Welcome to Richard Carmody Independent for Grey's Job Guarantee Page!
A job guarantee
-No restrictions, anyone who wants one, gets one, provided they can work the hrs
-You can work up to 40 hrs per week
-Pay will be at the minimum wage rate (approx $20/hr)
-The job comes with all the normal protections and benefits of a full time job
-Those protections include sick leave, superannuation, annual leave
-The yearly wage for a job guarantee employee will be approx $40,000, twice what you get on newstart
-The job guarantee jobs are not meant to replace existing private sector or government jobs. They are the creation of a new sector which has the purpose of providing useful work to those who want it and fulfilling community needs not currently fulfilled by the private sector or government
-The job will be provided at or close to the location of the applicant
-The jobs will be tailored to the abilities of the applicant as much as possible
-Examples of who might take up a job guarantee job
-A farming couple who are in a drought circumstance, chooses to work a minimum amount of hours on the farm, say 15 per week, but both take up 40hrs per week of job guarantee work, bringing in $80,000 per year, between the two of them to help keep the farm going and provide for their children
-A school leaver who is having trouble getting work in the private sector (the unemployment rate for young people is much higher than for the general population and can be as much as 15%!). They can take up a job in the job guarantee until they manage to get a job working in the field they want.
-Someone who works as a casual in hospitality, getting only 15hrs per week. They can take up some job guarantee work, to get say, an extra 15 hours per week, to help them go from struggling with bills, to being able to pay bills and even save a bit.
-An older person, say a 67 year old woman, who has a desire to still do work and contribute. She might only chose to do 15 hrs per week. That's fine. She's asked not to do real physical work, but is happy to do some physical work, she isn't sedentary, she just knows her limits. The job guarantee admins find her work that suits her physical capabilities. This extra little pay helps make her feel financially more secure as she's not running down her superannuation as fast.
-The people that were laid off during the Whyalla steelworks troubles all would've been able to go straight on to a job guarantee job, had the program existed. For the ones with home or personal loans, this keeps the money coming in at a level much higher than newstart and hopefully would've helped avoid problems with those loans.
-A struggling business owner, say in a country town where the farmers have been hit by drought, could opt to only have the business open a few hours per day, but in the rest of their time, they can work in a job guarantee job, getting an income that way. This would help keep the business going instead of it closing down or moving away, it would keep services available to country people. When business picks up again, the owner can ask to reduce their job guarantee hours or stop working in it altogether if they want.
-A boilermaker that was hurt in a workplace accident has been assessed as disabled. Technically, he is still free to be employed, but the employer would have to take special precautions. He tries to get work but no employers are interested and under the current system he only has newstart to turn to, which frustrates him to deal with. He's also frustrated that he can still do his boilermaking work quite well, he just can't work all day and needs to take his time and have breaks. This person could take up a job in the job guarantee. He would be assigned a role where he could take those breaks. The good thing is, society doesn't lose the skills of a very competent boilermaker and the boilermaker himself would feel much better contributing and not having to deal with centerlink.
-A student has taken on a double degree at uni. Her time demands are high, but she does have some gaps in a busy schedule here and there. She tries to find a job with a small amount of hours that lines up with the times when she's free, but she's not able to find a match. She could simply take up a job guarantee job. She can specify the hours and the times and the job guarantee admin must do their best to match this. They have no problem doing this seeing as the girl is young, fit and very educated, so she fits a wide range of work that the job guarantee has on.
-Local communities set the work to be done in the job guarantee
-The work could include:
-Repair and recycle centers could be opened, these would be staffed by job guarantee workers. Initially a local council may have to employ someone to bring in the repair skills but as that person trained up job guarantee people, they could go on to train new people and it would be self sustaining.
-A school or hospital may have some run down equipment. They may request to have some job guarantee labor to help repair and refurbish a few things. This will often extend the life of equipment, saving money on new purchases. If there was a lot of ongoing work, there would be no harm in the job guarantee workers being resident in these bodies (subject to all the checks for people normally employed there) for the long term.
-Environmental rehab and repair work. There are areas in Grey that have issues with salinity. Job Guarantee labor could assist with rehabilitation and monitoring of these areas. They could assist research groups trying to determine what methods work best at reducing the salinity. There are also many areas with invasive weed species, again, the community could request to have job guarantee workers assist with these sorts of things
-Public areas may need cleaning and tidying, to help the appearance and amenity of a town. This might, for instance, help bring more tourism. The community could request for job guarantee workers to assist with this work
-There is a lot of unpaid volunteering and carer work. Some of the efforts people are going to, in my view, deserve to be rewarded with a wage. A person caring for a sick relative could apply for that job to fall under the job guarantee banner. If the community agreed, then the person would be able to do the caring work and recieve a wage for it. Similarly, a volunteer role may have grown and consumes a significant amount of a person's time. They would be able to apply to the job guarantee scheme. If the community agreed that the workload was enough, the person could recieve a wage. Perhaps the workload is only high in the run up to an event, in which case the person would recieve the wage whilst doing that work and then as the workload dropped back down, they would drop out of the job guarantee criteria and just go back to being a "traditional" volunteer.
-Its really up to communities to decide what they want and need.
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Authorised by Richard Carmody, Whyalla Norrie.