In case there was any doubt that our conservative Coalition government is but a tired retread of our old one, this week has brought news that the Abbott government is looking to reinstate one of the more lacklustre policy failures of the Howard era – the work for the dole scheme.



A favourite policy of talkback callers everywhere, work for the dole is also an idolised measure for the right side of politics where old-fashioned conservative selfishness dovetails nicely with the extremist economic demands of economic neoliberalism. The idea is that to receive the sub-poverty-level subsistence Centrelink payment of $250 a week, dole recipients will be mandated into forced labour or deprived of subsistence completely. Currently mooted are plans for the unemployed to be mandated to pick up rubbish in the not-for-profit sector or work in aged care homes as maintenance workers.



What's sold to the what-about-my-tax-dollars yodellers – a crowd, one presumes, who nobly exempt themselves from participating in other communist plots like road construction, garbage collection and the use of police stations – is an opportunity to punish the unemployed, who they've long suspected of unfairly escaping the soul-crushing drudgery of debilitating and meaningless labour.



These people entertain fantasies of "dole bludgers" or "welfare scroungers" having a whale of a time at the taxpayers' expense, and will regale listeners with consistently unverifiable anecdata about the indulgent excesses of those on the public purse. They are themselves, of course, too lazy to do the basic mathematics that demonstrate the fallacy of their assumptions: anyone who would be able to afford to do anything apart from watch TV, play videogames or lurk pointlessly around a shopping mall after paying rent, bills and groceries out of $250 a week is not actually "jobless" – they would be gainfully employed as a professional criminal.

Having been unemployed myself for a short time, let me dispel any fanciful imaginings of what life on the dole is like for the majority of people: on $250 a week, you're forced to eat badly, you get sick a lot because you eat badly, you live in constant anxiety about your utilities bills, the words "rental inspection" chill your blood, and no amount of daytime television can compensate for the annihilating terror that tomorrow looms just as bloodlessly as today.



The work for the dole policy is a mere physical relocation of this unique misery - and the majority of studies yet completed on its introduction have concluded that such schemes do not lead to employment opportunities for their participants, or employment gains for their communities. In fact, one of the most comprehensive studies was of the failure of Howard's original work-for-the-dole schemes, which informed Labor's dismantling of the policy.

Why don't they work? Because work for the dole does not actually address any of the prevailing conditions of unemployment. It eschews actual job creation for subsidised volunteerism that does not reduce the unemployment rate, nor deliver economic or social employment gains to the community.

The skills learned on a work-for-the-dole scheme do not better the employment capabilities of their participants beyond suitability for the scheme itself, because any work opportunity with meaningful training would already exist as a job in itself. Additionally, by not paying its compelled workers a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, the scheme sets up a parallel employment economy that threatens, for cost-effectiveness, the hard-won award conditions of external workers in comparable and legitimate jobs.

For those believing the conservative rhetoric that work for the dole placements don't effect "real" jobs and conditions, keep in mind that Abbott's conservative brethren in the UK have just been busted by the high court for sending work-for-the-dole workers to work in the chainstore Poundland, as forced labour for private business.



So with studies damning the scheme and international examples being so poor, why is Australia reintroducing an ineffective policy? Because it relieves the government and their supporters of the complex intellectual demands required to understand nuanced policy responses to the vagaries of employment markets in the wake of globalisation, factory closures and the global financial crisis. Their self-righteous simpletonism is a convenient mask for the pro-business neoliberal architects of work for the dole schemes.

Those driving in the policy, are those, of course, whose policy interests are not those of employment, the unemployed or the society around them as much as they are those of their big business backers. It is in the interest of corporations to keep wages as low as possible to maximise their profit margins; it is in the interest of big business that any mechanism that enables workers to challenge the employment and wage conditions offered to them must be eliminated.

The most obvious target of the Coalition since their election here is the unions, and it is no coincidence that the closure of the Holden factory in Elizabeth, South Australia, is also a closure one of the most influential manufacturing union strongholds in the country. Yet, as equally important to the flexibility of the employment market for big business is engineering the conditions where the alternative to the kind of work they're prepared to offer is unconscionable or unbearable. Desperate and de-organised workers will work for lower wages and fewer conditions.

This is why the constant shaming of the unemployed is encouraged from conservative policymakers and their soft media allies. This is why the shameful rate of the dole will not be rising. This is why unemployed people are being forced into paint-the-rocks-white style work-for-the-dole-scheme, without even the dignity of remuneration at minimum wage.





