The jobs boom is leaving some people behind Media Man Int

The jobs boom is leaving some people behind - 18th October 2018

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Harsh changes to the safety net over the past 20 years, new barriers to young people accessing Newstart, and the growth of the Work for the Dole program have done nothing but hurt people who are looking for work. CREDIT: MARINA NEIL

By Kasy Chambers

Work in Australia is changing.

People are working longer and retiring later. Some do this because they want to, but most do it because they have to.

Work is becoming more casual. For the first time, less than half of all Australians are in full-time work. About one in four are working casually.

And as the economy changes, some jobs are disappearing altogether.

One group is bearing the brunt of these changes more than any other – people looking for low-skilled, entry-level jobs. Anglicare Australia’s Jobs Availability Snapshot, released on Thursday, shows what the job market is really like for this group. These are people who are looking for work, but who might not have education or recent work experience.

Our research shows two clear trends. First, low-skilled jobs have been drying up. The government’s own figures show that they have halved as a percentage of job advertisements since 2006. At the same time more and more jobs are being aimed at people with advanced skills. In the month of our Snapshot, 39 percent of vacancies called for a degree or at least five years’ work experience.

And second, there are just not enough of these jobs for those who need them. We found that for every low-skilled job at the entry level, there are at least four jobseekers who might be competing for them.

As always, some parts of the country fare worse than others. The situation is especially tough in South Australia and Tasmania as they face major economic changes. In South Australia, eight of these jobseekers are competing for each suitable job. And in Tasmania, there are a staggering twelve jobseekers for each suitable job.

This might seem overwhelming, but these numbers are conservative. The people who need these jobs the most often find themselves competing with recent graduates, retrenched workers, and other candidates who apply for positions below their skill level.

Put simply, this problem is even worse than it looks.

These are the people being left out of the story we’re being told about jobs in Australia – that we’re in the middle of a jobs boom, and that the inability to find a job is an individual failure instead of a structural one.

Skilled workers have more options. But for those without work experience, education, or the long-term unemployed, the picture is dark. Glumly those who do find a job can end up in roles that don’t meet their needs. We found that 1.13 million people were underemployed – almost one in ten people in the workforce.

Perhaps more than anything, the research shows that our endless wave of welfare crackdowns has failed. Harsh changes to the safety net over the last twenty years, new barriers to young people accessing Newstart, and the growth of the Work for the Dole program have done nothing but hurt people who are looking for work.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, then our obsession with welfare crackdowns has become pathological. Just this year Parliament created a demerit system for Centrelink recipients and began forcing people to run down their savings before they can get help.

This will trap people in poverty instead of helping them into work – but considering revelations that some in government wanted to end payments for people under 30 altogether, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

We must stop forcing people onto an endless hamster wheel of job searching, competing for jobs that just aren’t there. If we’re serious about helping people, we need to raise the rate of Newstart and Youth Allowance. People looking for work should not be trapped in poverty while they search for a job, and current rates are so low that they are a barrier to landing a job in and of themselves.

We also need to fix Australia’s broken employment services system. By any measure the beleaguered Jobactive network is failing, taking an average of five years to find work for those who need the most help. Instead we should move towards a tailored approach for each person.

This means working in partnership with people taking into account their situation, strengths and goals. It means helping people find the right training programs and jobs for them. And it means supporting them to stay in work – something our current system is failing to do.

This government likes to say that the best form of welfare is a job.

If that’s true, then it behoves us to make sure the jobs are actually there for the people who need them most.

Kasy Chambers is the executive director of Anglicare Australia.

(The Sydney Morning Herald)