‘Workfare’ – the best way to hide jobless figures

IT seems Social Protection Minister Eamon O Cuiv and the Green Party have finally discovered the long sought-after panacea for unemployment – force people to work for their social welfare payment.

In reality what they are saying is let’s return to the days of the famine roads and cutting nettles, digging ditches, etc. There has been a great deal of spin about “fraud”, “upskilling” “smart economies” and other nonsense from Mr O Cuiv, et al, throughout the recession and prior to the announcement of this scheme.

This type of scheme has had an inglorious history. When all the nonsense is stripped away, rest assured that the aims (and the reality) of the proposed ‘workfare’ scheme will be as follows:

- Participants in the proposed scheme will not be counted as unemployed, thus making the unemployment statistics look better. This has always been the primary aim of this type of project

- The proposed scheme, like all similar schemes, is deliberately designed to make the unemployed feel ashamed and to portray all of the them as fraudsters and scroungers. Successive social welfare ministers have consistently stated that welfare fraud is quite low anyway, and this is true, so why do the department, the media and assorted politicians keep going on about it as if it was a huge problem? Don’t they trust the social welfare inspectors?

- The scheme is really designed to force people to emigrate (especially graduates), thus ‘exporting’ the unemployment problem, as our politicians have done with so many of the nation’s problems through the years. With all this in mind, you can rest assured the scheme will do none of the following:

- Match highly skilled/qualified unemployed people with jobs where they will actually use their skills and qualifications, thus offering them some hope of progression to more substantive employment in the future.

- Help economic recovery

Tim Buckley

Bowling Green

White Street

Cork