Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wanted to get an idea of the track record of the Government in providing jobs and training for people, so I looked up the JobBridge website today. The first advertisement I found was for an Advance Pitstop position which had been filled 28 times previously by the JobBridge scheme. This was not about providing jobs, it was about exploiting people as much as possible until they were thrown back on the heap. Advance Pitstop is a disgrace and so is the Minister who allows this to carry on.

Gateway is no better. The principle of Gateway, the fact that it exists and could be proposed by a member of the Labour Party no less, is an insult to the idea that people have any rights. It says clearly that fair treatment, decency and respect are privileges that one earns with the accumulation of wealth. It says that if people are young, uneducated and out of work for any reason, they do not deserve something as basic as a decent day's pay for a decent day's work. It denies flatly that if a job is worth having done it is worth paying for.

In its implementation, the State and local authorities, like the businesses in JobBridge, exemplify the destructive, exploitative nature of capitalism that its strongest proponents so flatly deny. If a job is worth doing it is worth paying for. It is worth a decent wage for that decent day's work. That is what we are fighting to uphold when we fight against Gateway and JobBridge and other such schemes. They do not activate employment but further incentivise and legitimise the worst cases of exploitation.

In this State where the Taoiseach earns more than most EU leaders, the Labour Party now feels that the worst-off should work for free. Unemployed people in an economy which has not seen a major growth in job numbers, will now be forced to work for a €20 top-up on their dole for 22 long months. That is not even enough for a weekly bus-pass, especially since this Government decided to hike up fares every six months. The Government claims this will give unemployed people experience which will help them to get a job.

Training is important but we have seen the kind of training provided by Labour-designed job activation policies. JobBridge was not a method of getting training and experience for people without jobs, and neither will Gateway. No account is taken of existing experience of the people being forced to slave for virtually nothing. Through JobBridge people with qualifications who have simply lost out to the economic collapse are being asked to take unpaid work cutting chips in the local fast-food restaurant or washing floors. How is sweeping streets or planting trees any better as a form of training? If these jobs need to be done, they should be paid for.

One cannot create jobs by forcing people to work. JobBridge only created profit for the unscrupulous who will exploit it. Gateway will actively discourage councils from creating real jobs, relying instead on the team of free workers straight out of the dole queue. Those selected randomly and forced to slave will have to do so for 19.5 hours a week. That means they are being paid less than €1 an hour, except that 20 cent will be subject to PRSI.

I do not know how the Labour Party could stomach this, much less propose and implement it. It is disgusting. The scheme includes no structured formal training. It is worthless to those who will be forced to take part but lucrative for the Government, or so it hopes, which will claim further success in reducing joblessness when it has 3,000 people working for nothing.

Real people, with families and homes need real jobs that pay real wages. They need training in some cases but training that will genuinely put them in a position to find work. If labour activation was so important to this Government, community employment schemes would have been improved, but instead they were nearly done away with altogether. If training was really important to this Government, third level education would not become more and more expensive for ordinary people. Schools would not be forced to cut the cloth closer each year. Grants supporting people returning to education would not be so difficult to access. That would be a real drive towards training and upskilling. It would not help the Government to spend a little money investing in people while also saving money by running local services on the cheap with free labour. This scheme stinks. It is a scam, just like JobBridge, and no one is fooled.

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