Gillard’s claims of a fired-up economy are a cruel mirage for older workers sacked during ”the recession we never had”.

The Prime Minister has made it official. “On any measure,” Julia Gillard said, “we are living through a boom.” The word clanged like a bell through her speech last week to the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia. She used ”boom” 23 times, when once would have been once too often for those still in the throes of the bust. But the thousands of Australians who got hammered by the global financial crisis have long since been written out of the script. Some were still desperately sending out resume after resume as the downturn that had cost them their jobs became “the recession we never had”.

There is another side to the story, and it can be told from the perspective of ordinary people whose lives have never been the same. If they were in manufacturing and over 50 years of age when they were sacked, there was every chance they would wash up working with a labour-hire company. That brought with it a working arrangement so uncertain that they might be phoned at five in the morning if they were needed that day.

Employers restructuring under cover of the crisis were transferring ever more of the risks of doing business to the employees hired only if there were orders to fill. Manufacturing workers were joining the casuals in retail and hospitality, helpfully bringing unemployment numbers down by swelling the ranks of the underemployed.

According to a Morgan poll taken after the latest crop of school-leavers entered the job market, unemployment and underemployment had increased a fraction to 16.5 per cent. But the caravan had moved on. One in six people who said they wanted a job did not have work or not enough of it. But the clamour from business lobbyists and mining interests was all about skills shortages, one of many signs the crisis had opened up a wider gap than ever between the two sections of the two-speed economy.

Indeed, with the gap as wide as it is, the ”two-speed” expression has lately fallen into disfavour, as if perhaps it was suggesting that the palely loitering part of the economy had been left behind like road kill.

The “patchwork” economy, Gillard called it instead in last week’s speech, picking up the chorus about skills shortages (if not its underlying theme – the mining industry’s determination to import more migrant workers, none too incidentally holding wages down).

Gillard also invoked some of the people left behind – the 2 million Australians of working age outside the labour market, in addition to the unemployed, the underemployed, those too discouraged even to look for work, and the many older workers on the disability support pension. She envisaged getting as many as possible back into the fold, both for their own sakes and for the sake of the economy, confronted with an ageing workforce at the very time the mining industry is expanding on an unprecedented scale.

But all the talk of patching up the patchwork economy by retraining older workers and training the younger ones sounded like empty rhetoric to someone who had just been through the process, as I had.

I was at my desk at The Australian newspaper writing about people being sacked when I, too, was sacked. By the time I went to a job agency, I was at work on a book about the fallout from the GFC; strictly speaking, I had gone through the process to write about it, but it was like falling down the rabbit hole to find the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations playing the part of the Queen of Hearts.

I turned up at the job agency to be told that you turned up the first time only to make an appointment. When, at long last, I met my consultant, I said I could do office work. “Like receptionist,” she said helpfully, abandoning the question of my future employment there and then to chat with me about the pressure the agency was under. I never heard from them again.

The government was saying everyone who had been retrenched would have job training through the Productivity Places Program. Not quite. There would be no courses for months. It took a while to work that out. The website was excruciating. The system had become more confounding than ever. “It’s not black and white any more, not that it was black and white before,” said a bloke from one of the firms contracted to provide the training in question. “We don’t even have time to work it out ourselves.” The Prime Minister said: “I want to ensure that the incentives of work always outweigh the attractions of welfare.” It was tempting to retort that the government was once again trumpeting policy initiatives that had already unravelled at ground level.
There was much talk of participation, but as far as Job Services Australia was concerned, it was undoubtedly more of a make-work program for the bureaucrats than for the so-called clients.

I tried the idea on a factory worker who had lost his job when I lost mine. Gary Leffley was 53 when the factory where he had worked for nine years sacked nearly half its workforce. Though he didn’t want to go on welfare, it took him eight months to find another job. These days, he works through a labour-hire firm that sometimes calls at five in the morning, and sometimes doesn’t call at all. When he gets the call, he reports in at a chip factory where the temperature is always 10 degrees hotter than it is outside. If the Prime Minister is determined to patch up the patchwork economy, he wouldn’t mind if she started there.

Source: Nationaltimes.com.au

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