From top: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty; Eamonn Kelly

It seems that JobPath will be wound down sooner rather than later.

The first signs of its demise began In December 2017 when a report indicated that JobPath was ineffective in its stated aim of creating employment.

Then in June 2018 the Department of Social Protection (DSP) announced via the minister that JobPath participants could now apply for Community Employment (CE) schemes.

Prior to this the JobPath rule said that CE schemes were not “real” jobs.

Whether this change was to include placements on CE as JobPath “successes” to massage the stats, or whether it was a winding down of the entire JobPath programme and the wider privatisation drive of welfare services was not yet clear.

But then in October 2018 it emerged that 11,000 people who had completed the JobPath programme were re-referred for another go. The figure was later revised up to 15,000.

Questions were raised. Did this mean that Seetec/Turas Nua would receive another payment for the same “customers”?

The Oireachtas public accounts committee looked into the matter and Yes, was the eventual confirmation. Seetec/Turas Nua would be paid twice for unsuccessfully “processing” the same individuals.

Then, in December 2018, that quiet time when everyone’s mind is on Christmas, the taoiseach said in an interview that JobPath may be wrapped up.

He claimed that it had done its job, that there was now almost full employment, full employment that is of people who can’t afford to rent rooms.

But it was clear that JobPath had not done its job. In November 2018 The Comptroller and Auditor General, Seamus McCarthy, told the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee that only 7% of jobseekers who found work while engaged with JobPath were still in employment after 12 months.

But even that measly success rate is open to question.

There are numerous anecdotal reports of people finding jobs without the aid of JobPath, whose employers are then contacted by Seetec/Turas Nua employees to claim credit for the creation of the job in order to charge a fee from the DSP.

The current minister for social protection Regina Doherty reiterated a claim to the public accounts committee that she routinely makes, saying that JobPath is, (or “JobsPath” as she calls it, revealing a perplexing apparent lack of familiarity with her own paperwork) the most successful job activation scheme in the history of the State.

What she fails to mention, and what no one ever pulls her up on, surprisingly, is that JobPath is, strictly speaking, the only Employment activation programme in the history of the state.

“Unlike most OECD countries, Ireland has not yet developed full labour activation policy, but is under increasing pressure to do so.”

So says a paper published in 2010, “The politics of Irish labour activation: 1980 to 2010” by Mary P. Murphy from the Department of Sociology, NUl Maynooth:

According to this paper, JobPath was one of three available models for employment activation in Ireland:

“The Danish model of flexicurity (derived from the two words flexibility and security) aims to enable flexible transitions between work and unemployment: periods of unemployment are cushioned by generous welfare schemes and workers, while unemployed, remain work-active by participating in ALMPs.

The mutual obligations model promoted by the OECD (Grubb et al., 2009) recommends intensification of benefit-control activity for the unemployed and other benefit-recipient groups in a more coercive approach where moderate benefits are used to support compulsory education, training or labour market participation; intrinsic to this model is the political message it sends about the obligations of the unemployed.

The third model, active inclusion for all, is promoted by the European Commission as a holistic strategy that stresses work for those who can work and inclusion for those who cannot work. This is less work focused and avoids punitive conditionality or a narrow focus on getting people off benefits.

Rather, its three pillars focus on adequate income support, inclusive labour markets and decent public services, which strive to provide personal pathways to employment and/or social participation…”

Well, it’s clear for anyone who had even the briefest brush with JobPath that we didn’t get the Danish model. Of the three available models, the more punitive one was chosen by the Fine Gael-led coalition.

It seemed that the intention was simply to dump people off welfare at whatever cost, encouraging a new wave of emigration from Ireland while forging ahead with a ruthless privatisation programme across all public services.

Also, as Leo Varadkar’s welfare cheats campaign demonstrated, there seemed to be a clear intention to divide workers from jobseekers and to arrange a situation where one group condemned the other as dead-weights on the “economy”, as the state has come to be regarded. This in a context where the banks and so on were getting all the breaks.

The model is not unlike neo-liberal models at play elsewhere. Put bluntly, as elsewhere, the approach is basically the legalised pillaging of state resources by an exploitative elite served by an obsequious political class, and usually at the expense of poorer people.

Maybe it’s because the companies who do “punitive”, like Seetec/Turas Nua (Working Links) who had already cut their teeth in Britain tormenting the lower classes, that our government decided to take that option.

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