Sunday 8 July 2018

Australia 2018: just when registered jobseekers thought it couldn’t get any worse



The Guardian, 2 July 2018:

All across the country unemployed Australians are today bracing themselves for more stress and suffering, as the Coalition unleashes its new needlessly cruel benefit sanctions regime.

Starting 1 July, the Turnbull government is granting job agencies new, unprecedented powers to punish Newstart recipients for failing to comply with gruelling compliance demands.

Under this new “demerit point” system, agencies will now impose payment suspensions if (they believe) jobseekers are behaving inappropriately, or failing to attend appointments and activities like Work for the Dole without a“reasonable excuse”.

 Alarmingly, jobseekers currently battling drug or alcohol related illnesses are now no longer (“reasonably”) exempt from activities, nor safe from financial punishment.
Until 1 July 2018, Centrelink has been able to overturn any job agency penalties if it deems that they’re unfair or will lead to “extreme poverty”. It will lose much of this power. Now, job agencies will be able to punish their unemployed clients without government regulation or oversight.

Unemployed workers will also lose significant powers of appeal. They will have to passively accept many of the decisions ordered against them. In short, privately owned job agencies – many of which are for-profit private companies – will wield unlimited, unchecked power over the unemployed.

Under this system, unemployed workers can be completely cut off Newstart if they refuse to attend unsafe work for the dole activities. Even though 64% of sites are failing to meet basic safety standards, jobseekers will be forced to accept any dangerous, hostile conditions they’re met with.

Given that government funding to job agencies is tied to outcomes, such as placing participants into work for the dole, there is little incentive for job agencies to treat unemployed workers fairly. On the contrary – there are significant financial incentives to abuse unemployed workers. 

Already this abuse has reached crisis proportions.

In 2015-16, job agencies imposed a record 2m financial penalties on the unemployed.

As noted by the National Welfare Rights Network, roughly half of these penalties were found to be unfair and were rejected by Centrelink. This means that in 2015-16, more than 1 million unemployed people had their payments cut off when they did nothing wrong.

This kind of error rate is staggering – in any other sector, it would surely result in a royal commission. Earlier this year, a suspected 5% error rate at the Australian Tax Office resulted in an immediate government investigation.

Clearly, a culture of lawlessness and unaccountability already pervades the employment services sector. Under the new “demerit point’”scheme, this $10bn industry will enjoy even more freedom to run riot. The 800,000 unemployed workers attending job agencies will be left to fend for themselves.....

The author of this article is Jeremy Poxon, media officer for the Australian Unemployed Workers Union. 

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