver on this assurance to the long-suffering taxpayer remains to be seen; but there is another objection to the Government subsidy of groups so that they may equip themselves to tender for work contracts. The contracts they are successful in obtaining, and the work that they do, is not necessarily extra work. In most instances it is work that would have been done by someone else — a small contractor employing half a dozen people, maybe — who could have got the contract if only there had not been a commercially unrealistic tender from a work scheme.

This happened under the old programme and it is hard to see why it will not happen again. The result is to take work from existing contractors and, rather than increasing job opportunities, it merely reallocates them from people in work to Mr Goff’s “socially alienated.” The community is no better off, unemployment is not really reduced, and it is highly likely that the damage caused to those who miss out on work is greater and more lasting than any benefit to the fortunate few from the fringe that the Government has helped into a job for a while. If the chances were high that the experience would have a redeeming and lasting effect, or that the work would continue unaided, the reaction to the plan might be a little warmer.

Unemployment is a global affliction and no-one could expect Mr Goff to find a miracle cure. It seems generally accepted, however, that New Zealand has plenty of jobs for people with the proper skills, but the skilled are in short supply. Rather than throwing a few job crumbs to the fringes of society, Mr Goff and his department would do better to establish more precisely what these skills lacking in New Zealand are, and which industries are likely to prosper, then, at least, when yet another scheme is proposed to “better fit people for a job” there will be a fair chance that the best possible choices for training and experience will be made.