The Trials Of Job Action

You qualify but it is compulsory, explained the Government Employment Office clerk.

Like the army, I said helpfully.

Along with hundreds of others in a South Island New Zealand city, I had qualified for a Job Action 5 Day Workshop. The Unemployment Industry had honed in where bureaucrats fear to tread.

All two year or more registered unemployed had been contracted out by the Employment Office to this privately operated workshop. The workshop would take in weekly batches of these clients until they had completed the city register of long‑term unemployed. Only women seven months pregnant and job-seekers employed for more than twenty hours a week were exempt.

Thereupon like an anti-bacterial serum, these workshops would continue their inexorable spread north into the body politic, presumably to Cape Reinga, which is the top of the North Island. State coercion and money in cohort with Tory sentiments was in eradication mode of the bohemian, the mercurial and the simply discouraged.

In 1834 the English Poor Law Commissioners called the long-term unemployed:

Insolent, discontented, surly, thoughtless paupers who talk of ‘right’ and ‘income’.

They compared these surly paupers with:

…the poor man of 20 years ago who tried to earn his money and was thankful for it.

Our workshop commissioners too would be inculcating a work ethic in surly generational unemployed. Theirs would be the spirit and language of the touchie feelie good about yourselves merchants. But to us unemployment fodder, the Tory venom lurked behind the plastic smiles.

We arrived at appointed time a week later at the Job Action Headquarters. Job Action kept office hours. Its architecture resembled nothing so much as a nineteenth century workhouse. Its antiseptic institutional atmosphere was actually from its origins as a 1960s maternity hospital. The eccentric elderly porter, the admonishment not to tread on the grass, the grim faced clientele was straight out of Oliver Twist. All that was lacking was the prophetic howl of a baby. But the legacy of the 1960s babies was among us too.

We workshop clientel were ushered into a shabby section of the old hospital that had been most likely a ward and adjoining offices. Above us in the activities room there flourished a paper mosaic of the Saatchi and Saatchi logo:

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

In the initial broadcasting of first names, a young unemployed musician cussed the supervisors and demanded to be called – Mister.
He would continue to loudly complain that in a month's time he would be heading to Auckland to start a band and this was interrupting his goals.

His complaint was a universal one. Our projects had been disturbed by this; we had various scatological terms to describe it. But unlike the musician – we nicknamed him Dalebludger – the old hands would not commit the fatal error of asking for more. Two mornings later Dalebludger had departed into that most dreaded twilight zone of endless shunting between institutions. Dalebludger's fault would hang over us all as a sacrificial offering to candid expression. That candid expression our supervisors had encouraged at the initiation of the course and so exposed and entrapped poor Dalebludger.

Our two supervisors were a bearded robust man with a Liverpudlian accent straight out of the Labour Exchange of the television series ‘The Boys from the Black Stuff’ and an anxious young woman assistant. They would, for the week, smile and smile. We would learn through the week to delight in their smiles.

In that institutional response at least, they would teach us very well. One of them had the presence to refuse a smoke outside for an old tar during workshop hours.

They pretended to negotiate with us over lunch‑time hours and so defused our real grievances and made us delight in their liberality.
Less diplomatically, they tirelessly parroted that the course was:

Not compulsory, as we could leave any time – although we would lose our benefits.

We as insistently riposted that lack of visible means of support was a crime.
When our expression of our grievances became too threatening, the man always splendidly defused the tension with:

You are shooting the messenger!

Our first task was group bridge building with paper and scissors. With my clumsy fingers, I hung on in the group fringes. Some models displayed the ingenuity and technical skills that in a happier age might have constructed a nation or at least a passable bridge.

We soon found ourselves to be a social cross-section. We all – at least for the week – were institutionally viewed and would learn to view ourselves as failures in our callings. There were failed fishermen who described their hobbies as smoking and drinking, failed authors, failed artists, failed academics, failed businessmen, a failed burglar (he merged with the businessmen), a failed antiquities collector, a failed kitchen hand, a failed decent bloke. The decent bloke blamed everything on too much education. There was also a failed young hippy woman.

‘Failed’ is a mind set for the Employment Office bureaucrats. In our own assessments out of supervisors' earshot, we were successes, capable of self help and life style choices. The problem was we all had learnt to lust after that steady unemployment income. We all wanted to be left alone with it, but the Government, in the name of the great New Zealand tax‑payer, wanted a fair return for its investment.
The riddle was for us all to free ourselves from that will-sapping welfare viper.

The downside from that noble aim was, as the Americans put it:

Work is a mug's game!

Oscar Wilde said:

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

The Haitians have put it best of all:

If work were good for you, the rich would take it all for themselves.

A week had passed since the completion of our workshop. There is little specific I can remember and even less of interest to readers. Our supervisors put us through job‑seeking role-plays in funny point hats and threw about plastic fun objects. We had interviews with an Income Support official and a member from an unemployed over-forties self-help group. We visited an employment agency in town and felt we were on public view as State care recipients. We made self-aggrandizement posters and filled in career option forms. We were edified and amused with charts and videos.

It was mostly a carnival spirit but at moments became suddenly hugely serious when we were warned we might fail and have to come back next week. We ate supplied lunches from what appeared to be horse nose‑bags and which were about as palatable. The hippy woman succeeded in permanently disappearing after that first lunch. That left one woman in a batch of thirteen men. We waited for hours on end for new activities and grumble helplessly.

To graduate – that is not to have to repeat the workshop the following week – we had to make up and gain Employment Office approval of a personal "Job Action" document. That action plan was meant to start the following morning after the workshop and last until one had reached gainful permanent employment before the grand final. We, one by one, qualified in our action plans, and once more atomized slid thankfully out of the private interview office and disappeared into the fresh air.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but did I gain anything from my time disturbed? I learnt from the supervisors that Wellington is targeting the long-term unemployed as part of what the supervisors called a political game. We were warned that the days of long‑term reliance on the unemployment benefit are over. We old hands had heard that cry of wolf before. We learnt from open and covert discussion more tricks of evasion. We learnt spouses and partners are advised by the Employment Office to juggle their benefit between them to keep one step ahead of official bear traps.

Through role plays, I have a few odd insights of what it is like to be an employer drowning in job applications. You take out a set of mean prejudices and run them through your applicants.

CVs are missiles to "stretch the truth creatively", as the supervisors euphemistically put it.

From a video that had demonstrations including Prince Charles and Lady Di together, I learnt body language can be more efficacious than words. I learnt to treat official statistics as gobbledegook when we were assured an employer invests one million dollars in every employee. That statistic, drawn on a chart, was based on the average person's life‑time earnings; but forgot no job lasts a working life time. Like Pavlov's dogs at the time we all salivated at those million dollars.

I learnt a gem of knowledge that students at a South Island University have a traditional fraternal practice of licking vomit from each other's mouths. I see better how fragile is intellectual freedom in a coercive institutional environment. Even Oscar Wilde learnt to love his warden.

I secretly felt that as they insisted on our attendance, the workshop should have taken itself as least as seriously as a troupe of real clowns. What we learnt at all was incidentally picked up. There was rarely follow-up of practical application after activities. Maybe the workshop regarded its successes as appeasing and qualifying us by the end of the week without a walk‑out or riot.

After a week we were beginning to recognize a common identity.
We were working toward the critique:

We are the little liars and cheats, unappreciated cogs in a great lying and cheating system.
We accept our economic role as structural unemployed but market forces must drive us to be competitive with the employed to inhibit better wages and conditions.
We agree the Unemployment Industry is one of the country's biggest rackets in its deceitful promises and abuse of the public purse.

Our supervisors seemed to be agreeing with, even encouraging that critique. After one client boasted he was earning "under the table" several hundred dollars a week, they confessed they knew but would not divulge that half of us were on scams. But then we all went our separate ways back to the bear-traps of direct crediting and private interviews.

Today I read in the city newspaper that after two months of this course in the city, 16 out of 121 participants had gained full-time, part-time, or casual work. The article quoted the Employment Office clerk that those who completed the course had appreciated its benefits in helping them regain motivation. 66 of the original 187 long‑term job-seekers selected for the workshop had brilliant excuses to not attend the course, such as having "forgotten" to deregister or no longer wishing to remain listed as unemployed.

So the city's Employment Service could claim a successful result on its targeted long-term unemployed of 44% in two months! 35.4% left the course through declining to attend the course, 8.6% found some degree of employment after attending the course.

The Employment service did not specify how many of that 8.6% are off the unemployment register. It seems – as the Poor Law Commissioners preached last century – it is not the institution but the dread of it that is the most effective goad against long‑term unemployment.

One firm conclusion we workshop internees did draw. A truly ruthless system could reduce in a few months long‑term unemployment by 100 per cent. Just keep us at this workshop until one way or another we would be all off the unemployment benefit.