MINISTER FOR Social Protection Joan Burton has said she is determined to resist automatic reductions in welfare payments for unemployed people who don’t find jobs on the basis they are arbitrary and are inspired by “deficit hawks”.
Ms Burton’s stance may put her at odds with the position of the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund. Both agencies have insisted that the Government introduce measures to “ensure that work pays for welfare recipients” as part of the bailout programme.
The Minister, in an interview with The Irish Times, has said she agrees with the troika's analysis that Ireland is an "outlier" in that the incentives are not very strong to get long-time unemployed people off social welfare.
However, she has said that the Government’s approach to this problem must be imaginative and co-operative and sanctions should not be applied until the end of a process of engagement, and only where that engagement has been refused by the unemployed person. “There are deficit and social welfare hawks arguing the idea of activation where large number of people are just cut off. You can’t do that, you can’t throw people to the wind,” she said.
“As Minister, my message is clear: I will assist you but you have a responsibility to respond to the options and opportunities. If you don’t, you do run the risk of being penalised. You can’t do it in an arbitrary way.”
Ms Burton was speaking ahead of the unveiling later this month of Pathways to Work, the Government’s major new initiative to integrate unemployment payment and job-seeking services. The service will include profiling of each individual and the introduction of new public service cards; as well as subsuming 1,000 community welfare officers and 700 Fás employment specialists into her department.
She said that the new service would be geared towards activation training, upskilling and engagement, with sanctions only for those who refused to engage.
In all 221 people on jobseekers’ allowance were penalised last year for refusing to engage. While that number of sanctions is high for Ireland historically, it still remains a tiny fraction of the 450,000 people who are unemployed.
The OECD also criticised the Government’s activation policies in a report late last year. “Penalties for insufficient job search or lack of co-operation with employment services are generally weak: for instance, sanctions for job resignation, refusal of employment or refusal of an activation place are extremely rare by international standards,” the report said.
Ms Burton said it was clear there was a group who become very long term unemployed “and risk is that it becomes intergenerational and their children become unemployed”.