Want to get the dole? Get to work! That’s the Irish government’s plan, anyway.

The jobless will now be "requested" to work "in the community" or else they will lose their unemployment benefits. Those who fail to show up or miss hours will be struck off the dole under the plans, reports the Irish Independent. 

 

As if the ontological horror of not being able to earn a living isn’t bad enough, now people already forced to beg for a meagre crust are to be dragooned into a conscript army to provide "socially useful labour" (read as: appalling jobs that few would willingly do).

Everyone is on-board for the plan in these straitened times, it seems. Even Irish trade unions have given the government’s plan a guarded welcome.

On one level, it’s easy to see why: the longer one is unemployed, the harder it is to get a job, not only in technical terms – employers prefer people already in work – but also because long-term unemployment is psychologically demoralising and accompanied by a loss of social skills.

But the plan won’t work.

Apart from the unfortunate echos of Famine-era schemes that provided food in return for useless labour (such as the Killiney Obelisk, pictured), there are two simple facts the scheme does not address.

Firstly, Irish unemployment has sky-rocketed. To put it bluntly, people are unemployed because there are too few jobs available. Anecdotally, your humble journalist is currently seeking safer climes after six years as a freelance. Seven job applications in the last month did not result in even a single interview, despite having written for some of the best-known newspapers in the English-speaking world. More concretely, Irish unemployment is at a record 13.8 per cent. In a country of just 4.2 million, 455,000 people are on the dole.

Secondly, work in and of itself is not necessarily productive. In economic terms "make work" schemes are worse than useless – rather than contributing to the national economy they actually shrink it. Being economically unproductive is not a moral failing: civil servants are not economically productive but the public sector performs necessary work so we, as a society, agree to pay for it as the consequence of not doing so would be worse – and, in all likelihood, more expensive in the long run.

But forcing the already demoralised unemployed to work for dole not only makes a mockery of the idea of people being remunerated for ‘creating wealth’ (which that what our economies are all about, or so we’re told anyway), it also takes work away from those employees, public and private, who would otherwise be doing it. After all, if this work is so “socially useful” then we must already be doing it, right?