The Real Dole Bludgers :article removed - eds? : Melbourne Indymedia

I'd rather discuss it in public!

Then show the public what part of the article is incorrect? Point the general public to the specific part that someone said was incorrect?

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The Real Dole Bludgers

Unemployment figures scandal story ( longish)

On the surface it was not too bad an experience. I got a nice redundancy package and almost immediately was able to gain employment in the new privatised sector at a higher salary. Financially it was good. I was deemed to have performed so well for my first “provider” that, when they failed to get a renewal on their contract, I was able to get a new job that was effectively a promotion, managing one of the suburban outlets of my second. Nor, on paper at least, had I thus been promoted to the level of my incompetence (an ambition I eagerly look forward to fulfilling). I got good results in this role, was made “employee of the month” and won generous, tax-free bonuses.

But if I hadn’t escaped the Network to return to study in 2001 I would be a basket case by now. The feeling of profound self-disgust I experienced towards the end will forever haunt me. I never did anything mean or nasty. I committed no fraud. But I was part of a giant sham – a system of shameless plundering of the government coffers allied to a petty intimidation of the unemployed. I had to escape; and, despite four years of no income and financial difficulties as I started again at uni at the ripe old sage of 40, I have never regretted doing so.

The CES had been a curate’s egg of an organisation. I had the good luck to work for one of the parts that was good. My particular office – Footscray CES – was mainly staffed by outgoing, energetic, and good-humoured people who cared for our unemployed “clients” and saw the red tape that bound up our ability to help them as something to be cut whenever we had the available bureaucratic scissors at hand to do so. I was the union delegate for most of my time there and saw the membership climb nearly to 100% around disputes centered mainly around staffing. We were one of the busiest offices in Australia and one of my favourite experiences as a delegate was a visit during a national staffing dispute by Justice Gallagher (no relation to Norm) of the Arbitration Commission. I had tipped the union off regarding the best time to come – I knew we’d have queues out the door just before lunchtime on a Monday. And so, duly, late on a busy Monday morning, we had a delegation of seven suits/shoulder pads – three from the union and four from senior management in Canberra – hovering uselessly around my desk in amongst the chaos. Their attention was all focused on the spectacle of the learned judge pretending to be unemployed whilst I used the training database to show him what was involved in registering a new jobseeker. Yes! The computer had an occupational code for “Judge”. It even had one for “Prime Minister”, as I recall.
A small postscript: Justice Gallagher left his hat on my desk, and I received a phone call an hour later from the state secretary of the CPSU urgently requiring me to return it to the city. We still had a queue out the door, but a judge’s hat takes precedence over the unemployed, so management concurred that I should deliver it ASAP. I was even given a cab voucher to deliver the said item – a deer stalker.

One of the bonuses of unionising the place was the way we were able to virtually stamp out the nefarious practice of “breaching”. The Hawke government had ratcheted up the responsibilities/powers of the CES in the late 1980s by introducing a series of compulsory interviews for the unemployed. Not trusting CES staff to be sufficiently vicious, they had designed the computer system to automatically generate the letters and to automatically cut off the benefits of the jobseeker if no-one entered in that they had attended the said interview. The victims of this automatic breach would then storm into the office asking why they’d been cut off the dole, and we had the option of upholding or overturning the breach.

In Footscray our first response to any industrial dispute was to ban breaches. That meant that we extended the practice of someone like me – who never did them on principle – to those union members who were at some level open to the “dole-bludger” myth. It’s curious that this never led to any great flak or pressure from management. Nevertheless, we were not the only CES in the country to behave like this. Telling someone to their face that they’re going to be without income when you have the option of accepting their excuse/story and reversing a breach with a few keystrokes is, in any case, not easy. I suspect that the failure of public servants, in relatively secure employment, to be sufficiently vicious to the unemployed was once of the factors in Howard and Kemp’s decision to abolish the CES in 1998.

I soon found that the Job Network ran on entirely different lines. It used the same computer system as the CES – one of the main factors helping people like me get a job. But it was driven by financial rewards theoretically designed to encourage energy and reward success. In practice they led to something more sinister.

The problem is, of course: how do you measure success in the delivery of a service in a way that is quantifiable so that financial rewards are fairly delivered?

The way they worked it out was like this. They identified three things that the CES used to do that they wanted the Job Network to do. The first was a simple job brokerage function. Employers could ring the CES with a vacancy, it would appear on the boards/touch screens and the CES would screen applicants and refer them to the employer. This was incorporated within the Job Network as “Job Placement”. If you had a contract to do this your company would be paid $250 for every person registered as unemployed by Centrelink or yourself (they didn’t have to be on benefits) who was placed in a job by you or the company and worked at least 15 hours in said job.

The second was a thing called a Job Club which the CES never actually did itself – it was contracted out to a third party which was paid a fixed sum to motivate a set number (15 from memory) jobseekers to find work over a set period. We hated this in the CES. It got “good results” on paper because to be eligible for this “assistance” you had only to be registered as unemployed for one day and the organizations paid to do it notoriously tended only to accept those who were clearly going to get a job. Nevertheless, these Job Clubs achieved “good results” on paper (surprise, surprise) and were the one thing the Liberals liked out of the whole Hawke/Keating “Working Nation” paradigm, so they incorporated them within the Job Network as something called “Jobsearch Training”.
The other thing they grabbed out of the old CES was a thing that was introduced to the CES in the last years of its existence by the Keating government – Case Management. This was the idea that anyone who’s been unemployed for too long or is in danger of being so by virtue of a statistically driven definition of “disadvantage” needs a personal “case manager” to act as mentor/slave driver.
I had avoided “case management” in the CES like the plague. There I had the option of working in the “Job Centre” – the front of office section where you dealt with whatever came in off the street. It was the hardest working section, but the most rewarding.

In the Job Network, however, I had no such option. Neither of the “providers” I worked with in the Job Network handled “Jobsearch Training” but they both had contracts to deliver the other two. “Job Placement” was something all Job Network providers had to do, but “Intensive Assistance” (the new name for “Case Management”) was a licence to print money.

It worked like this. The outlet I managed for my second “provider", for instance, had a contractual caseload for “Intensive Assistance” of 300. Centrelink would refer people to us. They would appear on our computer and one minute’s typing from me would generate a letter requiring them to attend an interview or else be breached. At said interview I got them to sign a standardised “agreement” (they had no choice about this) and with a click of the keyboard the company was paid over $1,000 or over $4,000 if the client was designated as especially “disadvantaged” by Centrelink’s computer. The beauty for the Job Network “providers” was that whenever a client left the caseload for any reason they were replaced with a new client and another $1-4,000 signup fee. They left the caseload if they moved sufficiently far away, if they became eligible for a pension, went overseas, died or got a job. So, without doing anything other than make a bunch of people sign a form they had to sign in penalty of breaching, my little office of three staff in Sunshine was able to earn over a million in revenue each year.

The Network was, understandably, structured in such a way as to provide some motivation to try and do something for the clients, over and above just signing them up. They wanted us to get them into work and off benefits. Obviously, if they got a job they would leave the caseload, and this would financially benefit the provider. Also, if they got a job and we were able to find out who the employer was, and got the employer or the jobseeker to confirm after 13 weeks off benefits that they were employed, that was an “outcome”. The company got paid another massive sum for each “outcome” regardless of whether we had anything to do with getting the client the job. More importantly, the proportion of the caseload that became outcomes was the key element in determining whether the company got its lucrative contract renewed. That was the market incentive that was supposed to make us work harder than the old slack public servants in the CES.

In reality, however, it was actually much harder to help people in the Job Network than it had been in the CES. In the CES we had access to stacks of money for training our clients. We had a job subsidy scheme called “Jobstart”. We had plenty of vacancies because a large number of employers still came to the CES. In the Job Network it was much harder. The Job Network companies (even though both the one’s I worked for were supposedly “not-for-profit”) were really stingy and it was really hard to get management to approve funding for any training. The employers had already begun moving towards labour hire companies during the CES. The new Job Network companies, few of which had any public profile, found themselves competing with each other for vacancies from employers who were largely uninterested in using any of us. The poor bunnies who were paid to get vacancies off employers in my experience were mostly reduced to ringing up employers or recruitment agencies which had ads in the papers, and offering to send them some resumes and listing a “job” on the touch screens in the hope that some of those resumes would end up being recruited. That’s why, by the way, anyone who tries looking for jobs on the touch screens at Centrelink will notice identically worded vacancies listed under a number of different Job Network agencies. All they will be doing is forwarding resumes to Adecco or Skilled Engineering.

In trumpeting the supposed success of the Job Network, the statistic most often quoted by the Howard Government is the greater number of placements achieved compared to the CES. This is a bullshit statistic for a number of reasons. The first is that the CES staff, because we weren’t paid for placements, were not always especially diligent in chasing up the results of our vacancies. We did it, but if the employers were hard to get hold of we just closed the vacancy down without entering a placement on the computer. In the Job Network there’s money riding on recording every placement. The second reason is the fact that in the CES we were actually forbidden to source vacancies from private recruitment companies unless they paid us. The government quite sensibly thought it was a bit rich for companies like Adecco, who were charging employers an arm and a leg to recruit, to use a free government service to do the work for them. As I mentioned above, it’s precisely this sort of vacancy which is the source of a large slab of Job Network “placements”.

The third reason is more sinister. Anyone who’s worked in the Job Network will tell you how rife bogus job “placements” are. They range from simple fiddles like recording the details of the placement of anyone you know whose started work to even creating fake jobseekers and placing them with imaginary companies. The department which monitors the Job Network (it changes its name and acronym with every reshuffle, so I’m buggered if I know what it’s called now) used to do random checks and they would catch people out. This happened to people who worked for the same providers as me. But all the Job Network company had to do if they were caught out was pay the money back. As far as I know there has been no prosecution for fraud yet in the Job Network. I just had a conversation with my sister who recently quit working for a Job Network provider and she told me that things haven’t changed. She knows of one company in her area that was forced to pay back $600,000 worth of dodgy claims – there was no prosecution, and their contract was renewed.

[Paragraph deleted as factual basis could not be confirmed - Vera(MIMC)]

So what about me then, I hear you ask? Was I “successful” because I too indulged in an orgy of dubious practices? The answer is, yes and no. I broke no rules and I obeyed the letter of the law – apart from avoiding breaching people. There were a number of occasions when I would have some poor old bastard turn up for an interview and found that they were eligible for Mature Age Allowance (a half-way house between the dole and an Aged Pension). I would sign them up and do the kchink on the computer and write a memo for them to take to Centrelink telling them to “advise this client re eligibility for MAA". Always they disappeared off our caseload within days and were replaced. The government were paying over $1,000 (and often over $4,000) a pop for me to tell Centrelink clients what payment they should be on!

The other main rort (again completely “legitimate”) was if a new client rang up and said: “I’ve got a letter saying I have to attend an interview but I’m starting work next Monday”. I became a past master at persuading them to pop into the office and sign-up before they started. The fig-leaf that covered this was the fact that we would pay them a few hundred bucks, ostensibly to cover expenses associated with starting work – like buying factory boots or whatever. In practice it was a bribe that was paid back by the government in spades – a sign-up fee plus an outcome plus the signup fee of whoever replaced them on the caseload.

My main discovery, however, was a simple and revealing fact about how “performance” was measured. To be eligible for “Intensive Assistance” (the lucrative Job Network version of Case Management, with the big bucks attached) a client had to be assessed by the Centrelink computer system. They were assigned points for a range of characteristics that were deemed, based on statistical data, to make them at risk of being long-term unemployed. All sorts of things were taken into account: country of birth, health problems, language skills, education, whether they had a licence etc. The formula was theoretically sophisticated, and, while it provided every provider with a certain number of “free kicks” – clients who were deemed to be “at risk” who were in fact going to walk easily into a job – these tended to average out. Everyone got the same number of free kicks.

When I started managing a new site for my second Job Network employer all our new sites were offered a bonus based on how many new clients we could sign up in the first month. Ours did the best. Four months later we had the most outcomes, which you would expect, as we had the most clients (an outcome was someone who had been off benefits and in work for 13 weeks). What was more surprising was that we had dramatically more outcomes as a percentage of our caseload. We had been successful and I had no idea why. I was told to deliver a talk to all the other managers about how we’d done it. This was a problem as I knew for a fact that we hadn’t been responsible for anyone getting a job – they had all been “free kicks”.

So I went back and had a look. I found out that most of the people who got jobs were newly unemployed who had been referred to us straight away by Centrelink because they were Vietnamese and had asthma or some similar combination of “at risk” statistical quirks. 40% got a job within one month of signing up and 30% within two weeks. The worst performing office in our company was in a difficult location and had trouble getting clients in for their first sign-up. We signed people up on average two weeks faster than they did. The difference in outcome between the two offices was (you guessed it!) 30%.

In other words, we performed 30% “better” by ringing up people before they got their bureaucratic letter from Centrelink and soft-soaping them into coming in to see us quickly. I would make it clear that I had no interest in hassling them and that I didn’t believe in breaching. They all happily came in. We signed people up really quickly and we got loads of “outcomes”. 30% difference in performance, by the way, was equivalent to the difference between losing your contract and getting a bigger one. My bosses loved me and left me alone.

But all was not honky dory. I still got pressured to breach people. I had clients who wanted and needed help, but I couldn’t provide it because the company wouldn’t pay. Most of my caseload were older blue collar workers (mostly male) who had been Jeffed from the railways or chucked out by the private sector in the “recession we had to have”. They were over 50, had crook backs, spoke English as a second language and, after working 30 years for crap wages and paying taxes, were forced to jump through hoops to be paid a pittance. It began to grate that I was hassling them. It grated more that I could do nothing for the smaller number of young clients with real problems that I had neither the training nor the resources to deal with.

So I escaped.

Now we hear that Sarina Russo is model for women and migrants. Rudd, who will make glorious summer the winter of our Howard discontent, is married to a successful entrepreneur who has made her fortune from the Job Network. It is in little increments like these that we unknowingly accept the disappearance of the gains our forebears fought so hard for. The CES was established in 1947 as a direct consequence of the Chifley Government’s White Paper on Full Employment. Its privatization has turned the task of helping the unemployed into a business opportunity for spivs and sharks to plunder the public coffers.

I know nothing about Therese Rein, Rudd’s wife, or of her business. I know it made $175 million last year and employed 1,300 people. You do the maths – that’s a nice little earner. Maybe she has worked out a magical formula for empowering the victims of neo-liberalism, gaining them employment in the burgeoning resource sector. Or maybe she employs a bunch of under trained clerks to sign people up and go “kching” on a computer.

The important thing is that the only concern anyone in the media appears to have in all of this is the potential of a conflict of interest – not the more basic question of what this means for the labour movement. Will our new leader restore the CES? Does he give a flying fuck about the unemployed? He slept in a car a few times. That gave him “labour values”. We are expected to accept that as a consolation and a proof that he is a lesser evil than John Howard – which is like being called a lesser evil than Dracula. - R.B.

Related:

Charity withdraws from welfare-to-work scheme

"Because if the Government felt the need to have a system to back up, a safety net to cover up the real damage to those people who would get those eight-week penalties, then Centrelink should be the organisation that does the government's dirty work, not the community welfare sector."

http://adelaide.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/19784

Australian government cuts thousands of welfare recipients off benefits

This relentless assault on the most vulnerable sections of society has proceeded without a murmur of opposition from the official political establishment. In fact, the groundwork for it was laid by the Labor Party during its 13 years in office between 1983 and 1996. It is therefore not surprising that Labor has dropped its previous criticisms about sole parents and the disabled being incorporated into the new regime.

http://adelaide.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/57914

Comments:

Please state reason?
by Readers Friday March 30, 2007 at 07:00 AM

The Unemployment figures scandal ?
by R.B. • Sunday March 25, 2007 at 01:36 PM ??

You say, "(hidden on request-eds)" Unemployment figures scandal story ( longish) ??Eds please state the reason! ?It's not good enough to hide things without a reason. ?

We're not stupid people so explain why? Others can understand reasons.

Not many can understand nothing!

ps)
by readers Friday March 30, 2007 at 07:16 AM

If everyone can request an article be removed then what are we posting here for? I'll put it to you another way.

I request all the articles here be removed.

Now will you do that for me? If not why not?