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“THE NAME WAS was toxic because the behaviour associated with it was toxic.”
This wasn’t the opinion of a left-wing TD or trade unionist, instead it was former Fine Gael TD Noel Rock’s comments on the JobBridge scheme when it was finally scrapped in 2016. It shows why the government has been so vigorous in their efforts to disassociate their new labour activation measure – the Work Placement Experience Programme (WPEP) – from JobBridge.
Despite the clunky new name and government denials, when you look at the workings of the scheme it becomes increasingly obvious that this is a reheated and repacked JobBridge 2.0.
‘Scambridge’
The original JobBridge scheme was launched in 2011 in the face of high unemployment and mass youth unemployment in particular. The ideology behind the scheme appeared to be that young unemployed people were lazy and didn’t want to work, with then Labour leader and Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore telling the Dáil “[t]he place for any young person is not permanently in front of a flat screen television,” while he defended cutting the dole for those under 26.
Participants were forced onto ‘internships’ or faced having their payments cut. They would receive a €50 top-up to their welfare in return for working 40 hours a week for nine months. The employer would contribute nothing towards this and there was no guarantee of a job at the end of the internship.
In 2012, I launched the Scambridge campaign to oppose the scheme. We highlighted and picketed employers who were using the scheme for nothing more than free labour. These jobs included some such as sandwich artists in Subway, retail and hotel staff, forecourt attendants, and infamously the case of Advance Pitstop who attempted to hire almost 30 interns to work across its network of garages which would have saved them almost €400,000 in wages.
The scheme was an abject failure from the point of view of the interns, with 44% of them saying the employer was using it for free labour. Alongside the horror stories from participants, the scheme didn’t create new jobs, in fact, it acted to displace job creation and depress wages creation.
Under 20% of participants got a full time job with the employer they did the internship with. But almost 30% of JobBridge employers said if the scheme didn’t exist they would have been ‘highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to have simply employed someone properly! JobBridge simply forced people into working nine months for free.
€3.43 an hour – JobBridge 2.0
Faced with a new unemployment crisis, the government has relaunched JobBridge in the guise of WPEP. With the scheme only up and running a couple of weeks we already have many examples of employers intending to use it to access free labour rather than creating a job and employing someone.
Positions working in delis, petrol stations, sports shops, child care and IT have appeared since the scheme launched. These are jobs which if this new scheme didn’t exist employers would likely have to pay someone to do.
For participants the deal hasn’t gotten much better. Instead of working for 40 hours a week for nine months, you will only be working 30 hours a week for six months. To take the sting out of this scheme, the government is trying to say that participants will be paid the minimum wage – a weekly sum of €306. It is even less than the €350 which the Pandemic Unemployment Payment was set at.
I believe this is just a cynical attempt to fiddle the numbers. The weekly payment is made up of the normal dole payment of €203, with a top-up of €103. This means that for their 30 hours of work participants will be paid the princely sum of €3.43 an hour. Overall you’d likely be losing money if you were tempted to buy luxuries such as lunch or a coffee, as well as paying for travel costs.
Designed to be abused
By design the scheme is set up to potentially exploit the unemployed and workers generally, but to benefit bosses and the government. The government will get the immediate boost of being able to remove people on the scheme from the Live Register and to massage the numbers to say they are tackling unemployment.
The real benefit will be for employers – the government’s own report evaluating JobBridge 1 had recommended that employers should pay interns in certain circumstances. Like another six of the 10 recommendations, this has simply been ignored in the design of the new scheme. Instead, employers will be able to access a pool of free labour to do jobs that they otherwise would have paid someone to do. They won’t have to contribute one cent towards the worker, but reap all the benefits.
By normalising free labour, this scheme is bad for all workers. If an employee is thinking of asking for a pay increase or extra shifts or hours, the boss can turn around and say ‘why would I pay you more when I can get someone to do it for free?’
The answer to the unemployment crisis isn’t JobBridge 2.0 or any other Welfare to Work scheme, it is in public investment in education and job creation. We need genuinely free third level education, and investment in quality apprenticeships. The government also needs to create tens of thousands of Green and Care Jobs to ensure a rapid and just transition to a zero carbon economy – building and retrofitting homes, rewetting bogs, planting forests, teaching children and caring for patients.
In the meantime, Scambridge has been relaunched. Employers seeking to access free labour should beware – we’ll be exposing them on social media and protesting at their premises.
Paul Murphy is People Before Profit spokesperson on Employment Rights and a TD for Dublin South West.
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I got a job and experience out of it and ya money was poor but it helped me get a job. It’s not slave labour.
@Brax Braxton: Errrr what about people who need mone to pay bills and survive who cannot afford to be paid below minimum wage?
@Ally Mc Culladgh: Up skill and get a better payed job.
@Roy Dowling: *upskill *paid (oh the irony of telling someone to upskill).
If JobBridge was meant to actually create a bridge to skilled labour, that would be fine. But forcing people with university degrees onto it in order to do some photocopying was ridiculous. Yes, for many university graduates lack of relevant work experience in a recessionary environment was a problem, but the difference here is the word ‘relevant’ – hardly any JobsBridge position was relevant to the skills and knowledge of the person on the scheme.
@Joe Vlogs: jobsbridge was only one scheme. While on unemployment, you can also upskill on springboard+ to focus on the upskilling, but for some people, direct on the job training is better suited. The biggest problem with this article isn’t the scheme (which is better than starting on the for if you haven’t been able to get a job), its describing it as an unemployment crisis (everything is a crisis to PBP/SF). There is a COVID change that mostly affected low paid workers that will recover, but less than 8% in a pandemic isn’t a crisis.
This week’s bandwagon for Murphy’s popular front…
You’re not working for 3.43/hr Paul… You’re working for 10.20/hr. The difference is you’re working!
@Willie Murphy: and not paying tax on it
I understand the concern, but Paul has hardly needed a leg up it seems. The Youth Employment Support Scheme was around for years and Paul let that one go. Like anything, how it works depends on those involved. It can be exploited, but it can also be a massive benefit. I took a JobBridge position that opened up opportunities that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. I remember it being completely voluntary and no penalties for not taking it. It needs to be administered well and that really means locally. It’s part of a complex system that doesn’t always feel is on your side. It can be a real boost for some and knocking it isn’t the way forward.
Paul, you say “We need genuinely free third level education, and investment in quality apprenticeships. The government also needs to create tens of thousands of Green and Care Jobs to ensure a rapid and just transition to a zero carbon economy – building and retrofitting homes, rewetting bogs, planting forests, teaching children and caring for patients.”
Who is going to pay for all of this Paul? Your fantasy wishlist policies jump off the page, but no substance with regard to the cuts or taxes required to pay for it. With higher taxes, will come lower employment and back to the unemployment driven recessions of the 1950s to 1980s.
Jobbridge was a good scheme to create opportunities for the unemployed as well as the employers. It helped build confidence, experience and expertise that could be added to a CV. My Startup Company took on 8 interns through the scheme during our first 2 years of existence. All 8 interns used the scheme to their advantage. 1 long term unemployed man used the fact he was working to get a job elsewhere, another used it for experience whilst waiting for a course to come up, 1 left after 8 months and set up his own business… the other 5 were offered and accepted jobs with my company. Each of them helped my company grow during the 9 months and built confidence from the experience. All 8 are now confident and successful in their own rights.
@Paul Ennis: “bUt wHo iS gOiNg tO pAy fOr iT” cried the ghost of Margaret Thatcher through Paul Ennis’ haunted mouth.
Paul, are you aware that here in Ireland we pay a thing called taxes? Usually these taxes get spent on things like pensions for politicians, printers, e voting machines, childrens hospitals etc etc. But when someone wants to divert resources towards any of the aforementioned projects, Thatcher pipes up from beyond the grave via one of the many empty vessels she now occupies.
@Black Iron Tarkus: he used slave labour to make money. The lowest of the low.
Don’t agree with Paul Murphy on most issues but he’s definitely right about this. Most of the dole related schemes are a waste of time.
Way off topic here, but isn’t it marvellous we still live in a society where Mr Murphy can voice his opinions against the state without fear of exile or murder. I don’t normally agree with him but he’s dead right here. I have family members who were replaced in their jobs by interns during the last job bridge scheme. Solicitor said it was more cost effective for some employers to pay whatever through the WRC to sacked employees compared to the savings of replacing with an intern. Madness
Over 240 million of taxpayers money was spent on jobspath which turned out to be complete exploitation from the employers and people still ended up unemployed to make Leo and gang look great in the low unemployed figures which Regina Doherty reckons was great value for money.lets see how much they will pay to a private English company this time around.a complete farce
We are not out of the woods by a long shot. Pandemic unemployment is just now being realised, there will be a lot of evictions once the eviction ban is lifted in Jan 2022. Brexit job losses have been hidden so far by PUP. A lot of small businesses have gone under, but that’s not visible yet due to PUP.
@Flynn.: I agred Brexit has not really hit home yet. There is more hardship on the way food, fuel and day to day cost about to sky rocket.
Paul is right on this one. I applaud his work in this area, more power to him!
Maybe replace it with the scheme that got Zappone here job.
Four tiimes the Mayo schoolteacher raided my private pension scheme to fund this, they hit the ones who had no union to fight back and I will always detest them for it.
I thought it was a good scheme until a relative having worked in a Hospital in administration on scheme was not eligible to take up full time positions that became available because at the time there was an embargo on recruitment in the Civil Service. They said they could only offer the vacancies to staff that were already in the system. It was sickening for her to see others with no experience of the work getting the job she wanted.
The real dilemma is that our young unemployed have nowhere to emigrate to because of Covid. It will be the first time that we as a society have to face the fact that a series of measures will have to be put in place to deal with an unprecedented high level of unemployment. That includes Work experience programmes with state support. If Mr Murphy have genuine workable and affordable ideas to deal with this impending crisis let him give us his ideas. It is very easy to shout from the sideline.
I was out of work 2010-2012 and I had a family to look after and was trying to find work. I went on a scheme under a different name to these intern placements now and I can remember washing the bosses crew cab jeep and the wife’s family car. The next was off to the main dealers in the town and back with to brand new vehicles. I did get a job eventually but not to what I learned from them. It was just cheap labour I wasn’t really accepted by other staff members and I had no back up from fas as it was then
Jobbridge wasn’t a bad idea IN THEORY, but it was massively abused by employers who just saw it as free labour. It would need to be much more tightly regulated than last time.
I do know a guy who got into an IT career out of it, but I know many more who were just used as free labour, set to packing boxes and running errands at no cost to the employer.
Obviously working at Subway or Tescos is not an internship, the “Sandwich Artist” internship should have been the wake-up call but nothing happened about it.
It is 10.20 an hour for 30 hours , no tax on that sum
JobsBridge has a huge success with over 60% of participants going on to find full employment. Hard left always seem happy to have people being paid indefinitely to stay at home doing nothing. New scheme should be mandatory once a person moves from jobseekers benefit to allowance, with strict monitoring in place to ensure employers are operating the scheme correctly
@Stephen Kearon: Employable people going on to find employment isn’t such a shocking story especially considering 95% of school leavers in normal times find full employment without the aid of any such scheme.
For me personally as a college student at the time it was a complete disaster since all regular internships at the time had dried up to avail of the free labour and I wasn’t eligible to apply for any of them since it required 3 months on social welfare.
I had even agreed an internship with a software company, set the start date and as we were filling out the paperwork he realised he had to decline me because I wasn’t on the dole. It seemed clear the scheme was more about massaging the figures of long term unemployed than actually helping young people gain skills and experience.
@Stephen Kearon: that’s a complete untruth Kearon. What else would you expect though from an ex MaFFia member?
@Stephen Kearon: again you speak from the opposite orifice intended for speech.
The article itself stats that “ under 20% got full time employment “ yet you roll out a 60% number plucked from that same orifice.
You’re some tool!!
This is the same Paul Murphy who earns 125k a year and got free legal aid to defend himself. You have no standing Paul.
Funny how certain politicians seem to get a platform to write on whatever topic they choose on The Journal
Have you ever seen two things go together so well? Bacon and eggs? Beer and Crisps? No Murph and the Journal. Puke.
Corporate/business welfare as opposed to social welfare.
Any business which cannot afford to pay a living wage is non viable, it should not be encouraged to exist on welfare hand outs to create private profits.
My experience with JobsBridge was good. I went on the scheme in 2016 just before it ended. 5 years later I am with the same company. It needs to be targeted more with a specific list of roles offered.
When there was an opportunity here for PM to describe a decent alternative, all he could come up with was that the employers should pay the interns more! This is a get out to work scheme, who knows, you might make a career for yourself, we all started somewhere and usually on 5h ite money. Get off the soap box Paul and start coming up with real alternatives rather than your usual anti establishment diatribe.
@kieran: “The government also needs to create tens of thousands of Green and Care Jobs to ensure a rapid and just transition to a zero carbon economy ”
This rubbish from a high paid privately educated lefty TD who carried on a campaign to ensure a finite resource, fresh water, continues to be wasted.
Maybe the answer lies in Jobstown. Paul featured strongly there a few times!
The answer to the unemployment crisis sure as hell isn’t Paul Murphy.
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