02/09/2022
Friends - Just thought to share with you, the converted (lol), my response to a number of FB posts, and the . Also shared with Gareth Hutchens from the ABC given his interest in this subject. Not the full story by any means, but you get the picture... :)
"The Australian labour market is in real trouble without substantial government intervention.
Employers claim they can't get staff. Yet, there are hundreds of thousands of people on disability support, women, First Nations, migrants, older workers and long term unemployed still languishing (and I use that term advisedly) at the bottom of the socio-economic pile. Many more are under-employed.
Unless there is structural change, nothing will change. Essentially this means intervention in the labour market: proper jobseeker assistance (read: training, skills and personal development programs, wage subsidies to employers, travel incentives (to where the work is) and wages adjustment.
For business/employers/industry this means more flexible workforce management such as shared hours, work from home arrangements, child care provision, paying proper wages and not relying on a continual supply of low paid "backpackers", investing in their workforce to retain existing skilled staff, government investment in skills development and retention for small business. It also means adjusting the thinking around recruitment to include those with a disability, people over 50 and long term unemployed - to name a few.
Sure, we can bang on about overseas recruitment, eg skilled migration, 457 visas, Pacific Islander harvest workers, blah blah blah, but essentially that's not fixing the inherent structural problems in the labour market: it's just a band aid solution without any strategic research or policy to underpin it. And while we're at it, let's reconsider the way we actually measure "employment". Classifying 1 hour of work a week is NOT employed.
Child care and accommodation assistance are key to local workforce retention. Early learning, primary secondary and tertiary education needs to align more closely with business and industry needs, and not rely on overseas students to prop up the coffers (tertiary).
And until Unions and Business Associations find a way to work co-operatively, progress will be stalled.
I spent 20 years of my working life with the "old" CES and it did this and much more in it's day. Like any organisation there were faults, but the ethos, drive and focus was to GET PEOPLE JOBS. The privatised version that currently exists (JobActive, or now Workforce Australia) treats unemployed people as a money making commodity only, and has NO incentive to do otherwise. Centrelink is overburdened with a remit that is too big to be of any use. This also must change.
Perhaps the answer is to bring back a new, modernised version of the CES that is government owned and run. The huge sums of taxpayers money currently paid to the current lot of useless private employment service providers could fund it.
Link to an excellent ABC article below.
