Contents of

Up-Words Vol. 2 No 11

Not Drowning - Just Looking for Work

Election Aftermath: ALP Awake!

Human Rights Day Picnic

AGM

Take a look at this month's additions to the Sleuth 

Click here to access our  previous newsletters:

 UpWords 1 No. 1:
 What is Breaching

 UpWords 1 No. 2:
 Young Poor under Attack

 UpWords 1 No. 3:
 Frog Boiling;

 UpWords1 No. 4::
 Welfare Reform;

 UpWords1 No. 5:
 S11;

 UpWords1 No. 6:
 History of Unemployed Movements,
 Homelessness

 Up-Words No. 7:
 Launch of UPM/Latest Breaching  Statistics

 UpWords1 No 8:
 Open Letter to Minister Amanda  Vanstone

 UpWords2 No 1:
  Millionaires' Coup for Govenrment
 Centrelink Officiouisness hurts us  all

 UpWords2 No 2:
  Big Brother is watching you!
  Work for the Dole is not working

 UpWords2 No 3:
 Globalisation - the Excessive   Wealth Disease?

 UpWords2 No 4:
 Is Howard a Communist?
 Mal Brough, Minister for  Compassionate Employment  Figure Fudging

 UpWords2 No 5
 Benefits 37% below poverty line
 May Day protests worldwide

UpWords2 No 6:
The Permanently Alienated Underclass Speaks UP!
The Budget for the Unemployed
Views from the Coal Face

UpWords 2 No 7
Criminalisation of Poverty
Job Network is not working - from rorts to incompetence

UpWords 2 No 8 
Work for the Dole can kill!
National Coalition against Poverty Petition
Post card campaign
Poet's Corner:
Views on Unemployment

UpWords 2 No 9 
UPM joins Ranks for Peace
International Day for the
Eradication of Poverty
Unemployed Treated Worse Than Criminals!

UpWords 2 No 10
Election 2001: UPM's How to Vote Card
Annual General Meeting
How much longer?

Up-Words Home

Come to our Meetings
on the last Tuesday of the month,
1 – 3 pm
at the Torrens Building,
220 Victoria Square, Adelaide.

Join UPM against Poverty
as a member!

Copy the membership form here!

PO Box 485
Brooklyn Park SA 5032

Phone (08) 8352 4950

Human Rights Day Picnic

(see our events page)

Come to the Human Rights Day Picnic and tell us your story.
We are collecting case studies to develop a database of Human Rights abuses against the un- and underemployed people in Australia.
We are also looking at the rights of people with a disability and those of ethnic and Indigenous origin.
Please visit our table! You will be amazed to which degree our human rights are degraded day by day.

Back to the top

Up-Words Home

Sitemap

UPM Homepage

By David Rigney
It was one of those mid August Saturday mornings when you do not want to get out of bed. The overnight heavy rain had turned to a steady drizzle by the time I had finished breakfast. As I rugged up for the cold, I cursed the fact that I could not afford to buy myself an umbrella or for that matter any decent waterproof clothing.
Garry, one of my friends was picking me up at 8.30am and together we were going to the show grounds to apply for casual work with the upcoming Adelaide show. We were full of hope that we both might be lucky and work the entire ten days of the show.
When we arrived at the show grounds the rain started to pelt down, pushed along by a bitterly cold southerly wind. We parked the car and made a dash to the pre-arranged interview area. As we arrived we noticed approx 70 people already waiting in front of a caravan some had umbrellas but most were trying to keep dry as best as they could with the little shelter available.
After asking a few people what the situation was we were informed that we had to knock on the caravan door and tell them we wished to apply for casual work. We did this and were given various forms to fill in, asked to return and wait for an interview. Both Garry and I waited in the cold and wet for nearly one hour. Being in a warm room for the interview was definitely the high light of this endeavour. While the employment hire company consultants were snug and warm in the caravan, my ten minutes with them allowed me to stop trembling from the cold.. Garry was lucky, he received work, I did not.
I have used this story to illustrate the demeaning effects of long term unemployment. The longer the period of unemployment persists, the more entrenched the negative effects become. I am not writing this article as a means to have a whinge, these are simply my observations gathered over the past nine years of unemployment. Standing in the rain trying to fill in numerous forms and waiting for an interview demonstrated to me, how totally desperate I had become.

Over a protracted period of unemployment the first casualty is one’s self esteem and confidence, frustration becomes one’s daily mindset as one tries to manoeuver through a system that is far from user friendly and only seeks to make a profit from the misfortune that is unemployment. This system incorporates Federal Government departments and private industry.
The end product of three years of Intensive Assistance with several Job Network Providers amounts to 26 versions of my resume and two job offers. I have experienced a multitude of case workers who seem overall more intent on progressing through their organisations/industry career structures, than they were in assisting me to find suitable employment or training. Personally I find it hard to distinguish between the Job Network and the old Commonwealth Employment Service, they both do not seem to have any outcomes when dealing with long term unemployment.
I do not wish to minimise the efforts unemployed persons undertake to find employment, I believe the majority of job seekers find employment through their own initiatives. This is becoming harder as labour hire companies move into the unemployment industry, where their sole interest lies in making profits.
As the years go by it becomes harder to find work, and the competitive system imposed by employers to source employees discriminates against applicants on the grounds of age and the length of unemployment among numerous other factors.
At present there are eight applicants for every job vacancy, a statistic conveniently overlooked by both major political parties.

In this very competitive environment the long term mature aged unemployed have to compete. It must be understandable that after years of this futile competition frustration turns to anger, anger that is both emotionally and physically destructive. I believe most long term unemployed suffer from various forms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. Many studies have shown that the effect of unemployment lasting longer than a year has detrimental effect on the health of people. (Fryer, Dr. David, 1994, “Benefit agency? Labour market disadvantage, deprivation and mental health” The C.S.Myers Lecture 1994 published in The Psychologist, June 1995)
The Australian Psychological Society stated in a media release of 17 August 2000 that recent Australian research has shown that unemployment may be regarded as equivalent to highly stressful employment. Explaining these findings, Ms Colleen Turner, APS Director of Social Issues said,
“Unemployed people can be regarded as involuntary, poorly paid, low status, insecure public servants with virtually no negotiating rights, whose work (persistent searching for nonexistent jobs and managing households on inadequate resources) carries massive risk of occupational strain.”
More research needs to be undertaken into the effects of long term unemployment, the whole social structure of our communities is being eroded by long term unemployment or as I call it Mandatory Poverty.
Every person should have access to reasonable employment and lifestyle, long term unemployment and poverty should not exist in the 21st century. U.P.M. against Poverty Inc will never accept that long term unemployment and poverty has a place in our society. Therefore we ask community members to join with us in the fight to bring about a more balanced/egalitarian society.

The Election brought mostly bad news to the unemployed. No real employment creation programs, increased unemployment rates due to a downsizing in overheated markets such as the call centre, telecommunications, aviation, and new IT industries, continued mutual obligations, including Work for the Dole, the new Community Work program, breaching, and further denigrating the victims of economic rationalism and excessive wealth accumulation: the unemployed.
Was and is the community so shortsighted as not to see the danger of another three years of the Liberals’ dismantling of our common and publicly owned goods, services and assets?
John Howard and his team are back in charge. Minister Vanstone has been handed back the Centrelink portfolio, did we notice that she had not had it? Minister Abbott has been promoted to Government Business Leader in the House and started lashing out at the new ALP Leader as soon as the election was over. He had been very quiet and nice during election. And Minister Brough still is battling on in his Employment portfolio, so no real change here, which indicates that old agendas will be continued, like the welfare reform and the Administrative Review Tribunal Legislation, which will further erode the ability of unemployed people to appeal breaches and other Centrelink decisions.
Matching Tony Abbott in the key tactical job of Government Business leader in the house will be Wayne Swan, who is also the Shadow Minister for Family and Community Services, at least a change has not been announced. We congratulate Wayne Swan on his promotion and hope that our relationship with him will become a bit closer.
Our biggest hopes are set on Jenny Macklin, new Shadow Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Science. This is the Knowledge Nation at work. Although we welcome Stephen Smith, who will take on Health, we are very disappointed that one of the few defendants of the unemployed in Senate Committees, Senator Chris Evans, will become the Defence spokesman.

Why wasn’t the ALP elected as looked so likely only a few months ago? Did the Liberals really win such a big mandate as they claimed after the election?
The results show a swing to the Liberals of 3.18%. Did this swing come from disenchanted Labor voters? The Labor Party lost 2.25% of its voters. However Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party lost 4.08 %, where did her votes go? With the National Party gaining 0.33% the Coalition only gained 3.51%, so it lost 0.49% of the very right wing voters, but there is no gain from the Labor Party. Where did the Labor votes go? The Greens gained 2.24%, almost exactly what the Labor Party lost, the Democrats gained 0.27%, which comes to a total of the parties in opposition of a swing of 0.26% in its favor while the coalition lost 0.49%, in other words not much has changed.The biggest increase was in favor of informal votes, which rose by 1.1%. Independent votes gained by 0.91 %.
We believe that we can conclude from this that the ALP has lost ground to the left, in particular to the Greens, who come out as one of the big winners, if one disregards the Liberals’ gain of One Nation voters.
The ALP has markedly moved into Liberal territory, beginning with Keating’s support of economic rationlism and globalisation and hopefully peaking with Kim Beazley’s harsh stand on the asylum seekers and support for the war on terrorism without a broader public discussion.
Although there has been much talk about renewing the Labor movement and including community organisations more in their policy development process, there is now much talk about cutting the union movement off.
Naturally SImon Crean’s past as ACTU leader is an ideal focus for Minister Abbott:
“You’ve go to say that this guy’s background doesn’t suggest that he will be able to do that,” he said.
”He has been, if you like, genetically programmed to be Labor leader but the whole course of his life shows that this is a man who’s very much born to the Labor purple.”

And Queensland Labor frontbencher Kevin Rudd responded that “while Labor’s relationship with unions is evolving, it is still proud of its past: ‘I mean stitching Simon Crean up as some sort of trade unionist of the past with no relevance to the future is I’m sure what the Liberal Party pollsters would like and that’s the brief which Tony Abott’s been handed this morning.’” http://www.abc.net.au/news/australia/2001/11/item20011125120343_1.htm Herein lies the big danger. Many of our friends, who once were staunch and loyal Labor supporters have turned their back on Labor for three main reasons:

1) Labor (and some of the unions) have abandoned the workers and employees, the promises for a better life have not been realised, especially when one compares what unions and the Labor movement in Germany and France, for example, have achieved.
2) Labor has lost its ability to develop policy informed by the community and ordinary people who feel, they still have a sense of decency and fair go, active members and politicians are only out to make a career, therefore Labor has lost contact with its grass roots
3) Labor has abandoned its fundamental philosophy of fighting for the underdog, especially demonstrated with the boatpeople issue, environmental policy, privatisation, and their reluctancy to stop supporting policies which hurt the community , like breaching, Work for the Dole and the refusal to put a moratorium on further poker machine game venues.

Cutting loose from the unions and moving further right is not the answer. Cutting loose the power hungry, the self interested career ambitious, excessive wealth accumulating elements in the Labor Party and the union movement may be a better strategy. But there is not much hope with Mark Latham on the front bench. We put our hopes on Jenny Macklin and Wayne Swan and we are looking forward to establishing a working relationship with the Labor Party on all levels. But we sure hope that renewal truly means a renewal towards an old allegiance with the ‘underdogs’, fair go and decency.

Many people, especially those employed, believe that the unemployed
have all the time in the world and laze about for most parts of the day. While
there certainly are some unemployed people who make the best with what they have and enjoy life to the best of their abilities, many unemployed people
lead extremely stressful lives. While an employed person usually enjoys leaving the office behind on weekends and at night, the unemployed person's life is permeated with considerations of career limiting or enhancing moves. Is it little wonder then, that unemployed people are not very good at representing their interests?
According to my observations there are three categories of spokespeople for
the unemployed:

1. the genuine more or less professional advocate, usually not really unemployed;
2. the desperate initiative creating job seeker, who hopes to secure employment through his/her activism, and then leaves his/her activism for the unemployed behind - the transient advocate;
3. the frustrated, angry, very marginalised, often severely disadvantaged job seeker who has given up looking for a job.

All are genuine and mean it and work very hard, but the mix of people usually leads to the demise of any unemployed activist group. Apart from the barrier of not wanting to be too outspoken so as to not forego one’s chances of employment, there is the problem of finding the right strategy to work with those in decisioin making power positions, which is hard to do, when one is angry and frustrated and lacks confidence. Those who want a job often damage the position of the jobless further, by giving in to unreasonable conditions to be seen as reasonable and employable. And those who are employed are fearing for their job if they are too outspoken and are often underfunded and overwhelmed with the task at hand.
So who can be trusted to keep an organisation such as UPM going? Only you, you have to come and participate, you have to write articles and make your voice heard. Only you, no one else can do the job for you.
Come along to our AGM on Thursday, December 6, at 6 PM at the Worldsend, Hindley Street, Adelaide!