Stop doling out your anger on the jobless

HERE are three vignettes from the frontline. The first involves a friend who works in ‘job activation’ in the greater Cork area. He said last week he’s frustrated at the attitude of some people, mainly young, when he proposes they accept a so-called pathway to work.

“In one case, it was a course that involved training, and the real prospect of a job. The location was 15m miles from where he lived. No go. He was moaning that he didn’t want to travel that far, didn’t think it was worth his while.”

The experience is not typical. “There are others who regard anything offering some hope as a Godsend. I was onto a man, the other day, and he nearly bit the hand off me, he was so eager to do anything that might bring him anyway closer to the prospect of a job.”

The second vignette concerns a bakery in the suburb of Dublin where I live. The owner told me he employed a night baker, who came in for four hours, and was glad of the work.

This employee travelled daily from rural Kildare, but, after a few months, he handed in his notice. When petrol was taken into account, it wasn’t worth his while.

The third involves an acquaintance of the last decade or so. She is single, in her 30s, and has been out of work for the last two years.

Three months ago, she moved out to Co Meath, because she could no longer afford rental accommodation in the city. She receives a job-seeker’s allowance of €188 a week, and €78 in rent supplement.

Rents have been soaring in Dublin since early this year. For somebody in her circumstances, it’s no longer possible to live in the city, yet there is little possibility of getting work outside the greater Dublin area. She’s not despairing yet, not openly, at any rate, but her growing frustration is obvious.

Those are all real lives. The circumstances and dilemmas will chime with anybody who is familiar, on more than just a casual basis, with unemployment. It’s messy reality, where there are often no quick-fixes.

The lives mentioned above illustrate some of the ‘welfare traps’ that have popped up in the media over the last few weeks. The Citizens Information Board reported, last month, on the traps that prompt some unemployed people to shun work, because they would lose benefits.

Last week, the OECD expressed concern at the lack of job-activation success for the long-term unemployed. While neither organisation advocated cutting benefits, the reports have provided ballast for that section of society that believes unemployed people just have it too good.

A few years ago, the big issue in welfare was fraud. You couldn’t open a newspaper, or switch on a current-affairs programme, without somebody shouting that spongers were defrauding the taxpayer, living high on the hog off illegal earnings. A figure of €600m was plucked from the air and thrown around like manure at a horse fair.

Then, the Comptroller and Auditor General reported that €26m had been lost in social-welfare fraud in one year. That was roughly 0.1% of the €20bn social-welfare budget. Suddenly, all the anger directed at legions of mythical welfare fraudsters disappeared.

Today, it’s the layabouts who are being targeted. Apparently, a large chunk of the 435,000 souls on the live register doesn’t want to work, because they are living it up with a fat dole cheque and myriad benefits. Once more, the facts beg to differ.

Three quarters of people who are out of work just receive the job-seeker’s allowance of €188, less if they’re under 25 years of age, according to the Department of Social Protection.

Does anybody believe that subsisting on that amount of money is enviable? Only 14% of job-seekers receive rent allowance.

For many, if not most, of these recipients, the allowance doesn’t meet the full cost of rent in the private sector. One of the myths is that rent supplement is a benefit that can be put towards lifestyle, rather than helping to ensure recipients don’t live on the streets.

There are some among the ranks of the unemployed who may be work-shy. In the first six months of this year, around 1,500 people had the job-seeker’s allowance withdrawn for failing to co-operate in looking for work. That figure represents 0.3% of those on the live register.

What percentage of businesspeople are crooks? Even in the most honest country, surely it would be at least 1%. Are 100% of accountants honest? Are any solicitors dodgy?

Is every medical professional constitutionally incapable of exploiting patients? In every walk of life, there are moral or legal crooks and, usually, they represent exceptions to the rule.

Yet, over in Anger Central, it has become received wisdom that a relatively high number of jobless people are happy to live off the State, laughing at everybody else.

This warped sentiment swells when times are tough. Everybody is affected by the recession, many are suffering. There’s a lot of anger out there, and, once it becomes obvious that the anger will not be sated by targeting the ranks of the elite, who live in a parallel universe, then it is turned on those at the lower rungs of the ladder.

Some politicians try to surf the wave. Thus, last week, it emerged that the prospect of “capping” social-welfare payments was considered at Cabinet.

This would mean that bigger families, and families that include a child or adult with special needs, get it between the eyes as a fob to public anger.

It’s a road they’ve gone down in the UK, but, thankfully, we have not yet reached that point of callous indifference in this State.

There are welfare traps that require addressing.

The interface between welfare and work is messy and precarious, and the system has not yet caught up with the changing nature of work in a modern economy.

But should that mean, for instance, that four children should go malnourished because their father is forced to take on a minimum-wage job that will provide less in the way of subsistence than a basic State benefit?

Does it mean that a single person should move to a hostel when his or her rent allowance has been withdrawn, because he or she has taken up a low-paid job? Reform of the welfare system is urgently required.

For the angry brigade, reform means cuts imposed on those who can least bear them.

Surely, as a society, we haven’t sunk to that level, yet? Apart from any of that, the myths that are propagated about the unemployed casually insult the plight of the vast majority of those who are without work through no fault of their own.

It would be interesting to observe how many of the angry brigade, who wail about the welfare state, could survive life on the dole.