Posted: January 10, 2005

Work for the dole - it doesn't figure

The previous blog by Bill discusses an article in The Sun-Herald of January 9, 2005 titled Record sign-ons for work for the dole. I have an additional concern about the article - the veracity of a claim attributed to the Minister. The second paragraph reads "Workplace Participation Minister Peter Dutton said one in three people who did work-for-the-dole projects got full-time jobs afterwards". The data collected by the Minister's own Department shows that Work for the Dole (WfD) participants have no such luck.

In response to a Question on Notice at the 2004-05 Senate Budget Estimates Hearing, the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations provided detailed breakdowns of employment outcomes for persons who participated in WfD in 2003, 3 months after they left the program. This data is collected through the Department's Post Program Monitoring Survey and can be viewed HERE.

The data show that just 12.8 per cent of Work for the Dole participants in 2003 were in full-time work 3 months after leaving the program. This is dismal but full-time employment outcomes for the most disadvantaged participants are even worse - 8.1 per cent for WfD participants aged 50 years and over, 10.4 per cent for those who had been on income support for between 24 and 36 months and 7.3 per cent for those on income support for more than 36 months, 9.5 per cent for those who left school before completing Year 10, 7.2 per cent for indigenous Australians and 8 per cent for people with disability.

In no category of Work for the Dole participants (with categories based on age, duration on income support, educational attainment, equity groups and geography) did 1 in 3 find themselves in full-time work 3 months after finishing the program. They didn't go close. One third of WfD participants did find themselves in another labour market program - a phenomenon known as "churning" the unemployed.This isn't a suprising outcome in an environment in which there are 5.7 unemployed people for every job vacancy, however it is a shameful one.

It would seem that the Minister has rounded up his Work for the Dole "success" figures by around 20 percentage points. He would achieve a much better outcome if he concentrated his efforts on creating full-time jobs in the public sector for all unemployed workers.

Blog entry posted by bill