What do employment services and Monsters Inc have in common?

In this week’s blog this week’s contributor @simonecasey reflects on the opportunity now before us as the Workforce Australia Select Committee ramps up it’s scrutiny of compulsion in employment services. She argues that it may be too far a stretch to suggest we can we turn our employment services into a laughter factory but we can at least stop them from being houses of misery.

As submissions flow in for the Workforce Australia Select Committee inquiry into employment services, a debate is warming up about the future of mutual obligation in Australia.

The debate was ignited throughout the hearings and submissions to the ParentsNext part of the inquiry, and observers will have noted the Committee’s interest in the question of compulsion. That is a question about whether requirements to attend employment services should be mandatory, and if they are not how should that be handled.

Along with many others in the advocacy, policy and research community I have spent many years identifying the problems employment services, and the way in which the compliance framework had been used to punitive effects.

When I first started working in the employment services sector, this was one of the first things I noticed was the conflict that was being generated at the street-level. Inspired by those who’d come before like the McDonald and Marston, my PhD investigated the causes for this conflict. My view was that providers had become incentivised to use the compliance system to achieve programmatic targets and that this was the intention of the double activation of the contract. That was how Workfare and Workfirst worked.

No public review of employment services has yet applied so much scrutiny to the compliance framework, despite there having been two earlier breaching reviews. The Expert panel review did not focus on compliance and meanwhile the Targeted Compliance Framework was born and implemented.

As I have discussed elsewhere the Targeted Compliance Framework is an efficient mechanism for the surveillance and administration of compliance penalties. In fact, far too efficient, because it eliminates steps of human review of payment suspensions, and demerit decisions, that lead to financial penalties. When it was introduced the number of payment suspensions almost doubled over night.

Evidence has been provided to the committee that most payment suspension threats do not lead to actual delays in payments. Only 5-10% according to the data provided by the PBO, although the jobactive evaluation showed a higher number when the TCF was first introduced.

But the problem is the level of threat that’s used in the system from the very outset of people’s interactions with providers. The threat’s begin with the SMS that advises your payment may go on hold, and is then followed by another message two days later that the payment is on hold. In jobactive, outside of lockdowns, there were about 200,000 of these threats applied every month – or roughly for one in five people – and even more if you count those that go to people using Disability Employment Services.  The data from the PBO suggested an average of one in three people in 2021-2022, the last year for which there was a complete set of data, but we know that some people get more suspensions than others.

A similar level of threats is expected in Workforce Australia although I have not yet been able to verify that fully.

My research has shown that these threats to financial security are coercive, and they are too often based on administrative mistakes. But not all the threats are counted. Because the threat effect is used to get people to sign job plans, and attend appointments and activities, even when a payment suspension is not triggered.  The threats are just there - alongside the other threats of Work for the Dole, and other activities used for tree-shaking or referral effects.

So an important question for the Committee is how to remove the level of threat in the system so that people no longer feel disempowered particularly while they are already experiencing poverty and financial insecurity.

A question I posed in my PhD and in later publications was about the paradox of sanctions when the point of employment services is apparently to help people get the jobs that will supposedly help them get out of poverty. Some scholars answer this paradox with the contingent labour theory of Workfare - which makes sense in the context of neoliberalised social policy. The reserve army of labour that can’t be commodified is punished for not transforming into labour.

I think we need to rebuild the model so that people want to attend employment services appointments, in the same way, that we might want to attend a health appointment. To get help for something we can’t fix ourselves.

But most of us can’t fix the fact that years of austerity focused policy have forced too many people who should be on disability or carer pensions onto jobseeking payments. We need policy makers to work on those problems and stop punishing people who are unwell, who have a disability or who need to care for others.

In the Workforce inquiry hearings, some employment services organisations have adding to the momentum to take sanctioning away from providers. We need to design a model that eliminates the threats to economic security and gives people access to review before any adverse decisions affecting welfare payments are made.

There is a moment in the children’s film Monsters Inc when Sulley, the prize scare monster, realises that they get more energy from the factory from children laughing not screaming.

It may be too far a stretch to suggest we can we turn our employment services into a laughter factory but we can at least stop them from being houses of misery.

This article is based on my academic research and personal views.