textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp001116.txt

4 articles
***************** For starters *********************

THE DUBLIN GOVERNMENT has finally agreed to pay 
outstanding social welfare money owed to 70,000 
married women.  An average £3,900 is to be paid to 
each woman, 75% to be paid in August & December 
with the remainder over the following eighteen 
months.

A European Community directive ordered that 
discrimination in social welfare be ended by 
December 1984.  Up to then unemployed married women 
got almost £5 less than men and their benefit ran 
out out three months earlier.  Married women were 
also completely barred from claiming Unemployment 
Assistance.

The Womens Dole Campaign was set up to oppose this 
inequality.  More recently 'Married Women for 
Equality' and the Free Legal Advice Centres carried 
on the fight.  More than a decade later the 
government says it is going to pay its debts.  
[Imagine if you tried to put off paying the rent or 
mortgage for over 10 years!]

*********

       GOVERNMENT SCHEMES TO HAMMER UNEMPLOYED

Community Employment Schemes (CE) were introduced by the 
Government last year and have replaced all the other 
schemes, such as S.E.S.  CE is better than the previous 
schemes in some ways - you can keep your secondary 
benefits, your rent allowance, medical card and fuel 
allowance.  It is much better for lone parents with 
young children because a special child-minding allowance 
was introduced.  However, apart from these improvements 
it is still a 'scheme', with all the problems associated 
with that.

There are over 39,000 people on CE throughout the 26 
counties.  The scheme is only open to people over 21 who 
are on the live register of unemployed or are lone 
parents.  There are now no schemes that take the 18-21 
age group, a strange omission when we think of all that 
is said about youth unemployment.  However they are 
probably the lucky ones when we consider what people on 
schemes have to put up with. 

Firstly, the extra money above the dole is very little 
because the £79 a week for a single person is taxed.  If 
a couple are on welfare and one is on a scheme, they 
only make about £10-£15 a week more.  CE is a work 
scheme, not a training scheme, although lots of 
community groups try to use it for training.  There is a 
£200 per worker allowance for training and an extra £100 
each for personal development.  A minority of schemes 
provide good training, most provide very little.

Taken in and tossed out again

The community sector is using CE in a big way to run all 
kinds of projects and services.  Many of these projects 
are very worthwhile in themselves such as resource 
centres, drugs projects, community development schemes, 
youth groups and so on.  The problem is that all of this 
work is being done on short-term schemes where the 
workers are being exploited and have very little chance 
of getting work in the project, even though they have 
the experience.  When their year on CE is over a new 
group of scheme workers is taken on and have to be 
trained in the work. 

The official purpose of these work schemes is to get the 
long-term unemployed back into the workforce, give them 
some skills and restore their confidence so that they 
can then go out and get a job.  The reality is very 
different.  A survey conducted by the Dublin Inner City 
Partnership and the Scheme Workers Alliance this year 
found that very few scheme graduates actually got jobs, 
only about 17% according to F.A.S. itself.  Of the rest, 
5% became self-employed and 23% extended their schemes 
while the remaining 55% had became unemployed, emigrated 
or died.  

No jobs but lots of work

These figures are hardly surprising.  There simply are 
not enough jobs out there even though there is plenty of 
work to be done.  This is the basic contradiction that 
these schemes are showing up all the time.  They exploit 
peoples' desire to be working, especially in the 
community sector where so much socially useful work 
needs to be done.

Even though schemes are supposed to be approved by trade 
unions so that they are not replacing "real jobs", in 
practise that is exactly what they are doing, especially 
in the local authority sector.  Maintenance of parks and 
community facilities such as swimming pools is almost 
all done on CE now.  The situation has reached such a 
stage of acceptance that the unions in Dublin 
Corporation, who are still holding out against the use 
of CE, found themselves the subject of vicious abuse by 
councillors of all parties recently when the issue was 
debated by the Corporation. 

CE workers are denied many of the legal rights and 
entitlements which part-time workers have.   There is no 
entitlement to maternity leave on CE, for example, and 
no holiday pay.  The Scheme Workers Alliance is 
demanding that scheme workers' conditions be improved.  
The demands they list are:

*Proper certified on-the-job training

*Higher rates of pay, £100-£150 a week

*Full-time places in bigger schemes

*All legal rights and entitlements of part-time workers.

*All scheme workers to have the right to join the trade 
union of their choice.

Unionising the schemes

This last point is very important.   Although this issue 
has been raised within the unions for the past five 
years, none of the unions has shown any great interest 
in organising scheme workers.  Working in schemes is 
here to stay for the foreseeable future so it is 
essential that the unions get their act together and 
organise these workers to fight for better wages and 
conditions.  

The real reason for the growth in work schemes is the 
Government's need to keep down the numbers on the live 
register of unemployed.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of 
people have now been on several schemes and have done 
several F.A.S. courses as well.  Most of them are still 
unemployed at the end of all that.  Lots of schemes have 
third level graduates working on them.  There is often 
competition to get a place.  They have become a major 
part of peoples' experience of low paid work.  In fact 
schemes really are no more than state organised low-paid 
exploitative work.  It is an indication of peoples' 
desperation that so many end up working on them.

Work schemes are the forerunner of workfare, a system 
where you have to work for your dole.   This is the 
logical outcome of the schemes.  At a time when there 
are major attacks on welfare in the USA and Britain it 
would be logical to expect the same to happen here 
sooner or later.  The massive rate of unemployment here 
makes it a bit harder to just go out and cut thousands 
of people off welfare in one go, as has happened in the 
States.

What next.. real jobs or workfare?

Some community groups  such as the Connolly Unemployed 
Centre in Dublin are now arguing that because CE is 
realistically the Government's only job creation 
strategy, that full-time permanent jobs should be 
created where a scheme has proved to be successful.  Not 
only should this be the case but full-time permanent 
jobs should be created everywhere socially useful work 
is being done on schemes.   

Work schemes such as CE need to be taken seriously by 
the left.  Organising campaigns around wages and 
conditions is necessary.  The involvement of the unions 
is important.  Up to now they have washed their hands of 
these workers.  39,000 part-time workers should be 
mobilised, not ignored.  Apparently another new scheme 
is in the pipeline.  The chances are that it will take 
us another step closer to workfare.   Watch this space!

Patricia McCarthy

************

              How Much Do You Earn?

THE LATEST figures for how much people earn are for 1993 
and were released by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions 
in March.  Average male industrial earnings were £306 
for 42.8 hours (£7.15 per hour), while women's wages  
lag behind with £182 for 37.6 hours (£4.84 per hour).

*****************************

77 Million Cut

THE NEED FOR a real alternative was confirmed when 
Labour and Democratic Left once again put the 
bossesÕ interests first.  They have agreed to a 
freeze on jobs in the public sector, a cut of £77 
million in government spending and further cuts next 
year.

This will mean longer hospital waiting lists, more 
overcrowded classrooms, less jobs.  This comes from the same 
government which reduced the levy on massively profitable 
banks by £36 million, reduced Corporation Tax by 2% at a 
cost of about £57 million, and completely exempted some new 
multinationals from paying any Corporation Tax at all.  
Perhaps Employment Minister Richard Bruton best 
conveyed the governmentÕs views when he welcomed the vote by 
Packard workers to reluctantly accept 400 redundancies by 
saying he was "delighted that our intervention has been 
successfu"

Of course these cuts donÕt effect the ruling class and 
their pals.  Matt Russell was removed from the Attorney 
GeneralÕs office because of his behaviour during the Brendan 
Smyth affair.  Russell was either very lazy and inept, or he 
was trying to cover up for a child abusing priest.  Either 
way, he got a golden handshake of £138,500 and a pension of 
£33,700 a year.

And then there is Hugh Coveney.  He was fired from his 
job as Minister for Defence after he was caught trying to 
use his office to get business for his firm of quantity 
surveyors.  Where did he end up?  The Fine Gael/Labour/DL 
government appointed him as Junior Minister at the Office of 
Public Works.  Of all the state agencies, the OPW probably 
most uses the services of quantity surveyors!