Unite calls for mandatory jobs scheme participation to be axed

One of the country’s largest unions has told Social Protection Minister Joan Burton that the mandatory requirement for jobseekers to participate in Gateway placements or face a potential cut to their benefit is “unjustified and onerous”.

In a letter to the minister, Unite’s regional secretary Jimmy Kelly said mandatory participation should be withdrawn.

He also said compulsory job placement schemes displace work paid at market wages.

Under the Gateway initiative, dole claimants who have been on the live register for more than a year are paid an extra €20 per week on top of their jobseeker’s allowance to work for local authorities.

An average of 19.5 hours per week is on offer in areas including: village enhancement schemes; landscaping; tourism ambassadors; animal control; and libraries. Each placement lasts 22 months.

The Department of Social Protection has said it selects participants at random. The scheme has been slow to take off — up to February 21, only 60 of the 3,000 placements to be made available had been taken up, though this has been blamed on administrative delays.

Yesterday, the department confirmed that failure by a dole claimant to take up a work opportunity under Gateway can lead to loss or reduction of social welfare benefits.

Generally in such cases, the department would first reduce the person’s benefits for failure to engage and, if refusal continued, the payments would be stopped for a period.

A reduction could be up to €44 per week and a payment disqualification could last nine weeks.

Mr Kelly said the sanctions for failing to participate were “unjustified and onerous”. He also said that the introduction of compulsion into the Youth Guarantee “can only undermine its effectiveness and appeal, especially where young people may be forced into unsuitable positions or programmes that fail to provide effective training”.

Mr Kelly added: “There is little doubt that compulsory job placement programmes will displace work paid at market wages. If there is work to be done in both the private and public sectors, then employers should respond by employing labour.

“However, labour that is provided for ‘free’ through mandatory programmes not only negates the need to hire labour, it has the potential to create distortions between companies. This will have a negative impact on the economy and public finances. And the participant may well be caught in a situation where they are forced to do the same work as an employed staff member, but for free.”

Unite also argued that mandatory programmes are unnecessary. It said that, after suffering one of the highest levels of youth unemployment in Europe during the early 1990s, the country actually had one of the highest levels of employment among young people a decade later.

“The reason for this is fairly straightforward — an increasing number of jobs became available,” said Mr Kelly.

“The unemployed of all ages do not need workfare — they need real jobs. Compulsory employment schemes treat the un-employed as the problem — whereas the problem is that there are 28 jobseekers for every vacancy.”