Stephanie Convery theguardian.com, Wednesday 30 July 2014
Barely-liveable salaries, job ad buzzwords, no acknowledgement of receipt – everyone has their Centrelink stories. One thing is clear: the Australian job searching system is broken
‘Bogus applications are already part of the deal. Photograph: Gary Roebuck/Alamy
I’ve been looking for a new job for 10 months. I still haven’t decided which part of the process is my favourite. Perhaps it’s the undisclosed and often barely-liveable salaries on offer in my industry. Maybe it’s constant the job ad “buzzwords” that make you want to tear out all the pages of a thesaurus and papier-mâché them in front of the recruiter. Or perhaps it’s the slow but inevitable self-loathing that builds every time you hear the words, “Unfortunately, you were unsuccessful at this time ...”
Then there are the employers who don’t bother responding at all, as if all those hours you spent answering their convoluted key selection criteria, attempting to balance evidence of your experience with self-assured (but not self-satisfied) descriptions of your skills and attributes, weren’t even worth the 20 seconds it would take to send an acknowledgement of receipt.
Sometimes, after extrapolating on my excellent track record in grant writing, project management and “liaising with VIPs and stakeholders” for the zillionth time, I would start to wish I had been born about 35 years earlier, and could just quit my current job and register for the dole knowing I could probably still make rent if I cut back on groceries, and focus on writing and making art for a while.
Or, as the Abbott government would call it these days, “rorting the system”.
The government has made no secret of its desire to gut the Australian welfare system, but its latest move has more than a modicum of Zimmer frame-shaking about it. In order to rid their lawn of this latest plague of lazy good-for-nothings, the department of employment has advised that they want jobseekers under 30 to spend up to 25 hours a week working for the dole – or, if this occurs in the first six months after they have claimed unemployment, spend 25 hours a week working for nothing.
On top of that, they are somehow expected to find the time to apply for up to 40 jobs per month. It’s such a terrible idea that even business lobby groups are complaining about it: they don’t want to have to sift through all the bogus job applications.
But anybody who’s ever been on the dole knows that bogus applications are already part of the deal. It’s an especially cynical process when you know damn well that there are no jobs to be had in your industry, even for people who really want them. Sending off form letters and a skeleton CV for a bunch of roles for which you’re completely unqualified is par for the course. Right along with cash-in-hand work that even goody-two-shoes can’t claim for fear of being sacked, the interminable call waiting times, the interview queues, the random benefit cut-offs for no reason, and all the lost paperwork. One begins to wonder if “lost paperwork” is an officially sanctioned process designed to weed out the “bludgers”.
“The staff would frequently lose documents that took weeks to complete (means tests and such),” a friend wrote to me about his experience getting his father signed up for disability support. “We ended up photocopying everything before submitting. We got to the point where we would get the counter staff to sign our photocopies to prove they were submitted. Some were submitted three times, photocopies of photocopies.”
“I applied for many jobs I was not qualified for because I had to apply for anything to make the quota,” wrote another. “I worked at a few of the places that the job service agencies put me on to for a month or so before they fired me because I couldn’t do the work, but I was never qualified for it in the first place. The job service agencies never taught me how to apply for jobs I could do, or how to find the jobs that I should have been applying for.”
Everyone has their Centrelink stories. Even my mum has tales to tell of her time on the dole, and of welfare inspectors busting in at 7am to check that none of the members of her share house were sleeping in the same bed, and thus fibbing about their relationship status on their claim forms.
But my favourite story was told to me by a friend on disability support. Her payments had been cut off unexpectedly and without justification three times since she registered for them in 2009 — in one case, because the computer system couldn’t cope when she submitted her paperwork a week before the due date.
It’s tradition to make jokes about Centrelink, because if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. But it doesn’t take much digging to find the serious side. The system is so broken that the only people who could conceivably derive benefit from their benefits are those who are willing to game it. And that’s the horrible, toxic justification behind these changes. They’re not designed to help anyone. Instead, they’re setting people up to fail.
Underpinning all the proposed changes to welfare is this idea that being on government support payments is necessarily a bad thing. But the truth is, a pro-welfare culture is ultimately social. It recognises that people exist beyond their capacity to labour mindlessly, but also that capital-generating labour is not the only kind of labour worth doing. There is also parenting, caring for family or friends, learning, figuring out what the hell you want to do with your life, recovery from illness, and failure.
Contrary to the opinion of the old white businessmen currently in power, being unemployed is already one of the most full-on jobs going, no matter how it comes about.
