I welcome Mr. Mike Allen, general secretary of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed. Perhaps he will introduce his colleagues.
Presentation by Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed.
With me are Ms Camille Loftus, welfare rights co-ordinator for the INOU, and Mr. John Mathews, vice-chairman of theorganisation.
I welcome the invitation to address the committee. While these are serious issues, there is some disagreement about their meaning. It is worth noting how welcome it is for Ireland to be discussing how fast unemployment should be falling. I welcome the extraordinary shift in concern about unemployment. We are concerned that if unemployment falls it should allow for greater financial resources for training and for public concern to focus more on those who are left behind. There is a great anxiety among the long-term unemployed in disadvantaged areas that we are moving towards a society in which those who are left behind are treated as if this is their fault. These types of attitudes in mainstream society towards certain communities are deepening in many respects rather than focusing on how to achieve a more cohesive society.
The Tansey report, together with the NESF report, are important because they provide a good basis for the type of discussion which is taking place. I will list the weaknesses in the reports which will be referred to later. There is no gender analysis in the Tansey report. We know the way in which women interact with the labour market is very different from the way in which men interact with it. There are extraordinary complexities in the way in which people answer questions and the way in which the working life of men and women is perceived. This will be referred to later. While the report mentions the number of people on active labour market programmes, a substantial number are still on employment and training schemes and it does not emphasise the implications of this. It assumes the nature of the labour and skills shortages which exist in the economy at present. This is not fair because it much more problematic to work out what is taking place in terms of job vacancies than to work out the difference between the ILO and the live register definition.
I wish to raise my concern about the treatment of people on pre-retirement payments. These were introduced in the late eighties as a measure to move people between the ages of 55 and 60 out of the labour force. At the time the INOU opposed vigorously this approach and said it was essentially massaging the unemployment figures and telling these people to give up hope. This was introduced in a humane way by the then Minister, Deputy Woods. The Dáil debates at the time clearly indicate the view that these people would not work again, that they should not be obliged to seek work; they would not get more money but they would have slightly more attractive signing conditions. I find the committee's treatment of this group of people quite strange because they have been living under the regulations and legislation passed in this House. It is true they can and should be seen as a potential form of labour supply. However, they should not be seen as committing some sort of fraud if they do not genuinely seek work. The type of mistaken rationale which led to the setting up of the present scheme emerges in later observations, to which I will refer later. Some believe the abandonment of this group of people in the late eighties should be followed by an abandonment of long-term unemployed younger people on the basis of the difficulty they have obtaining jobs in the open labour force.
The problem with the Tansey report and subsequent discussions is the move from a very technical analysis of why two types of measurements are different. It concludes they are apples and oranges, pushes that to one side and asks why they are different. On the face of it, that would seem to concern an agricultural committee rather than this committee. However, this leads one to look at fraud. There are many reasons other than fraud as to why the two issues diverge. I appreciate this committee is primarily concerned with public expenditure but there are more concerns of a public expenditure nature than fraud. A number of issues immediately suggest that there are much more complicated issues which relate to the divergence between the two measures than fraud. The first is in relation to the 300,000 people who sign on and disappear from the live register each year. This is an extraordinary dynamic. A similar number of people go through ILO unemployment at the same time. When people compare the number of jobs with vacancies and the numbers unemployed they do not understand why these people cannot get jobs. This misses the point because most of the people do get jobs. If one looks at the numbers signing on and off the live register every six months, one wonders why only 10,000 people got jobs. This is not the case; tens of thousands of people have got jobs, they are simply replaced by others who are now on the live register. This is crucial to understanding what is taking place.
It was pointed out in the discussions this morning that there are different measures of unemployment. The committee is focusing on two measures of unemployment which, on the face of it, appear to have the same definition as access. This is about seeking work, availability for work, capacity to work and not otherwise working. This seems to be a reasonable question. However, when one looks at what is within these definitions, what does it mean to be genuinely seeking work? Does it mean to want a job and read the papers? Does it mean that one must knock on factory doors every day and ask for a job? Does it mean that people must wait for their neighbours to ask for a job for them? During the height of the unemployment crisis people were refused dole for not being available for work on the day they signed because they went fishing that afternoon. I represented people who did this. This is unreasonable but is it reasonable that one should be available to work next week? Do people have to make child care arrangements before they go to work? There are huge differences in these definitions. It is reasonable for someone to say to the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs that they are available for work when a job is available and say to someone who is carrying out a survey that one is not available for work because one is attending a wedding next week. Surely it would not be fraud for someone to go to a wedding while they were unemployed. Are we saying the Department should do what it did in the 1980s, that is, knock people off the dole for these periods? It does not go deep enough simply to say the definitions are the same because the concepts which underline the definitions are much more general and much harder to get at.
Deputy Ardagh asked about long-term unemployment. There are huge differences in this regard. To be on the live register for a year is very clear but anyone on the live register for over 12 months is termed long-term unemployed. The CSO asks what one was doing last year. That is a much more general question. Some people who were working last year might say they were unemployed because their general status is unemployed. Equally people who were long-term unemployed last year might think they were working then. These are very complex issues and to try to nail it down will not get us anywhere. I have been trying to understand these issues for ten years. Comparing people does not get one anywhere because the concepts and definitions being used do not allow this to happen.
The chairman referred to obscuring the issues. I do not wish to do this. We share the concerns of this committee which is that there appear to be very large numbers of people still unemployed, whether measured by ILO or by the live register. At the same time, many people are saying they have job vacancies. I am sure some of them are decent, well paid jobs that one would want, but they cannot fill them. At the heart of it, this is the issue which is to be resolved.
It is an issue which is deep in the heart of this organisation. We do not exist to defend people who want to hang about on the dole and do not want to work, nor do we exist to defend people who are working and signing. We exist to fight for the right of people who want to work to do so and to get decent employment, move forward in society, to participate and get a decent income from it.
The reason there are so many people who are remaining long-term unemployed while there are jobs is explained under the general heading of mismatch. It is that the jobs that are there do not match the people who wish to have them. That mismatch covers four aspects - there are additional levels of mismatch. One of them is skills, which has been mentioned already. In our submission we use some ESRI figures which show that while there are low skill job vacancies, the actual pattern of vacancies is dramatically one in which most of the job vacancies are for higher skilled people and very few vacancies are for low skilled people. The answer to this is training.
The second issue is the mismatch in age. This is complicated because many employers do not want to employ older people. The third issue is where people live and the fourth issue is despair. I want to concentrate most on that. I believe a substantial proportion of the difference between the live register figure and the ILO figure, if one wants that type of explanation, is the large of number of people who say to the surveyors that they are not looking for work. I also know from individual experience, the research that the INOU recently completed, that that is not true. The people they are lying to are not in the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, but the CSO survey people.
When one actually explores underneath people's experience, they say they are not looking for work, but when one goes back a few weeks later, they have a job or they are on a scheme. If somebody has looked for a job for four or five or ten years and does not get one and he or she is asked if they are looking for a job, the tendency is to say that they would not look for a job because nobody would employ them. The hope lives on in people and they continue to seek the work. That leads to a conclusion that the type of solution to the problem is not one which is focused on fraud.
There was a laugh around the hall when the employment action plan was raised and the number of people who sign off on receipt of the letter. We know 300,000 people sign on and sign off every year without receiving any letter. Most people who sign off the dole do so because they have got a job and they are planning to move on. They do not do it because they are being harassed. The sort of attitude which assumes that everybody who signs off when they go into the plan is a cheat who has been caught denigrates the work of FÁS and the Department and makes it much harder to deal with the real problems that are there.
The reality of those figures for young people is that, when it started, a third of them signed off when they got the letter. That is not that far out from the number which would have signed off anyway. When one looks at the older group, who were less than one year unemployed, the number who signed off went down to 25%. With the groups in Dundalk, Ballyfermot and Kilkenny, it went down to 16% who signed off. It is worth exploring why the older, long-term unemployed people were much more willing to come in for an interview than younger people.
In the employment action plan, it was clear from what Mr. Haran said that the focus is on preventative measures, which we strongly support. However, little work is being done with those who are already long-term unemployed. There is a process of abandonment going on with those people. They are being left behind while the resources are directed at preventative measures. We have resources to look after the people who suffered for the last 20 years of mass unemployment. We are not doing it, and we tend to do it only by suggesting that they are committing fraud.
There may be some among them who will never work again in the open labour market, but I would not jump to that assumption. I have seen a very large number of people who I would have thought might not work again who are now making a very decent income and contributing to society and their families. Focusing on that area of work would be a much more important direction in terms of making sure that we do not have any ILO unemployment or live register unemployment and, therefore, do not have to concern ourselves with the difference between them.