Worker perspective 1 - Jo

   I worked for JSA shortly after the start of the new contract in 2010, the organisation won a new contract and were basically referred all of an old providers hard cases.

This meant we have a lot people on the caseload with complex needs who needed case managing and help with other parts of their lives before they could become at all job ready.

At first I found my social workers skills were useful in JSA, then about 6 months into the contract there was a lot of pressure to change our practice and get people into jobs.  This really changed the culture, and there was an influx of new staff from other Job Networks who were much more employment consultant focused. I did have to learn new skills like reverse marketing which I did find useful to the job, but I felt like my capacity to actually really help my job seeekers was eroded.

I found some of my colleagues who had been with other providers previously did not have the skills to deal with the complexity of the case load.  There was one woman who had lost a job as a manager at a failed provider, who I suppose was a bit dejected because she had all this experience and had to take a job at the same level as a newby like me. It was like this air of failure was attached to her somehow, because she had worked for a failing provider. And she just did not cope with the new types of job seekers we were getting a lot of who were old PSP clients with complex needs.

I did have to PR people but tried to avoid it wherever possible. I would try a whole range of strategies like ring the ones up who were at most risk of not showing up and checking they were on their way, and rescheduling appointments if they weren’t. I avoided doing PRs because I felt they are not an effective engagement tool, not in the least.  In fact, I inherited a lot of clients who had a history of PRs who were just so angry and annoyed, it took me a long time to build their trust and rapport and engage them after they had been through that. I saw it happening around me all the time too, some of the other staff were constantly making threats and issuing them, without qualm. They just didn’t seem to care because their job was just about processing people, getting them to obey and jump through the right hoops at the right time. And giving them meaningless activities like job search clubs, when they didn’t need it.

I observed quite a lot of subjective bias and stereotyping too in the way job seekers were treated.  Some of my colleagues would identity with some job seekers and not others, literally some of them could be their mates from the neighbourhood and they’d get treated a lot better. Then if they had some for example say an Arab man unemployed for 5 years  they’d just get treated like a dog. And subject to a whole lot more hassle and meaningless activity like job clubs.

There was definitely an attitude based on the idea that some job seekers were lazy, and there were definitely but only a few who I could tell were working cash in hand and had this kind of cocky attitude. But most of the people I found who weren’t complying had mental health, and other crises in their lives they were not always aware of or able to do anything about. For example, there might be women in controlling relationships, basically were there’s violence, who are too scared to say anything and kind of appear to be going along with things, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on behind there. JSA didn’t give us a chance to work with that at all.

We were pressured into putting people into crap jobs, I remember one factory in particular everyone came back from there with health problems.  I worked in an area of high unemployment and it was really hard to get people into jobs, especially with public transport that didn’t start early enough in the morning to get people into jobs in the industrial areas. It is a feed mechanism for low paid jobs, that is all really I saw most JSAs doing.

This contrasts quite a bit to my experience as a social worker at Centrelink. I worked for the social work team, and our approach was a bit different to CSOs because we would deal with the complex cases. I had to do comprehensive compliance reviews as part of this work. I felt here our judgements were always based on thorough analysis of the facts of what was going on, not subjective bias.  We had the vulnerability indicators to work as a guide but we worked hard to help people identify and articulate their issues, that didn’t always fit in a neat box, for example, like I mentioned the example of domestic violence, but were were usually able to find a criteria to get people off. From memory I think there was only one case that I knew of where there was  a 8 week no payment, I guess it was deserved, out of maybe several hundred I did while there.

Of course, as is natural in case work kinds of situations, we would have issues relating to identification with clients, and we had formal debriefing and supervision to handle this.  To me there didn’t appear to be much variation in our practice, because of the way we supported each other’s work and process and the way Centrelink handled quality sampling and professional development. Our attitude was more like getting people back onto the system, not about cutting them off. More about their entitlements and rights than about compliance and punishment.

The most striking thing I observed about clients during the CCR was they appeared flat. Sure there were a few who were a bit hysterical because they were worried about being cut off, but most of them just sat quietly through the process and it was like finding hens teeth to get it out of them. I have to say there were a disproportionate number of Indigenous people representaed, and there were cultural issues  and sensitivities relating to disclosure with them. Even so, it just felt like most of the people getting a CCR were resigned to it, that this was just another process they had to go through, of form filling and box ticking, that did not excite them to any higher level of engagement with the system. I found them highly disengaged.

It was interesting observing this after having worked for a JSA, and of course I’ve kept in contact with lots of my colleagues and networks, that there is this JSA disengagement and the attitude shown by people during processes like the CCR shows how far this compliance model is from an engagement model. I know lots of ECs see compliance as an engagement tool but I do not. From the point of view of Centrelink worker these attempts to get people to engage through the threat of the stick, only work in a small minority of cases.

There are some people who really benefit from the social contact they have with JSAs, and they tend to be those who are pretty far from job ready and treat the whole thing like a social visit. There were quite a few around like this who we were really friendly with, but occasionally our manager would tell us off for “over-servicing”. But it points to a gap in needs, like there are different levels of servicing people can benefit from, for some just getting that social contact can be a major improvement in quality of life, and a stepping stone to other things eventually, as we build their engagement and confidence. This approach does work, I’ve seen it in action but it does take time, time that is not available in JSA any more.

It’s such a pity really, that government employment services have to be like this. I think the basic failings of the system come down to the over-emphasis on compliance. This is not engagement, it’s punishment. There need to be much better ways of discriminating between different levels of capacity to benefit, motivation, and needs which can be extremely complex.  There was very little capacity to co-service anyone in JSA, even stream 4, so the complex needs remain and the person stays unemployed, but jumping through the compliance hoops. I would see them at the CCRs time and time again, it was just like a merry go round they couldn’t get off and they’d come back in again and again.