There was a story this week online about a woman who is suing Britain’s government over a provision in their “Job Seeker’s Act” that requires people to accept internship positions, regardless of how appropriate those jobs might be, if they want to continue receiving unemployment benefits. I had always been in favor of such programs, on the grounds that if we’re going to pay people not to work, and we have a lot of work that needs doing anyway, it makes more sense to pay people to do that work. But the present case raises a few points about the practice that I’ll admit I hadn’t previously considered, and I thought it might be worth taking a closer look…
First off, the lawsuit claims that this practice is effectively unpaid labor – in the sense that the job seekers is being made to work for a company that has applied to their government to receive the use of workers, and some of these jobs are unpaid internships. This might result in program participants not being regarded as well as paid employees, or even in their being given harder and less enjoyable work, but since the point of such an assignment would be maintaining one’s unemployment benefits, it can’t really be described at unpaid. In the case of paid internships, paid positions, or even unpaid jobs that provide valuable training for free, the jobs may effectively be double-paying the applicant…
On the other hand, the program doesn’t appear to take any other factors into consideration. In the case in question, the woman bringing the lawsuit was working an unpaid position in a museum, in the hopes of using the experience to improve her chances of both finding and qualifying for a job, when the government pulled her out of it and ordered her to take a position stocking shelves instead. I’ve worked retail myself, and I can tell you that unless you want to move into retail management this sort of entry-level work is unlikely to prepare you for anything. I don’t know how realistic the woman’s aspirations were, or how likely she was to obtain employment she feels would be suitable working as an unpaid intern at a museum, but I think we can accept her contention that finding such work by means of working retail is even more unlikely…
The problem here is that while there are undoubtedly some people who will decline to take an otherwise unpaid job because they are actually working on getting a suitable position, there are others who will decline the work because they would prefer to get paid without having to work. Or, more to the point, if anyone is excused from working a menial job but allowed to keep receiving his or her unemployment benefit because he or she claims to be “working on getting a real job” then it is probably safe to say that no one will ever work one of these unpaid internships. As much as we might like to see people work for their unemployment benefits, it seems counter-productive to ask them to divert time from activities that might land them an appropriate job in order to work an inappropriate job…
So I have to ask you: do we have the right to demand that people furnish work in exchange for their unemployment benefits? If so, do we have the right to require that they do so during working hours when they might be engaged in getting a job? If not, how do we separate the people who are actively looking for work (or volunteering in unpaid jobs that might lead to paid ones) from people who are just looking to receive money without having to work for it? Or should we just offer voluntary programs (like the “Welfare to Work” projects in the US) that give people the chance to learn skills and get placed into better jobs on completion?
It’s worth thinking about…
No comments:
Post a Comment