Back on the job creation scheme

Sylvia French (left) with fellow Papakura town ambassador Edward Mulligan. French got the work scheme job off her own bat and was made a supervisor after just two months. Picture / Dean Purcell

Sylvia French is just 31 years old but she has already spent eight years of her young life on the dole.

She is bright, enthusiastic and responsible. Last month, just two months after she became a Papakura town centre "ambassador", she was promoted to supervise the other six ambassadors - all drawn from the dole queue when she was.

She got the job on her own initiative, after seeing the first two batches of ambassadors plucked from the dole.

"It's been awesome," she says. "I just like to look after people, make sure they're okay."

Yet until three months ago, French had not worked since she had a job in a bakery when she left school.

"I've been on the dole for well over eight years. Before that I was doing courses."

Work and Income paid her the dole but, by her account, did nothing until recently to help her find work.

"I went there and said, 'Any jobs?' They said, 'Come back next week, we might have some jobs on the board."

National welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins, whose electorate office is in Papakura, believes New Zealand should never have allowed a bright young person like French to waste the prime years of her life on the dole.

"We have been participants in a 30-year experiment - an experiment in rights as opposed to responsibility, an experiments in entitlements rather than obligations, and an experiment in welfare dependency," she told the National Party conference last month.

If National wins the coming election, that experiment is about to come to a shuddering halt. "Under National", the party promises, "ongoing taxpayer support (at the level of the unemployment benefit) will be conditional on unemployed people undertaking community work or approved training.

"We will focus initially on those under 25 and on the long-term unemployed," it says. Collins suggests tasks such as "graffiti removal and some planting of trees" and street patrols.

National's likely coalition partner, New Zealand First, also promises to "reintroduce the community wage policy requiring recipients to make a contribution to their community".

It would direct the unemployed to build homes for low-income people on multiple-owner Maori land, and encourage local councils to use jobless people for "conservation and weed and pest control activities, and for beautification and maintenance of waterways, beaches, parks and roadsides".

Unemployed youths would be enrolled in conservation or youth service corps, industry training, seasonal employment or, "for those at risk, military-type discipline training".

The parties' tough line scares even keen young people like French, who admits she became a street ambassador only because it operates under a work scheme, Job Connection, which pays employers $380 a week for up to six months.

The Papakura Town Centre Association passes that on to the ambassadors, giving them a lot more, even after tax, than the single adult dole of $168.59.

Asked if she would have taken the job if it just paid the dole, French replies: "I probably wouldn't, because we do a lot of hard work walking and making sure the town is safe. If you're only going to get paid $130, I'd find me another job."

Work for the dole is not new. It was tried by National and NZ First the last time they were in power, from 1996-99.

This time the context is different. The unemployment of the 90s has turned into a labour shortage. In the year to March 1996, 15.5 per cent of Maori and 4.6 per cent of Pakeha were unemployed. By March this year, Maori unemployment had almost halved to 8.8 per cent and Pakeha joblessness was 3.1 per cent.

Eighteen to 24-year-olds on benefits have reduced significantly in the past five years, from 19 per cent to 12 per cent. Those in the same age group in tertiary education have jumped from 27 per cent in 1996 to 39 per cent. But the total number of people on benefits (excluding pensions) has come down rather less, from 12.5 per cent of all adults to 9.5 per cent, as lower unemployment has been partly offset by rising numbers on sickness and invalids' benefits.

Peter McCardle, a National MP who switched to NZ First and became Employment Minister in 1996, says he pushed for work schemes because in his previous work as an Employment Service manager, he "saw a lot of people losing their motivation and self-esteem" on the dole.

It took two years to implement McCardle's vision, and then it lasted just a year until Labour won power and scrapped it. But for that one year, 1998-99, the unemployment benefit became officially a "community wage" for which job-seekers were liable to do up to 20 hours a week of "Community Work" or training.

Workers got an extra $21 a week for travel expenses, with up to a further $20 if required. The work had to be additional to the organisation's usual work, had to benefit the community or the environment, and had to develop the workers' skills or work ethic.

An evaluation by Work and Income in 2001, released to the Herald under the Official Information Act, found that 144,050 people were put through the various work and training schemes between January 1998 and July 2000, including 29,641 people on Community Work, at a cost of $202.1 million.

It found that subsidised private sector jobs, such as Job Connection used by the Papakura ambassadors, did get jobless people into jobs. Job Connection workers were 39 per cent more likely than others to be off Work and Income's books two years later.

The main public sector subsidised job scheme, Taskforce Green, gave people a 16 per cent better chance than the average of being off the Government's books within two years.

But people on the two schemes which simply paid the dole, Community Work and its predecessor, Community Taskforce, were 7 per cent less likely than similar job-seekers to move off welfare within two years. The schemes "locked in" people while they were working on them, and often led them on to further schemes, leaving them less time to look for fully paid jobs.

Another evaluation in 1999 found that schools were the biggest users of Community Taskforce, taking on job-seekers as teacher aides, in libraries and maintaining school grounds.

Perhaps surprisingly, most of the jobless enjoyed the work. More than half said they would have liked to stay longer when their six months were up.

"This finding suggests a degree of reluctance on behalf of job-seekers to move on from a Community Taskforce project if their future options are less desirable or enjoyable," the report commented. "They may also not be focusing on finding other work while on Community Taskforce."

Many voluntary organisations and some councils boycotted community work because it was forced labour.

However, the groups that took part in community work believe it worked. Long-time community worker Peter Wyatt helped to create the Tauranga Employment Trust in 1996, when almost 800 Tauranga people had been unemployed for more than four years.

"We took 500 of those over the time we existed, about four years, and about 80 per cent of them, as a result of being with us variously between three and 12 months, were subsequently placed into permanent employment or full-time training," he says.

Many helped to convert a former historic village into what is now the Compass Community Village for voluntary groups.

In Hamilton, former mayor Margaret Evans says that when she visits the Hamilton Gardens even today, people who helped to create the gardens under council-sponsored work schemes come up and say, "We worked on this."

Lawrence Kovaleski, who ran the council's schemes, says they gained such a good reputation that employers wanted to employ people who had been on them. Job-seekers trimmed overhanging trees, repaired footpaths, worked in the museum and the library and beautified the riverbank.

These services contributed something worthwhile for the community, just like any "real" job. As the 2001 official evaluation noted, the schemes were not set up solely to get the jobless into permanent jobs, but also to give them a chance to keep contributing something to society.

Collins says the mere threat of work for the dole drove many people back to work. She cites a study of Australia's Work for the Dole scheme, which found that a third of those referred to it never turned up. Thirty per cent of those referred to the scheme, whether or not they actually worked on it, left the benefit system, compared with only 17 per cent of those who were not referred to it.

Collins has started consulting local councils about National's scheme and, when asked who she talked to, names Porirua Mayor Jenny Brash. Brash, a former workforce planner for the Health Ministry, is a believer in equipping young people with the skills they need.

But she says she would hate to see youngsters just working for the dole.

"Maybe as a last, last resort. But there are an awful lot of initiatives and programmes that are beginning to bear fruit and need to be tried first."