Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

It was about the Taoiseach's short-term benefit but it was also about a deeper process of shifting responsibility for unemployment onto the unemployed. It is a repeat, or the implementation, of the Thatcherite notion that there is no society; there is no societal unemployment. There is no unemployment caused by the crisis, bankers or developers. Instead, there is only the lazy, the work-shy, those who cannot get up in the morning. A key part of this that has become very clear over the summer is JobPath, the so-called employment activation scheme into which people are being pushed on a very widespread basis. It involves private companies getting paid on a results basis of getting people into some form of employment. Apparently, the Taoiseach went to see "I, Daniel Blake" a few months' ago. He must have seen it because he seemed to get ideas from it. In fact, he copied wholesale the same ideas and implementation that are graphically condemned in that film and brought them here. It is that notion of privatised employment activation with coercion and sanctions that is behind the horrific stories told in that film. Not just that, the Taoiseach brought the same companies to operate here - Seetec and Working Links, the parent company of Turas Nua, that are involved in scandals, including allegations of fraud in Great Britain.

The whole concept of JobPath kills two birds with one stone for the right-wing ideologues in government. It blames and demonises the unemployed for their unemployment and it simultaneously privatised a key aspect of social welfare. Unsurprisingly, it has its roots in the Troika memorandum of understanding with its call for "the application of sanction mechanisms for beneficiaries not complying with job-search conditionality". I met two women a month and a half ago who got these so-called letters of invite. These are threatening letters telling people they have to turn up. Well, they invite people to turn up but if they do not turn up, they may lose social welfare payments or have them cut. The women turned up to the meeting under that threat. Their story of being infantilised, of being treated like idiots, of pointless travel, of being forced to sit there and apply for jobs in a room with people supervising them when they could do it more effectively at home and of soul-destroying experiences is typical. Good articles on rabble.ieand broadsheet.ieillustrate that typical story.

In addition, like a certain number of other people affected by this scheme, they had community employment scheme offers which were likely to lead to real jobs but which they were unable to take up because they went into JobPath. Effectively, because Seetec would not make any money from it, they were blocked from taking up a position that could have led to a real job. They are imprisoned in this so-called JobPath. The entire system is perverse. The private companies get paid a registration fee for every so-called personal progression plan and then they get more fees for a time when someone is employed for 13 weeks on the basis of 30 hours per week or more, i.e., they have an incentive to meet that amount but no more - to get them into some type of job even if it is a job that will go nowhere or is only for 13 weeks. The case of two women I spoke to illustrates the point perfectly. It is not about the best outcome for people on social welfare. It is about profit for a company and meeting their incentives. It is a crucial part of this race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions - forcing people into low pay and low-security jobs.

Let me finish by warning the Government. When we started the ScamBridge campaign to expose JobBridge exploitation, the Government responded confidently. It had its Indecon report and huge success rates and everything was great in the same way as it sometimes points to a 99% success rate for JobPath. It claimed everything was rosy. Through people's experiences, and let us remember that over 100,000 people have been pointed in the direction of and forced into JobPath, and through it being exposed continuously, it was undermined and eventually the Government was forced to scrap it. The same will happen here as part of people getting organised and rejecting the Government's ideological demonisation of the unemployed and its policy of privatisation and Thatcherism and fighting for a socialist society where people have an opportunity to have decent, meaningful jobs and properly-funded public services.

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