Back to the 1930's with Brash

Article for DominionPost Business Day by CTU president Ross Wilson, published on February 3, 2003.

National finance spokesman Don Brash's proposal to abolish the dole would be an extraordinarily regressive policy for a political party seeking support from mainstream New Zealanders.

The proposal, as Dr Brash outlined in his speech to the Orewa Rotary Club last week, is that the unemployment benefit should be abolished and unemployed workers would queue up at local Post Offices at 8am each day for a day's work organised by local government, and be paid in cash at the end of the day.

Those of us who did not live through it have certainly heard enough about the work camps of the 1930's depression to be sure they are not a policy solution in the 21st century labour market.

The proposal also ignores the reality that the Ministry of Social Development are doing some excellent work in developing strategies to move people from the unemployment benefit into real jobs.

It is a major concern that we still have 107,000 unemployed when there are huge labour and skill shortages in the labour market.

But it is not going to resolve that dichotomy to dump the 107,000 unemployed into local work gangs on labouring work.

The real challenge is to develop schemes which provide the unemployed workers with the skills, and sometimes the literacy and numeracy, to enable them to fill the shortages in the labour market.

Many of the unemployed are casualties of the 1990's policies which left it to the market to determine when skill development and training were required and consigned thousands of young workers to the unskilled end of the labour market.

We now need to urgently make the necessary social investment to provide them with skills in demand in the labour market.

Just before Christmas the CTU called on the Government to spend more of the larger than expected fiscal surplus on this sort of social investment.

We advocated fixed term social development projects which make a "catch-up" investment in vocational, literacy, and social skills training.

This investment would build on the current Work and Income strategies of targeting training to those who need it most, providing skills in demand in the local labour market, and developing partnerships with large employers.

The Government's modern apprenticeships and industry training reforms also provide the framework for ongoing upgrading of skills of the existing workforce. Upgrading their skills will also create opportunities for many unemployed to get real jobs at the lower end of labour market.

That too is a big challenge. 80% of the workforce of 2010 is already in the workforce of today. 20% of the current workforce function at the lowest literacy level. 17th of students still leave school with no qualifications at all and 58% of them are Maori and Pacific people.

We all need to play a role in ensuring that our children and grandchildren understand the vital need for education and skills in the workforce of the future; and in ensuring that those missed out have the opportunity to acquire further education and training.

There is a developing consensus around this and the CTU has been working closely with the Government and Business New Zealand in developing and promoting the new strategies.

It is certainly no solution to condemn the current unemployed to a lifetime of picking up rubbish, and other unproductive and demeaning work, at the expense of local government.