John Howard has sold out the unemployed

By TOM DUSEVIC

ike 706,000 other Australians, I lost my job last year. An executive payout eased the pain. As a writer and editor with skills that are portable in the information age, I experienced the mixed pleasures of working from home. Luckily, I did not have to rely on the dole, receive training or visit the Commonwealth Employment Service. I avoided a system many find difficult to escape.

Although not happy about it, most Australians seem inured to high unemployment rates. There are many reasons why the nation's economic growth in the 1990s is not leading to employment growth. Productivity is improving, helped by labor-saving technology. Industrial laws make it more difficult for employers to hire and fire staff and in many cases prevent the market from setting salaries. Rather than taking on new people, many employers are working their existing staff harder, leading to record levels of unpaid overtime. After a long period of change to the way the economy is organized--producing more services, less manufacturing and farming--there is a mismatch between the skills needed in the new economy and those held by the jobless. And the welfare system allows some people to make a lifestyle decision not to work.

After seven years of economic recovery, 1 in 12 able Australian workers are unemployed. By contrast, in the less regulated U.S. system, where dole checks cut out after six months and minimum wage rates are relatively low, job growth is booming and unemployment has tumbled to 4.5%; there is even talk of skill shortages. While there are many reasons why Australia cannot easily go down the American path, it could take some of the same steps: reduce industry protection, deregulate the labor market, and welcome more migrants. Yet even with rapid job growth, there will be those who won't be employable, owing to a lack of skill, confidence or suitability--the losers in the new economy.

The world of work is less stable today, more insecure. People move between jobs, even occupations, more frequently. In these conditions, the Howard government--against its timid nature--has tried to do something bold. Of course, such a novel social experiment is bound to have teething problems. But the market-based Job Network adds uncertainty and delivers little, especially to the long-term unemployed who need individual case management. Many participants say the Job Network is headed for collapse. Yet the government, determined to do it all on the cheap, seems reluctant to make any changes.

One of the better programs of Paul Keating's Labor government was Working Nation. Its virtue was that it did not try to do too much. While the scheme was expensive, it was targeted to helping those people at the end of the unemployment queue. A study of Working Nation's job programs by economists at Perth's Curtin University of Technology found that the most intensive (and costly) initiatives were getting the hardest cases into lasting employment. Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello's first two Budgets decimated these successful programs.

The Job Network, by contrast, is being asked to do too much with too little, and will leave the long-term unemployed behind. It's a badly timed, poorly designed program that focuses on spending less on job schemes rather than helping the chronically jobless. Somewhere along the line it seems John Howard and his team decided that some people will never want to work and some people are just too expensive to retrain adequately. As long as government measures a person's worth in dollars and cents, the unemployed will have few champions.