Another story from a parent and some theoretical reflections

Theoretical reflections updated today!
Here is some analysis of Rosie's story I posted here today.
Rosie is another parent I interviewed for this research who had been transferred from parenting payment to Newstart in 2008 when her youngest had turned 8.
In her story, the conflict behind many of the relationship breakdowns which precede becoming a single parent, was present in the ongoing battles being fought between her and her ex-husband over their children’s care arrangements.  The presence of this conflict is an ongoing cause of stress for many single parents who must negotiate behaviour that is challenging, and where reports of non-payment of child support are frequently experienced making financial survival more difficult.
Rosie’s experience of employment services takes places against a background of ongoing struggle with different service environments, and illustrates the ways in which individual’s contexts are more complex than just being a parent, a worker or a welfare recipient. Individual roles are multifaceted, and for those experiencing extreme hardship like Rosie, involve the navigation of multiple service providers and multiple causes of stress.
Rosie tells of how because of her relationship breakdown she eventually lost her house because she was unable to maintain the mortgage payments when she was on placed on Newstart. To make matters worse, in 2009 Rosie was in a severe car accident, which leaves her to this day suffering from chronic pain and with a scar across her face she would love to have fixed. She has been waiting for a Transport Accident Commission claim to come through she hopes will provide her with the money to do this, and to help repay her parents for the help they have given her over the last 5 years while her circumstances have been difficult.
Rosie is currently living in a shed behind their house because she can live there for low rent, as she cannot afford to pay rent on Newstart. She lives there with two of her teenage sons, there is another who has been staying with his Dad, because although he does not pay her child support, he is working cash in hand and can offer the son bribes to stay with him despite their being parenting orders that he shouldn’t be.
After her accident Rosie’s life really fell apart. She was unable to work to supplement her Newstart income, yet did not qualify for DSP.  She reports begging her Doctor and the ESP she was referred to for vocational assistance, to pass her as fit for work as she was desperate to earn more money and had always had a positive outlook on working.
When she lost the house she and her three sons became homeless, living in their car, and staying when they could with relatives while trying to not outstay their welcome.  She relied on food parcels, vouchers and all forms of charity and material aide, while all the while staying in the same location so she could provide her sons with continuity of schooling and community.   Community and social networks have all been useful sources of social support for Rosie.
Eventually she was referred to a housing support worker, who helped Rosie get her situation under control.  However, she says, her family bears the scars of the period of living rough and financial hardship.  She feels the strain of relying on her parents too much, at the same time, she is also aware of the disappointment she thinks her teenage boys have that their childhood has been disrupted by these events.
Before Rosie’s accident she was working long hours, and wasn’t able to be home after school or the weekends.  Her eldest sons did what teenage boys do when they are unsupervised, and got into trouble with drugs with friends from school.  It was a particularly dark period for Rosie and other parents in the neighbourhood where a spate of six suicides of teenage boys from the school. Rosie decided to quit her job so that she could be there to supervise her kids, but not before she feels some irreparable damage has been done to her eldest son’s attitude towards her as she had left him to supervise the other children, one of whom had ADHD.  She reflects with regret that you never get that time over again.
Rosie identities a direct link between being obliged to work the extra hours by the changes to participation requirements and parenting payment eligibility requirements and the harm that has been done to her family. While her eldest is now back on track she feels guilty that she was not able to be there so that he did not have to shoulder the burden of so much care. There is a profound sense of injustice throughout Rosie’s stories, especially for her boys who she feels won’t get the time back with her they needed to have had normal childhoods.
Rosie is highly active, a campaigner for improving the rights and recognition of the needs of single parents who she says are disadvantaged by the same sort of stigma there is for people with disabilities, and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds.  She has done her research, and notes there has been specific legislative and regulatory changes that are contributing to anti-discrimination measures for both these groups, but not for single parents.  She cites how single parents are still treated by politicians and the media as the wayward underclass and not as women who are struggling to juggle the demands of parenting, working and negotiating service providers.
She notes the ES providers she has encountered have not been at all well-equipped to deal with her circumstances and those of other parents she knows, and believes there should be special services for parents that understand the needs of families, the risks to children and young people not being cared for at home after school hours
Not only has she not found employment services helpful she in fact has found major faults with the way they have interfered to claim outcomes and provide unwanted wage subsidies for jobs she has found herself.  Her ES provider contacted an employer to offer them a wage subsidy when she had already started working them for them, and this caused them to withhold her wages because they would not be able to provide the subsidy (and claim the outcome payment).  This made her furious, to the point that it affected her relationship with the employer and the job did not continue.
Rosie felt discriminated against when she was placed in the Disability Employment stream because of her car accident. She felt this added another layer of discrimination to her situation, and she preferred to be treated like a mainstream job seeker.
Having to attend appointments and being hassled by both Centrelink and ES has caused Rosie to disengage, feeling they are just making her jump through hoops while she gets on with the real work of finding herself a job.  When they have threatened her with participation failures she reports being made to feel “incredibly, incredibly worthless, and angry, she can’t believe the government would do this to women, who do everything for their children. For Rosie, having to repeat the story about her circumstances to new service providers, ECs and consultants recalls the trauma of the events she has been through. She can’t understand why she has to tell the story over and over, especially when she feels that they don’t really understand her or care, and impose requirements on her that don’t make sense.
Rosie describes being made angry by the system which has not helped her, and which causes many people she knows to suffer also. She said, that since she has attracted publicity for her circumstances, she has been contacted by hundreds of others who have similar traumatic events in their lives, who are seriously depressed or who have turned to drugs or alcohol as ways of dealing with the overwhelming sense of despair and lack of self-worth associated with their position
Rosie wants to work, as she realises the poverty she has endured over the years has been bad for her health, and bad for her kids, who she senses are acutely aware they have not had the same things other kids have. Since starting her new job over a week ago, Rosie’s priority was to get her youngest son some golf clubs, so that they could get out onto the course on the weekend, and do things together, sharing time that they weren’t able to when he was younger and she was working.

The last six years have been a nightmare for Rosie. After having left a violent relationship and working long hours to make ends meet while combining low paid work with Newstart, then a serious car accident leaving her in chronic pain and in need of rehabilitative care, becoming homeless and living in a car. Her life has been made more challenging by the constant hassling of employment services and Centrelink, who she feels have not acknowledged her circumstance.

Rosie is very angry about what she has experienced with employment services, who seem to think her engagement with them is taking place in a vacuum in which nothing else in her life has significance. Her concern with maintaining the safety of her children, especially after having been compelled to leave them exposed to the risks that are the stuff of every parent’s nightmares, fuels her now to challenge employment services and Centrelink about the way they treat her. She says she has been so badly treated by the system she is not afraid, and has nothing to hide and wants the world to know what has been going on so she can help others not to have to go through what she has.

First stories from parents

The first participants for this research were recruited via the Single Parents Action Group (SPAG) Facebook group. In what follows I have extracted some of the key points from their stories they have generously made available to this research and for the purpose of this blog.

As of 1 January 2013, all the remaining 100,000 parents who had been able to stay on parenting payment after the 2006 Welfare to Work changes, were transferred to Newstart if their youngest child had turned 8 years old (see ACOSS briefing for more background). On SPAG, women had been sharing stories of the hardships they had experienced since the Parenting Payment – NewStart changes. They also shared stories of the strategies they had adopted to cope with the loss of in many cases what amounted to over $100 per week (taking into account the impact of changes to taper rates between the two payments).

Others on SPAG were interested in recruiting people for a television documentary being planned which would capture the darkest impacts of the changes such as the stories of those who had been forced into prostitution or other illicit activity as ways of avoiding the low paid trap.

One told harrowing stories of how they had been helping others by delivering food to homeless people, only to find women and children sleeping under bridges. The particular correspondent of this story, called out to the members of SPAG to unite to provide support for people at risk of losing their homes, so that the community could provide responses to problems the politicians wouldn’t.

There were also stories written by parents who had to work long hours and how this would mean, since they were in single parent families, the children would spend even less time with the only parent they had.

There were messages on the SPAG page from women trying to decide whether it would be better to use their last remaining money to put petrol in the car to go to work to earn money, or buy food so that her family did not have to go hungry again at night, and also about the related difficulty of applying for time off from work, in order to collect food or petrol stamps from the Salvos.

Leanne’s story - link to full story here

Leanne’s story illustrates how many of the parents who are now on Newstart have varied backgrounds. In her case she was married for 10 years before exiting a relationship from a partner who had a gambling addiction. Her newfound independence as a single parent initially on parenting payment meant she felt for the first time she was in control of her family’s finances, and that there was enough money to get by on. But then after a period when she was not on income support, Leanne needed to go back onto parenting payment, only to find the social policy rules had changed and that she was placed on Newstart, replete with the 15 hour participation requirements. Like others in this research, Leanne’s experiences of the system once she has been placed on Newstart are radically different to those of it previously when she had been on parenting payment.

The work she had already been undertaking at her children’s school was not recognised as ongoing because she was employed as a casual, and therefore did not satisfy her participation requirements. Leanne showed great initiative and perseverance to get her role at the school recognised especially by embarking on a traineeship in administration there, and eventually by getting the school’s employment contract to reflect the ongoing nature of the work. Unfortunately this initiative and capacity to work with the system to get the best results for herself, were once again affected by changes in the external environment (a school amalgamation) that caused the job to be terminated.

In order to satisfy her participation requirements Leanne was required to take a second job, meaning she would have to put her younger child in after care and give her son in year 7 a key to the house. Perhaps the most dramatic element of Leanne’s story is when she tells how her son, like as she observes, the other teenage children of the single parents in her neighbourhood, begins to truant and fall off the rails.

Then the ‘wheels fell off’. My eldest and his friends had been getting into serious trouble at school. What I noticed about the situation was the similarity in all our family situations. The children were all boys, all parents were low income earners, half had sole parents who were trying to work / study / volunteer and most of the children were the eldest sibling. I quit the second job after looking at risk and protective factors for psycho-social development in adolescents. The only risk factors I had any control over were – authoritive parenting and parental supervision. (Leanne)

Leanne felt compelled to quit the second job so that she could fulfil her parenting role, and found herself once more subjected to participation requirements. She reports finding her employment service agency unsympathetic to her situation, that she is forced to attend job club and other activities she is already over qualified for. They send her to job interviews she is too afraid to say no to attend, because of her fear of receiving participation reports. Her experiences of the bureaucracy of her reporting requirements is Kafka-esque to the point where she is afraid to correct mistakes she notices on their file, for fear of inducing more frustration for herself, and for the staff who serve her.

Leanne decided to enrol to train to become a community services worker a qualification she completed without support from employment services that satisfied her participation requirements. The sense of relief she expresses at no longer being subject to the employment services regime is palpable. She notes that the withdrawal of the pensioner education supplement affected her ability to be supported while she did this.

Financial uncertainty, hardship, and relying on the generosity of her friends and her social networks had enabled Leanne to get through these periods living on Newstart. Leanne counts herself lucky because she is paying off a mortgage that while still a significant drain on her meagre income, is not as high as the rents others in metropolitan locations must pay. However, there are costs of repairs and maintenance associated with being a home owner she finds it problematic to pay.

For Leanne, being on Newstart has increased her financial uncertainty, when situations she managed to negotiate backfired because of changes over which she had no control. These episodes of uncertainty speak of sorrow or sadness, like she is being abused or punished when she has not done anything wrong. In fact, what she had done was do everything she could do to have her skills, capabilities and needs recognised within the systems rules which seemed to frustrate her efforts at every turn.

Kelly’s story - link to full story here

Kelly is a sole parent whose youngest child turned 8 in the last quarter of 2012. Kelly decided to leave her job once her payment changed to Newstart so that she could avoid being caught in a low paid trap, meaning she would have to work more hours to cover her costs and spend less time with her daughter. She also decided to move to another area in the hope she could find a job that would better suit her commitments as a mother, and so that she could pay less rent by housesitting. Kelly said:

...that’s why I chose to leave my job, I wasn’t going to buy into that and work more hours, I’d rather modify my lifestyle and move somewhere more affordable so I could still be supported in what I needed in life - I’ve got a contact through a friend who has a one bedroom converted garage cabin place, we were living a 3 bedroom, now we are going to live in a little cabin, and that won’t compromise our happiness, and I’ve rather do that than have that lifestyle than live in the 3 bedroom house where I was having to you know not see my daughter very much because of that and work long hours (Kelly).

Kelly had experienced an employment service agency in a rural area who she had found helpful prior to her participation requirements becoming mandatory. Once she was activated by the 8 year old child rule, she began to visit an agency in another district where she had moved, which was a $32 and 1 hour journey away.

Unfortunately for Kelly, she had moved to an area where there were few jobs that matched her qualifications. The support she had requested from her employment services provider to help her update her resume was overlooked through a persistent focus on participation requirements and compliance.

When she reported not having been well, she explains she was treated badly by the receptionist who told her she would have to get a medical certificate or she would be reported for a participation failure meaning she could lose some of her payment. Kelly commented on how the focus on compliance here diminished her needs as a human being which were as she was recovering from an illness to be treated with some sympathy. The handling of her illness while she was also caring for her sick child again reinforces the misrecognition of the role of carer it was her natural priority to fulfil.

Being threatened with participation failures made Kelly feel bullied by her employment provider, and misunderstood while her needs for support went unanswered. Like Leanne, Kelly had voluntarily upgraded her qualifications and had not received any support from the employment service to do this and found the withdrawal of the pensioner education supplement made it impossible for her to study.

Her experience with this agency was so unpleasant and unhelpful, she “resigned herself” to moving away to another area, so that she could did not have to work with that employment consultant who she felt had treated her unfairly.

Kelly made conscious decisions to choose a lifestyle that would enable her spend the time with her 8 year old daughter she feels is the right things for a parent to do. She is aware she is lucky in this respect and that not everyone is able to find ways to live frugally enough to do this.

I know that I can make ends meet by going back to basics, but not everyone is able to live like that. I guess this makes me fairly unique that I have learnt how to live back to basics and feel confident that I can do that, whereas a lot of women don’t have the material independence to survive like that and need to take on jobs to keep their living standards at a level like that.

Implications for social policy

While ending long term welfare dependence was the aim of the welfare to work policy changes, it affects all parents equally regardless of their history of benefit receipt. However, the broad brush approach, sometimes known as tough love, has begun to reveal some defects of major significance for social policy makers.

Firstly, many of the women affected by the Parenting Payment – Newstart changes had already been working (about 60% - see article by Eva Cox about this). The changes have made it more difficult for them to survive by balancing work with caring, to the extent they have been forced to make radical changes to their circumstances which in some cases, like Kelly’s, have actually made them more welfare dependent.

Secondly, the capacity to exercise autonomy, self-efficacy and choice, have all been severely impacted by the changes once they have been exposed to the rules of activation and the punitive nature of the employment services compliance system. The focus on compliance rather than employment assistance services has introduced high levels of antagonism as the service user comes to mistrust the service and the client worker relationship. The approach has denied access to the basic services that might have enabled them to find suitable work, and provide social and economic continuity for their families.

Yeah, I just think of like they’ve cut our payments back and the'y’re making us see these people and they’ve got all these offices, and how much money is going into these services is it worth the output, and like, if there’ve got 5 offices in one street and you’re paying rent on all those buildings and ECs in there, why can’t they just pay us back the money and just give us back the money and give us one centre to go to, and I know some people need more support than I do, but I’m not one of those and to be forced through this system it’s just like putting a round peg in a square hole, it just doesn’t fit. (Kelly)

Employment services have been experienced not as environments in which they have been enabled to participate to negotiate or construct roles and identities that align with their capabilities or preferences, but as institutions which actively prevent that from occurring.

They put everyone into the same basket, it’s not saying well do you need help, not grading people in degrees of help they need, or individualising treatment according to what sort of help the need, well not treatment, support, the support I need is a good computer with office so I could do a resume, and if there was someone there who could quickly look over my resume and make suggestions, that would have been ample support, I think in the degrees they are trying to over support us,, and it comes across as harassment, because I’m educated I can do this sort of stuff if given the resources and where are these computers where I can sit down and do my resume. (Kelly)

These single parents have exercised choices they believe are rational for example by not getting into low paid jobs with high number of hours, but which have also exacerbated levels of disadvantage they experience, increased their level of poverty, and made them become vulnerable and dependent on welfare. As Kelly said:

I know of a lot of women there who don’t have that ability who are being forced into low paid jobs who are really stressed and worried about what’s happening to their kids while they are not home, and just keeping on top of everything they have to do.

Socially beneficial activity such as helping the school with NAPLAN exams, and using this as a venue for networking for potential future work were not accepted as valid forms of activity for the 15 hour activity rule, even though it is known the 80% of people find their next job through friends and word of mouth (DEEWR 2013).

The cases I have encountered to date have also indicated the complex reasons why these parents are doing it on their own, not always by choice and because of intolerable factors in the relationships they have left. While the myth of the welfare dependent and morally deficient underclass informs policy assumptions about sole parents, the facts are that many of the women in this research show extraordinary resilience and entrepreneurialism in their efforts to secure conditions of employment that are safe for themselves and their families. This means being at home to care for their children after school.

However, few jobs are available in the professions for which they are qualified – yet they are forced to apply for and take up jobs to meet their participation requirements in lower paid and insecure roles. Meanwhile they are subject to ongoing supervision by employment services while actively attempting to find jobs that reflect their capabilities as this final quote from Leanne indicates.

So presently I am attending weekly ESP ‘training’ sessions where I am advised on how to look for work as I am considered one of the most employable job seekers. Really!? I am also working approx. one day a week enjoying doing Project work for a school in partnership with our local health department and local university. I have also picked up another short term role for this term facilitating two orientation sessions at our local TAFE provider. I’m spending at least two full days per week writing job applications, addressing key selection criteria. Oh, and you know, I’m also caring for my children! (Leanne)

ABOUT THIS BLOG

This blog will track the progress of the research I am doing as part of a PHD at RMIT.

The aim of the research is to explore the ways people who use employment services find the system, especially when they might not agree with the nature of their participation requirements and feel like they have been punished because of this.

 The analysis and stories that are mentioned on this blog have been published with the permission of the research participants.

If you have any questions about the research or would like to get involved, please contact me via this blog or email s9502268@student.rmit.edu.au

The material on this page is copyright of Simone Casey and may be reproduced only with the permission I will seek from the research participants.