Top-of-cliff choices on jobs

LAST week we were looking for a circuit breaker to counter the institutionalised army of very expensive government agencies trying to address myriad bottom-of-the-cliff casualties of social disengagement. A circuit breaker to divert the back-end billions into pro-active programmes able to neutralise highly costly downstream dysfunction. We're looking for a Win-Winz solution.

This circuit-breaker is in having permanent availability of a suite of (at least) three-day-a-week Government-sponsored productive jobs.

Not a revolutionary concept, but the key word is "permanent". And there is no shortage of worthy projects which can provide those jobs. For some people the term "work scheme" conjures up sugar-bag years, picks and shovels.

Nothing need be further from the truth. The Great American socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt proved this many decades ago with a New Deal that powered America out of the Great Depression through job options in diverse fields including the arts.

Even the more labour-intensive projects still require support staff that promote a wide range of skills - accounts keepers, co-ordinators, drivers, machine operators, and the like. Not "Work For the Dole".

Just simply "work". Work with all the relevant terms, remuneration, conditions and responsibilities that normal employment entails. Within these various projects, there would also be provision for further specialist training, literacy upskilling and so forth.

THE issues are multi-faceted. But the first step is to crack the debilitating trap of dependency - both financial and psychological.

Countless studies testify to the substantial personal and social benefits accruing to gainful consistent engagement and employment. Government will point to slightly lower unemployment and Youth NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) rates. But often somewhat arbitrary application of sickness and invalids' benefits, and "training" courses that are simply bums-on-seats exercises of no interest or ultimate use to the trainees, disguise what is substantial additional disengagement by any other name.

The main problem area this proposed job package addresses is the scarce lower-skills job zone, where a small but significant sector is shut out even here through lack of specific qualifications, skills and jobs themselves. But the key is that there has to be reasonable choice, and incentivised to be financially worthwhile for the participants. But given those conditions, the other side of the coin is that individuals cannot decline all options and still expect to be financially supported by their fellow citizens regardless.

To me, being willing to reasonably participate is part of the social contract of being a citizen.

And good luck and see you later if you're not.

I'm not sure about you, but I find it scandalous that - to give just one example - we rely on about 40,000 pickers from overseas to harvest our crops and fruit when we pay a battalion of disengaged to stay at home and become even more so.

THE main outcome is a coterie permanently removed from what most consider the dynamics necessary for a healthy and organic society - living in what is in effect a virtual reality.

Not a particularly pleasant virtual reality, but still one nevertheless, at the extreme end of which state-subsidised individuals so disconnected see nothing untoward about sticking a 3-year-old in a spinning clothes drier for want of anything better to do.

Ditto most of our tragic domestic and child violence stats. Look closely, and generally at the bottom will be one of the disengaged and frustrated, alienated and angry.

Full employment is not some sort of unreachable mirage. It's what we had only a couple of generations ago. But we need these job options to break what has become an entrenched cycle in this critical sector. Jobs that are not ends in themselves but stepping stones to promote engagement, and build the basic skills, self-confidence and self-motivation that will facilitate later transition into the private sector.