Government’s pie-in-the-sky jobs numbers just don’t add up
Take, for example, the much-hyped jobs’ budget that was announced back in May. After some initial confusion about whether it was a budget or an initiative, Taoiseach Enda Kenny was adamant on at least one point — it would create 100,000 jobs over four years. Of course, his certainty on the issue was in marked contrast to Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton who, less than a month before the announcement, had written to a range of companies asking them how many, if any, jobs they thought could perhaps be created as a result of the new strategy.
Despite the conditional tense employed when questions were being framed and put to businesses, the Government must have got some pretty definitive responses as the jobs’ figure went from an unknown quantum to 100,000 in under four weeks.
Notwithstanding this herculean feat, high-achiever Mr Bruton has gone back to the drawing board and last week announced his intention to draw up an even bigger and better jobs’ initiative.
He made his announcement just one day before 575 Talk Talk workers cleared out their desks in Waterford but I’m sure that was just a happy coincidence and not an attempt to pre-empt the gloomy headlines with a good news story.
Anyway, this latest “comprehensive” jobs’ strategy is going to be the Government’s most ambitious plan yet and will create an incredible 200,000 jobs. Fancy that. Once those jobs are added to all of the jobs that will have been created with the first jobs’ strategy, we’ll practically be back to full employment. The crisis, at last, will be over and Mr Kenny’s prediction, that Ireland will be the best little bailed out country in Europe by becoming the first to wave goodbye to the IMF, will duly come true.
Although, there may be a few slight issues that Mr Bruton has yet to resolve. Like, a timeframe in which these additional hundreds of thousands of jobs will be created. You see, Mr Bruton is pretty confident that exactly 200,000 jobs will be created at some point, he’s just a bit fuzzy on exactly how long it will take. Or what kind of jobs they will be. Speaking at a US/Ireland business conference in Farmleigh last Thursday he said: “I think it is a long-term strategy”.
Now, his decided vagueness about whether or not this newfangled strategy is long term or short term could cause some cynics a bit of concern but I’m sure there’s no need to worry and he knows exactly what he’s doing. He went on to further expand on the inspiration for his latest headline-grabbing jobs’ announcement.
“It is about setting an ambition and looking at what are the changes necessary to get to that sort of ambition,” he revealed.
Hang on. So, essentially, Mr Bruton is saying that he was at his desk one day and suddenly thought: “you know what? I’d really like to create 200,000 jobs. All I need is a plan. How hard can that be?”
Perhaps Mr Bruton has been reading too many self-help books but a jobs’ policy that can best be described as “dare to dream” does not exactly instil much confidence in his ability to conjure up these elusive jobs.
IDA-backed multinationals managed to create just 1,350 net jobs in Ireland last year yet Mr Bruton thinks he can come up with a plan for 200,000 by January.
Unless the minister has some psychic abilities that we have not been made aware of, it really is stretching credulity, and patience, for him to wax lyrical about 200,000 jobs when economists all over the globe have dubbed any recovery in Ireland a textbook jobless recovery.
Instead of making fantastical claims about mythical jobs he will some day create, the minister would be better advised to sit down and carefully read the research that this week revealed that wild optimists suffer from a verifiable brain defect.
Regrettably, during the worst economic crisis to befall the country, we appear to have elected a cabinet full of the kind of people who rely on hastily devised get-rich-quick schemes to provide financial support to their long-suffering families — aka: you and I. Instead of a boy who cries wolf, we have an enterprise minister who cries jobs.
Fine Gael has form here with Finance Minister Michael Noonan conceding, before the election, that Mr Kenny’s claim that the party’s NewEra policy would create precisely 125,000 jobs was “not credible” and was “a PR add on”.
In other words, complete pie-in-the-sky bunkum. Now, of course, we are supposed to believe that some other aspirational party plans will create a combined 300,000 jobs — even though Mr Bruton has himself admitted that he just picked the figure at random and intends to spend a couple of months tweaking existing policies in order to achieve it. To be precise, this is what he said about how he is going to achieve his latest employment hocus pocus.
“This strategy will not attempt to compete with the large number of reports already prepared on this subject, but will draw from the volume of material already available, as well as the amazing level of expertise available both in Ireland and abroad.
“I have already started a rolling process of engagement on the issues and intend to create an action plan that government can take to address our challenges,” he enthused. Action plan? Rolling process of engagement? Is he serious? Unless he intends adding a wand and the word “alakzam” to that formula then, I’m afraid, it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.
WHILE governments routinely spend large portions of their time attempting to pull the wool over citizens’ eyes, there is another sinister implication.
Putting job creation plans on the never-never, by always working on some dubious strategy that will be announced as a panacea at some point down the road, gives the Government some considerable breathing room when it comes to fielding difficult questions. Now, when the budget rolls around in December, and people rightly raise the deflationary impact of crudely slashing 3.6bn from the economy, Mr Bruton can simply smile sweetly and tell reporters that his mooted 200,000 jobs’ initiative will solve everything — just give him some time to actually devise it first and then some more time for implementation and on and on it goes.
As is often the case, Mr Noonan sounded much more sensible in advance of the election when, while in opposition, he said plucking idealistic job figures out of thin air was a pointless exercise and that the purpose of government was to create the right environment for businesses to create jobs.
Unfortunately, anything remotely resembling cogent arguments have dissipated now that the party is actually in government and people are demanding that they do something about the country’s endemic unemployment crisis. Forget spin, and the media’s slavish obsession with reiterating everything that emanates from government without first subjecting it to even a modicum of critical analysis, and simply look at the figures.
In March of this year, just after Fine Gael and Labour took office, the Live Register figure stood at 442,000. Today, it’s 442,200 — remaining stubbornly high and showing no signs of suddenly plummeting.
After the job losses were announced in Talk Talk last month, the Bishop of Waterford, William Lee, announced he was going to pray for the unemployed — a policy which sounds like it could conceivably be far more effective than anything emanating from Government at the moment.
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