This is very much from the chool of 'thinking out loud'. Kel and I were chatting it over and I thought it intersting enough to share for wider comments. Here goes...
It stems from two social issues. The first is the pro’s and con’s of national service. There was debate some time ago about the value of national service, in the wake of the TV program ‘Bad Lads Army’. There was even political attention given because the program had showed some ASBO-culture young guys turned into… well… better trained ASBO-culture young guys. And indeed, some ‘turned their lives around’ in a pretty cool way, so I’m not going to slag it off, but anyway – it brought national service to the attention of the public as a possible cure for our declining society values, etc, etc.
From time to time, I’m privy to information about the governments’ responses and initiatives that don’t make it into the press, just because I work with organisations that are consulted in think tanks and research stages of policy. Around this time, I heard the opinion was National service would be too unpopular as a policy, and that it was perhaps a step backwards in our social evolution, not to mention a risk to the very good reputation our military has for being consistently one of the most professional armed forces in the world (because… it’s not conscript – it’s… well, professional). But plans were not scrapped altogether. Talks moved on to a national service system, where military would be one of many options, including large programmes for community work. When you leave school/college, you spend X years minimum doing some kind of low paid service to your nation akin to voluntary work. It gives a sense of equal ownership and community to everyone right at the start of adult life, and would hold many of the benefits of the old style national service regarding discipline and community pride, as well as getting people into a working attitude that could go a long way to reducing long term unemployment.
I’ve heard little about this since, and my guess is somewhere along the talks the impracticalities started working their way into the spotlight, and perhaps the suggestion that ASBO culture is something that needs to be tackled long before the end of school/collage and by this point, the system wouldn’t be strong enough to actually work for anyone but those who would have been keen to seek career paths/further education anyway, effectively just slowing them down. I dunno. But I do hope it’s not a dead debate – cos I think there’s definitely something of value in some kind of ‘national service’, and it’s prolly time to try something out for the sake of avoiding more panicked policies in a few years time.
It stems from two social issues. The first is the pro’s and con’s of national service. There was debate some time ago about the value of national service, in the wake of the TV program ‘Bad Lads Army’. There was even political attention given because the program had showed some ASBO-culture young guys turned into… well… better trained ASBO-culture young guys. And indeed, some ‘turned their lives around’ in a pretty cool way, so I’m not going to slag it off, but anyway – it brought national service to the attention of the public as a possible cure for our declining society values, etc, etc.
From time to time, I’m privy to information about the governments’ responses and initiatives that don’t make it into the press, just because I work with organisations that are consulted in think tanks and research stages of policy. Around this time, I heard the opinion was National service would be too unpopular as a policy, and that it was perhaps a step backwards in our social evolution, not to mention a risk to the very good reputation our military has for being consistently one of the most professional armed forces in the world (because… it’s not conscript – it’s… well, professional). But plans were not scrapped altogether. Talks moved on to a national service system, where military would be one of many options, including large programmes for community work. When you leave school/college, you spend X years minimum doing some kind of low paid service to your nation akin to voluntary work. It gives a sense of equal ownership and community to everyone right at the start of adult life, and would hold many of the benefits of the old style national service regarding discipline and community pride, as well as getting people into a working attitude that could go a long way to reducing long term unemployment.
I’ve heard little about this since, and my guess is somewhere along the talks the impracticalities started working their way into the spotlight, and perhaps the suggestion that ASBO culture is something that needs to be tackled long before the end of school/collage and by this point, the system wouldn’t be strong enough to actually work for anyone but those who would have been keen to seek career paths/further education anyway, effectively just slowing them down. I dunno. But I do hope it’s not a dead debate – cos I think there’s definitely something of value in some kind of ‘national service’, and it’s prolly time to try something out for the sake of avoiding more panicked policies in a few years time.
The second thing was derived quite separately, but links in rather neatly I think.
I was thinking, maybe we should just end unemployment. I hear people talking about unemployment as an issue. Unemployment figures being high is a negative thing. Very few people… if any, speak of unemployment as a good thing. People who are unemployed also view it with negativity, and it’s a leading cause of depression. So… why have it? We spend a lot of money on sustaining unemployment and if no-one wants it, it seems ludicrous to do that.
Why do we have unemployment?
Before I get into that – I need to separate two very different parts of unemployment. The benefit system is a massively good and important thing – making provision for those who are unable to provide for themselves due to any given long or short term situation. It is however, a hideous system that has been strung together in an adhoc piggledy mash of red tape and loop holes, resulting in a) it’s severe abuse by those people who know the system well enough when they don’t require it as fully as they take from it, and b) it utterly fails the people who really need it, because they don’t know how to work it. The benefit system may have once worked, but the addition and modifications over the years have left it disorganised and unfair. It needs to be rethought out from ground and made to actually work for the people it should work for. It should also have a strong focus on making every provision possible to bringing people who struggle into a contributing job in whatever way they can offer, because there’s a massive issue of dignity to these people who really want to make their difference in the world too.
I was thinking, maybe we should just end unemployment. I hear people talking about unemployment as an issue. Unemployment figures being high is a negative thing. Very few people… if any, speak of unemployment as a good thing. People who are unemployed also view it with negativity, and it’s a leading cause of depression. So… why have it? We spend a lot of money on sustaining unemployment and if no-one wants it, it seems ludicrous to do that.
Why do we have unemployment?
Before I get into that – I need to separate two very different parts of unemployment. The benefit system is a massively good and important thing – making provision for those who are unable to provide for themselves due to any given long or short term situation. It is however, a hideous system that has been strung together in an adhoc piggledy mash of red tape and loop holes, resulting in a) it’s severe abuse by those people who know the system well enough when they don’t require it as fully as they take from it, and b) it utterly fails the people who really need it, because they don’t know how to work it. The benefit system may have once worked, but the addition and modifications over the years have left it disorganised and unfair. It needs to be rethought out from ground and made to actually work for the people it should work for. It should also have a strong focus on making every provision possible to bringing people who struggle into a contributing job in whatever way they can offer, because there’s a massive issue of dignity to these people who really want to make their difference in the world too.
That leaves the rest of unemployment, which is not benefit related. I suppose then this is caused by there not being enough jobs. This may or may not be true – I’d go with… it’s true. There certainly aren’t enough appropriate jobs for the number of qualified people in a lot of fields, and so people wait for one to come up, becoming frustrated while they do. In any case, this isn’t a good reason to have ‘unemployment’. In a country where there is a lot of tings socially lacking, seems to me ‘dole’ could be replaced with some default government employment system. If you sign on for money, you must select a job form the bank of very generic and helpful roles of jobs, quite similar if not the same thing as the before mentioned new national service system. For these jobs, you’d get the same money you get now for being unemployed. There’ll be a wide variety of rewarding and unquantifiable beneficial jobs to choose from, ranging from the classic military, to things as simple as riding busses in two’s or three’s just to monitor and prevent anti-social behaviour on them and stop making bus drivers have to deal with everything on their own all the time. It could mean cleaning up an area, running community centres and activities, talking to people in hospitals and delivering meals on wheels. The list goes on – there’s no end to the positions that could be created under the occupation of ‘national citizen’ or whatever. And these roles making life better for everyone, as well as giving job seekers a sense of contribution and worth, will very quickly drop the stigma associated with ‘unemployment’ as well.
Part time national employment with job seekers would involve 3 days working a chosen job, and 2 days left free for job seeking, along with help given to improve CV and job hunting skills. This would be assigned a salary similar to that of the current unemployment benefit.
Part time national employment with training would be for those who aren’t able to get a job because they aren’t educated enough and need vocational or basic education. This would be 2 days working a selected job and 3 days appropriate training, and again, salary equivalent to current job seekers.
Full time national employment would be 5 days employment, and is for those who want to make community work their career path – and would allow for a scaling salary as they climb the ladder of a whole new department of society that would I guess be a sister to the Civil Service, which brings a stable element to what would otherwise be a very unpredictable work force making long term project management difficult. Also, allowing for a full time option (just like the earlier mentioned national service would be in fact) would also further remove any stigma we have towards this kind of system – it’s an honourable and valuable work – society and community is important stuff. It wouldn’t even be really creating a new department on the higher levels – the system could be fed into existing public sector departments.
And the cost of this? Well… it’s not much more than what unemployment costs us anyway, but adds huge social and personal benefits to all. Again… why have unemployment?
Part time national employment with job seekers would involve 3 days working a chosen job, and 2 days left free for job seeking, along with help given to improve CV and job hunting skills. This would be assigned a salary similar to that of the current unemployment benefit.
Part time national employment with training would be for those who aren’t able to get a job because they aren’t educated enough and need vocational or basic education. This would be 2 days working a selected job and 3 days appropriate training, and again, salary equivalent to current job seekers.
Full time national employment would be 5 days employment, and is for those who want to make community work their career path – and would allow for a scaling salary as they climb the ladder of a whole new department of society that would I guess be a sister to the Civil Service, which brings a stable element to what would otherwise be a very unpredictable work force making long term project management difficult. Also, allowing for a full time option (just like the earlier mentioned national service would be in fact) would also further remove any stigma we have towards this kind of system – it’s an honourable and valuable work – society and community is important stuff. It wouldn’t even be really creating a new department on the higher levels – the system could be fed into existing public sector departments.
And the cost of this? Well… it’s not much more than what unemployment costs us anyway, but adds huge social and personal benefits to all. Again… why have unemployment?
