The cost of being a woman in public

Felicity Perry has talked to both Stuff and Nine to Noon about her experience on the Independent Youth Benefit. This is one of the benefits that National is planning to target with its latest scheme to pathologise young people.

David Farrer wrote a post about her (I'm not linking to it). In the comments thread someone posted her cellphone number. In that thread she has been repeatedly denigrated. She has also been harassed by phone.

She told a small part of her life story. Of her experiences on the Independent Youth Benefit, and what these policies would have meant for her. Her experience was not the experience of MPs, businessmen and international financial traders. It was not enough for those who disagreed her to denigrate her and attack her legitimacy to speak; they also had to harass her personally and extract a toll from her for what she'd said.

*******

On Friday's New Zealand Next Top Model the contestants were given a "Pacific Blue Courtesy Challenge". They had actors making life hard for the contestants, and this included an actor playing a papparazzi. The fake papparazzi took a picture of one of the contestants, Aroha, in her underwear when she was getting out of the taxi, and when she tried to get away from them she was the most assertive.

Aroha was deemed to fail the "courtesy challenge" and kicked off the show.

She was blamed both for being harassed, blamed for her harassers success, and blamed for fighting back.

*******

Drawing attention to misogyny on either kiwiblog or New Zealand's Next Top Model, is kind of like talking about the wetness of the sea. Women's bodies and lives are treated as public property, and these are just two of an ocean of examples. But as well as being examples they normalise it. NZTM is fun Friday night entertainment, and the huge number of tampon adds on TV3 OnDemand makes it very clear whose its ideas of what it means to be a woman are for. While Kiwiblog is happy to exact a cost for stating opposing views - a cost that'll be higher for those who are more marginalised.

So my opposing narrative is to offer solidarity to Aroha and Felicity. To applaud their strength and resistance. To offer the same to other women who are experiencing variations of the same horrible harassment, whose lives and bodies are treated as public property, and who are penalised for any difference with what the viewer expects.

What do we want?

It's hard not to feel a sense of achievement. I've marched demanding universal student allowances; I've got up at 6.30am to put leaflets in lectures to get other students to march for universal student allowances, I've sat in long meetings talking about protests we were going to organise demanding universal student allowance, I've occupied buildings demanding a universal student allowance.

Although I left university a long time ago, I haven't forgotten the issue. I organised in workplaces where there were heaps of student workers. I've seen the the power that the employers had, because students needed to work outside lecture times.

I know that a universal student allowance won't just make a difference to the children of the middle and upper classes. The current threshold is $46,000 - so no student who has two parents in full-time work (even if it only pays at the minimum wage) is eligible for the full allowance.* Tertiary education is a requirement not just for middle class jobs. There is a full-time year long course for machine sewing - a job that only just pays more than minimum wage at unionised workplaces.

I think this shows the value of being organised, even in the minimal way that students are organised.

But it continues a theme of the labour government, which is ignoring the beneficiaries and targeting those with work. This comes with explicit, and implicit, ideology that those who are in work are more worthy than those who are not. This is a dangerous ideology at any time, at a time of rising unemployment it's purpose is to continue to draw attention away from the structural reasons for unemployment.

Unlike Julie I don't see Labour as a force for good.** This doesn't change my vote, or my view of labour. But it makes me think about everyone who was part of the chain that struggled against privatisation of education, against fees, and for allowances, for almost 20 years. A chain that must be continued, no matter what happens after this election.

* one of my pet issues as a union organiser was that entitlements to means tested programmes were generally indexed to inflation, if they were indexed at all, not to the minimum wage. This has meant that the entitlement of workers to things such as the community service card has declined dramatically, till anyone on full time work is no longer eligible. This is true of other programmes such as income related rents, the disability allowance, and so on. The government was giving with one hand and taking with the other.

** Although I do think that universal student allowances is a feminist policy, as is any policy that attacks student debt. Because of the wage gap women tend to take much longer to pay off student loans than men, and the amount of money they end up having to pay back is a much higher proportion of their lifetime income. Eliminating the need to borrow to live reduces, but does not eliminate this inequality.

But if we let people with depression eat without being wage slaves then everyone will get depression...

Yesterday the government announced a shiny new hoop that sick and disabled people need to go through before they can pay the rent. See here, here or here. The short version is that Work and Income wants to 'help' more sickness and invalids beneficiaries back to work. It plans to do this by paying for extra treatment, initially for those with mild mental health conditions and who are waiting for relatively simple operations, and by trying to get doctors to focus their care on getting people back to work.

Access to medical treatment should not be contingent on whether or not you're available for paid work. Students, retired people, full-time caregivers should have the same access to treatment as people who would be in paid work were it not for the depression. According to nine to nooe only half of the people who are hospitalised for suicide attempts even get a follow up phone call - let alone better treatment. So there are quite a few gaps in our mental health provisions as it is.

But I have a bigger problem than that with this change. Let's be clear here the sickness and invalids benefit exist because we structure work around the needs of business, not around the needs of people. If work was structured around people's needs then almost everyone would be able to do at least some useful work every week. Sickness and Invalid beneficiaries exist because we throw people on the scrap heap and decide we can't use them if they don't meet the very specific needs of business (can work the same number of hours each week, can operate in a workplace environment without modifying that environment, can deal with stress, and so on).

Our economic system is set up so that paid work is only available to people whose bodies meet certain criteria and the sickness and invalids benefit is what we do with the rest. But now the government is saying - hey that's not enough it's not just that we won't modify the work to meet the needs of your body, we want to modify your body to meet the needs - and we have the right to do so.

Beneficiary Bashing

You know what I've always found makes parents more likely to abuse their children? Giving them money. If only we made sure no parents had any money then I'm sure all our children would be safe.

Attacking the benefit system is a nonsensical response to child abuse - raising benefits would make much more sense. But regular as clock-work a child gets treated horrifically and people come up with stupid, unworkable, punitive suggestions for changing the benefit system. From Rotorua:

Rotorua's community leaders say it should be compulsory for all women on solo mother's benefits to have contact with welfare or community agencies.

Because being without a man, a job, or a fortune, is a sure fire sign that you're abusing your kids.

*****************

National is proposing Work for the Dole. They will start in South Auckland, and possibly Gisborne and Northland (which for the record has its lowest annual unemployment rate ever at the moment). I'm not sure they could have made their subtext any more texty without hiring a plane and sky-writing "WE ARE TARGETING BROWN PEOPLE".

Stand Down Margaret

I sleep walk.

I don't actually sleep walk - I sleep run. I have these dreams where a bomb is about to go off in my flat and I have to get out now. So I get out of bed and run out of the house. These dreams come in different intensities, but at their worst I know I'm about to die, and I'm terrified of that death.*

When I was small I lived in Thatcher's Britain, the Britain of Protect & Survive. I was terrified of bombs. When we moved to New Zealand I was five, and I listed one of my favourite things about this country that their were no bombs.

I don't think my terror dreams come from those years in Britain. I think they're a stress or anxiety response. But I think it's because of Margaret Thatcher and her pals that I dream of bombs. If I lived in different times I might be running from Wolves, or communists. I'd probably be just as scared, but that's small consolation when I can still taste the adrenalin from believing that I was about to burn to death.

As far as Thatcher's casualties go - my experience is nothing. The miners lives weren't ruined in their dreams, they were ruined in reality. While she never dropped a nuclear bomb, she did drop other bombs. Her economic policies led to redundancies and unemployment - those aren't just abstract ideas - they kill people. Poverty kills, hoplessness kills - the year after the miner's strike saw many more than the usual number of suicides. It's not just economic policies either Section 28, passed by the Tories, made it illegal to promote the teaching in state schools "the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship."

So when someone responds to me posting the lyrics to Merry Christmas Margaret Thatcher with: "Nothing Margaret Thatcher did is worth hoping for her death" - that really depends on what, and who, you value. People have died because of Margaret Thatcher.

I don't think individuals are the driving force for politics, if Thatcher hadn't been there, it would have been someone else. I don't particularly hope for her death any more, she's old and out of power, and probably a little bit out of it anyway. But when she does die you better believe that I'm going to celebrate. I'm going to dig out my parents old anti-Margaret Thatcher t-shirt and put it on, I will play anti-Margaret Thatcher songs all day, and I will write a post on this blog, maybe about Women Against Pit Closures.

My favourite phrase in Solidarity Forever is 'we will break their haughty power'. The power to ruin people's lives by remote control and sit back with a cup of tea is a haughty power indeed. To suggest that people shouldn't be angry about what is done to them, and other people, shouldn't be angry at that haughty power, is telling them their lives don't matter.

16 years and no-one gives a shit

I haven't been paying that much attention to the budget. I'm sure I have an opinion of KiwiSaver (and I suspect it's fears of creeping privatisation), but I don't care enough to figure out what it is.

But I can't help but notice what's not here: we have another budget, another surplus, business tax-cuts, and the benefit cuts of 1991, the ones that were intended to make benefits impossible to live off, haven't been reversed.

This is the best the Greens, the most left-wing party in parliament, an do:

However, the big ticket item of business tax cuts rewards sustainable and unsustainable business equally. The big business tax cut is not linked to sustainability measures at all. And a great deal of it will simply flow overseas in increased dividends for foreign companies. How that helps the economy or sustainability is a mystery.

Even Susan St John's alternative budget doesn't mention them.

What do we value

I have a candidate least favourite person of the week, it started with a press release from Judith Collins (it's not her - although she's always a good candidate):

Napier businessman and Hell’s Pizza franchisee Richard Stevenson says an employee of his quit her job when a WINZ staff member told her she would earn more on a benefit.

He wasn't paying much more than minimum wage and didn't offer a guarantee of how many hours she was going to work from one week to the next. She had a ten month old baby and this job required her to work nights (where there is very little, if any, subsidised childcare available) and he made no offer to help with childcare). She would be better off on the benefit, and that's not WINZ's fault, it's her employers (You can listen to him on Morning report but I didn't couldn't finish it I hated it that much).

It's not exactly breaking news that I think employers suck. But my real point is why the outrage? Why do we consider making pizza to be a more worthwhile than raising a ten month old baby? I'm not knocking the work involved in making pizza. I know enough about the work-conditions that they work hard. Although I can't eat pizza anymore (I'm severely dairy-intolerant) I appreciated it when I could - and anyone who appreciates any object should value the labour that went into making it. Neither am I saying that looking after a child is the only possible work that a child of a ten month baby could or should be doing.

But looking after a 10 month old baby is work, and it's valuable work. Most of us have eaten pizza, but all of us have been looked after when we're 10 months old (even Judith Collins and Richard Stevenson), and we should appreciate that labour far more than we do. What every person who raised their voice in outrage is saying is that making pizza is a better use of that woman's time than looking after a 10 month old, and I disagree.

Maia vs WINZ: The Reassessment

A week or so ago I received a letter from WINZ telling me that since I had been on the unemployment benefit for some time I should come in for a reassessment to check that the unemployment benefit was the best benefit for me.

I felt like writing back and saying that I had been on the unemployment benefit for two weeks and that it was not the best benefit for me, the Invalid's benefit or the DPB would be much better. Both these benefits involve more money and less hassle from WINZ. But as I didn't think I was eligible for either of those benefits just at the minute could they just leave me alone.

Of course, it turns out they were lying. They had no interest in reassessing to see if the unemployment benefit was right for me. All they were doing was giving me another hoop so they could cut off the benefit if I didn't comply (the person who ran the 'seminar' said rather gleefully that everyone who had attended the seminar six weeks ago, but hadn't attended this one, would have their benefit cut off).

It didn't begin well - the case manager asked us if we went to the Sevens. As it happens I think I would rather go to an All Black match. At least at normal rugby games the clothes aren't part of the extremely obvious and offensive gender coding.* But even if I thought the Sevens were awesome I get $263 a week, where was the money for a Sevens ticket going to come from? Was this trying to trick us into having money we don't have? Was it trying to entice us to get a job so we could enjoy the thrills of lots of drunk people? Or was it just inane chatter?

Then it was time to assess our job seeking activities. As it happens I've got two weeks of work starting Monday - so that was rather easy for me. But the tone of the whole activity was 'what have you done wrong that you haven't done work. The other woman in the 'seminar' with me was a trained teacher.** Guess why she hasn't got a job? When the school holidays . But when the case manager was out of the room she talked to me about how shitty it felt to apply for job after job and be rejected. If you're going to look for work for an extended period of time, you need confidence that it isn't personal. Having WINZ tell you you've done something wrong because you haven't found a job in six weeks over January isn't going to help.

Then I saw a case manager (not my case manager - I suspect the relief was mutual - my case manager was running a different seminar) who told me to continue ringing the call centre every week to report my job seeking activities and make another appointment in six weeks.

What drives me completely nuts about this whole process is how much it's about ticking boxes. You couldn't quite ring the call-centre and tell them that you job-seeker activities for the weeks have involved harvesting carrots - but it's close. As long as you string words about applications, interviews and calling employers, they write that in. No-one who was having problems looking for a job would be supported by this. For those of us who do know how to find work it's just busy work in the hope that we'll fall down the cracks.

* The dress code at the Sevens for men is to dress up as someone with less power than you have (muslims, women, homeless people), while the dress code for women is to dress up in sexual a way that emphasises how little power we have and how much we are supposed to focus on pleasing men.

** I said it'd be the educated white girls who made it through the hoops and onto the benefits - it's such a stupid system.

No Work For the Dole

In more breaking news - the Maori party suck:

It should be compulsory for all unemployed beneficiaries to be placed on work-for-the-dole or training schemes, Maori Party co-leaders say.

They believe that sort of action is needed to attack entrenched attitudes of state dependency.

Tze Ming is on it.

Update I have decided to disallow comments on this post, because I can't keep on top on the racism and hatred of unemployed people.

Maia vs WINZ: the call-centre

In order to prove that I am in fact looking for work my job-seeker agreement said that I would phone WINZ every Wednesday for six weeks, from the third of January. Incidentally I shouldn't have signed this job-seeker agreement, I was so relieved that I'd talked him out of a course, that I didn't say that I would think the job-seeker agreement over before signing it. At the moment WINZ can't force you to do anything until your benefit starts, although that's going to change.

I also had to find out some really basic information (such as when my benefit was going to start). When I went in last week my case manager didn't actually get to that stage before he sent me away. He said he'd leave a message on my phone, and hasn't so far.

So today I got to deal with that font of inaccurate information the call centre (they once sent me on a seminar about starting a benefit when I wanted an accommodation supplement).

This pleasant experience started to the soothing tone of Bic Runga. I'm convinced that every government department was issued a copy of Nature's Best to play while people were on hold, and stern instructions not to play the stimulating tracks.

I started on the job-hunt information. So I told them that I'd contact four employers and that none of them were open because it was the third of January and New Zealand in general, and Wellington in particular, is dead in January. That I'd checked Saturday's paper and there had been just a page and a half of jobs and that this was probably attributable to the same reason. The contact centre worker wrote this in, and then asked me what I was going to do next week - and we agreed that it'd be the same thing, but probably with better results.

I'm glad I had that support in my job hunt.

They couldn't help me in my quest to find out what was going on with my benefit (except that the two other times I'd already called to try and find out weren't on the system), but they put me through to my case-manager, but he didn't answer his phone.

So I'm none the wiser. I still don't know when my stand-down period begins or how much money I'll be getting. My calculation is a start date of 12th of January (first payment 19th of January) and $266.32 a week (including accomodation supplement, but without the possible disability allowance and TAS) - as soon as I hear what the actual rates are I'll let you know if my calculations were accurate.

I actually saw my case manager go to the dairy as I walked past WINZ today, but I didn't take this opportunity to ask him what was going on. I figured it's very rare that stalking your case manager is going to improve things.

Maia vs WINZ: The Reality

My Planning and Assement Module* appeared to be going well; I really liked the guy who was running our first session he was giving us all this information about entitlements that I didn't expect (non-beneficiary accomodation supplement, recoverable and non-recoverable grants, targetted assistance - he covered it all). I noticed a sign advertising courses WINZ provided that were run by privately owned companies - I made a little note to myself - thinking that I could write a nice little blog post about privatisation through sub-contracting.

Then my casemanager came in. It was the guy who had run the previous seminar. The only consolation I had was that he was as worried about seeing me as I was at seeing him. As we walked over he told me that I wasn't to interupt him to talk about the inaccuracies of his hypotheticals.**

So we went and sat down, it seemed relatively easy, until we got to the job-seeker part of the deal.

I think it is time for a little diversion. Once upon a time a man named Peter McCardle was working as a work-broker (or possible at Social Welfare it doesn't really matter), he would see people looking for work (or possibly applying for the benefit) and think 'why can't there be a one stop shop where people can apply for the benefit and look for work'. Now this story wouldn't matter that much if he didn't end up on the NZ First Party List at the 1996 election, when the New Zealand public, showing a well-placed cynicism in all politicians (with unfortunate results), gave NZ First the balance of power. So National, who at this stage were prepared to raise the minimum wage to keep in power - they certainly weren't going to object to some restructuring of the public service, announced that Soical Welfare was going to merge with the employment office, just like Peter McCardle wanted.

I swear that one of the pieces of paper had "Thank you for choosing WINZ for part of your work search" - obviously a new use of the term 'choice' previously only used by anti-abortion nut-jobs.

From my experience there are three really important reasons why having WINZ also offer employment services is a bad idea. One is straight incompetence, the case-managers are badly trained, and there's extremely high turnover. The benefit side of WINZ is largely mechanical, job-matching less so - so job-matching looses out. My case-manager didn't know what to do when 'union organiser' wasn't in any of the databases. He couldn't load that in either as the jobs I was looking for, or (more disturbingly) the last job I had. We spent a good ten minutes trying to find any job in there that in anyway matched 'union organiser' (Him: "What about HR Manager" Me: "Not so much").

The other problem is that it makes it easier for social welfare to use the job-search as part of the ways it sanctions beneficiaries. Most people would argue that this was the point of loading WINZ up with employment in the first place (and that's entirely possible), and I wouldn't disagree, but I suspect it's counter-productive.

One of the most ridiculous activities was looking at a list of fifteen skills and number my top ten. Several of them I had no idea what they meant (and I picked reading comprehension as one of my skills). "Co-ordination Adjusting actions in relation to other's actions" - whether or not I'm good at that really does depend on the actions that are being talked about. Based on the ten I chose I had to be put into a talent pool (their words). The talent pools were a standard array of low-wage jobs. Many of the talent pools such as caregiver, retail and customer service are casualised industries that have little chance of delivering anyone full-time hours (which is supposed to be the goal of all this).

I want to make it really clear that I'm not arguing that caregiving, customer service, and retail are beneath me because I'm a middle-class white girl with an MA, and a professional job. That work is not beneath me, or anyone else - but the conditions that those jobs are done in, the part time casualised nature of the industries, with your hours of work at the whime of the employer - those conditions are bad for the vast majority of workers. It's also not a solution to unemployment, because people cycle in and out, one week they earn enough the next they don't. Taking the attitude that an on-call job (where you don't actually get called) is better than nothing, does not keep people off the unemployment benefit, long term. What does (apart from changing the monetary policy so that workers' lives aren't used to fight inflation) is making sure people are in jobs that will give them a livelihood. For most people pushing them into insecure employment makes secure employment further away, not closer.

The third reason why social welfare and employment should be two seperate areas was made clear to me during my session. My case manager wanted me to go on a course. Since my only goal of the entire session was 'no WINZ courses', I put up a strong case why that would be a bad idea.** When he agreed not to send me on the course he said "I was just testing you, I wanted to see what you would say, I can see that your confident, and you know what to do so you don't have to go."

Now I've no idea if he really was, or whether he was trying to save face. But what he said was true, confidence is hugely important when you're looking for jobs. It's a completely confidence destroying business putting yourself out there for rejection. The more confidence you have in yourself, the more likely you are to be able to keep on going, the less likely you are to be depressed by the job hunt and unemployment.

WINZ does not give people confidence, because case-managers tend to treat every person who come through their doors as if they've done something wrong.**** This destroys people's confidence and makes them feel like shit (not to mention the power WINZ has over people's livihood). I think fighting this attitude towards beneficiaries is a very important project, but it's a long term project. If Social Welfare and Employment had never merged, then the work search could be happening in . I think that'd be much more likely to get people into jobs with secure hours that match their skills and experience (putting people in other sorts of jobs as a stop-gap measure makes unemployment levels look good, but if anythign it adds to government costs as people are less likely to stay in their jobs, and getting people on the benefit is a long process).

*That's WINZ speak for applying for a benefit, it as euphamistically named as you might expect, there was little assessment and less planning.

** I've realised since that he probably felt that I had shown him up at the previous seminar (I'd pointed out inaccuracies and argued, and other people had joined in). He appeared to be quite new and struggle a bit with the software and the forms. I'm worried that this is going to end badly. I suspect the combination of not knowing what to do, and not wanting to lose face is why he sent me home before the interview was finished.

*** Unfortunately I missed the main argument, which was that he couldn't send me on a course until my benefit started. I'm not entitled till the twelth, and the course he wanted me to go on started on the eighth.

**** I'm going to meet with my case manager in six weeks if I haven't find a job in his words 'to find out what you're doing wrong'. Maybe not finding a job in six weeks over the Christmas break isn't anything that I've done wrong.

Maia vs. WINZ: The Forms

You get a lot of forms after your WR4U seminar, all in a pretty orange folder. In fact that's the reason you go to WRK4U seminars, because they won't give you the form to apply for the unemployment benefit unless you go to a WRK4U seminar. Apparently they are currently on very dodgy legal ground in doing this, but the government is going to change the law to increase WINZ's surveillance of people with the audacity to want government support very soon. I knew I could probably get out of the seminar before I went, but I decided it wasn't worth the effort, plus I wanted to write a blog post about it.*

About half the forms and random bits of paper they give you are about applying for the benefit, the other half are about looking for work.

My favourite form of the whole lot is the self-assessment form. In this form they give you a set of questions and you have to circle 1-5 depending on whether they apply 'Not At All' or 'Always'. Some of the statements are really inane "I am a positive person" is the silliest. Although my personal favourite was: "I know y rights and obligations as an employee" after 4 years of being a union organiser I wanted to make a new category 6 or - 'more than WINZ form-writers'.

You have to be careful with these evaluations though, because if you're not you might come across as the sort of people who needs to go on a WINZ course. WINZ courses are boredom vortexes from which you may never recover, and while Straight2Work - Retail sounds bad, I'm sure it's nothing compared to what they've got from someone who doesn't know that they must circle at least 4 on every question about job interviews and CVs.

The forms about work are funny, and relatively easily ignored (although they expect you to keep a job lead diary of all the job-leads that you've gone after and followed up, isn't surveillance fun). The bigger problem is the application form itself. Here's what you need, besides the form:

Verification of bank account details (easy enough for me, harder for people who don't have a bank account).

Original of birth certificate or passport (I have my birth certificate filed under 'D' for documents in my filing box - people with a bad relationship with their parents might find it harder to get hold of, and it costs time and money to get a replacement - even more so if you were born overseas).

Another form of identification such as driver's licence (which is problematic if you don't have a driver's licence)

A letter from Inland Revenue showing your tax number (I saved one of these under 'T' - otherwise I'd have had to make a special trip down to inland revenue. Not that big a deal for someone with a car and without a child).

Gross income details for the last year (I did this by getting my ex-employer to fill out a form. It was easy enough to do, because we have a really good relationship. But an ex-employer could really screw you over, particularly if they hadn't provided pay-slips. It would also be that much harder if you had two jobs, casual or part-time work).

Verification of accomodation costs (filed under 'F' for flat - and relatively easy for most people although harder if you don't have a tenancy agreement).

Verification of assets (just a trip to the bank away - although the bank will probably charge you).

There's a whole bunch of other things you may have to verify, names changes, evidence of citizenship/residency status, children's birth certificates, . Then if you were silly enough to admit you were in a relationship in the nature of marriage you have to provide all the same information for your partner. For any supplementary allowances there's more documentation; if you want a disability allowance you have to go to the doctor (at your own expense) and provide receipts of everything you've ever bought.

If you know what you need in advance it may not be that hard making sure you have all this stuff when the time comes. But if you don't, then it's a lot of time and expense, when you're probably least able to provide it.

Which comes back to the theme of these posts - it's not the ones who need help least who are kept out by bureaucracy - it's those who need it most.

* I'm 28 the fact that I can treat dealing with WINZ as a strange venture into a foreign land is both weird and a sign of my priviledge.

Maia vs WINZ Part 1: WRK4U

I'm soon finishing up working at the union, which means I'm going to have to deal with WINZ. I've decided that the best way to deal with this is to re-tell all contact with WINZ as an epic adventure on my blog.

The first step in this story is the WRK4U seminar. As many of my readers probably know before you can apply for a benefit (at least in Wellington) you must go on a Work4U seminar. The main goal of a WRK4U seminar is to kill people with boredom before they get the chance to apply for the dole.

My seminar was very much what you'd expect at a Wellington seminar at this time of year: mostly pakeha, mostly young, mostly men. There were five women, including me, and all the other women were students, as was the only Maori guy there.

The first thing the guy running the seminar asked us was if we had a partner. I was very pleased to see that everyone said no. While I'm not suggesting any specific person was lying (and in case there are any WINZ employees reading this I'm not in a relationship in the nature of marriage) - lying to WINZ about the nature of your relationships is an important rite of passage in this country.

Relationships in the nature of marriage have a funny history. Women on the DPB were one of Muldoon's many targets, and in the late 1970s (the DPB only became a statutory benefit in 1972) there was a real campaign against women on the DPB who knew any men. One cabinet member was explaining what a relationship in the nature of marriage meant, and he said that the woman didn't necessarily have to be having sex with a man for the man to be financially responsible for her, because he knew lots of married people who never had sex. At the time they tried to get a woman to sign an agreement that specified that she wouldn't have dinner with the same man more often than three times a week, or have sex with him more than once a fortnight. Whether their ideas of relationships in the nature of marriage are weird or accurate probably depends on whose marriage they were using as a basis.

The rest of the seminar involved a WINZ employee showing us over-head projector slides and explaining them to us and, as time went by, people arguing with him. The guy asked us who the major employers were in Wellington, of course everyone said the government. He agreed but then said restaurants, and then mentioned McDonalds and KFC by name (which is complete rubbish, I know the person who organises for fast-food outlets in Wellington, and they're not that big in terms of total hours). Just in case we were thinking we should be looking for actual jobs, with fixed hours.

Then he put up a chart showing how much money we'd get on the benfit compared with how much money we'd get in a full-time job. He explained further that if you got into a job the employer would see how well you were doing, and give you a pay rise (I looked sceptical and giggled a bit at this, since this cheery picture doesn't match either my personal, or union experience of employers' attitudes towards pay rises). Then he said that the benefit would stay the same amount forever, and ever and you'd never get any pay increases. When I said "surely the benefit gets inflation adjusted" - he wouldn't even answer my question and say 'yes the benefit is inflation adjusted.'

I think the idea of the seminar was supposed to be that you sit there and listen to the WINZ guy talk. It should come as no surprise to readers (and certainly not to anyone who knows me), that I wasn't very good at that. I can't remember where I started butting in, but I do know that by the time he got to the working for families package entitlements I was explaining it (after that he said he thought I should get a job working for WINZ, which shut me right up).

The really good thing is that once I started, everyone else started putting their two cents in. One of the guys there didn't have the two forms of ID they claimed to need, and another woman said 'it's just another stupid hurdle to try and persuade us not to apply.'

After this we had to go away again, make another call to the 0800 number and set up another time wasting appointment. Apparently you used to make the second appointment at the end of the first appointment, but they don't do that anymore. Presumably because if just 1 in 20 people don't have a phone and find it just too hard to ring the 0800 number, that's many benefits they don't have to pay each year.

The whole thing was in essence creating opportunities to shove people down the cracks. What makes me so angry is that it won't be the people who need the benefit least who don't get the benefit under this system, it'll be the people who need it most. I'm fairly certain that I'll get the benefit, and I'm also fairly certain that the woman sitting next to me, who'd been on the student allowance and was wearing a Gucci bracelet, will too. But the guy who'd been on the independent youth benefit and didn't have a passport or a birth certificate, he probably won't.

What bothered me most is how any form of paid work was again and again portrayed as the solution to everyone's problems. There were posters on the wall with photos of happy workers and inane quotes such as "I love my job so I always give 100%."

Even in a half hour seminar (well it was supposed to be half an hour), the guy took the bosses side against the workers on a number of different occasions. He was talking about Targetted Assistance, and used the example of someone who bought a stereo on hire purchase one week, and the employer put him off the next. This implies that bosses can just get rid of people at will.

I'm not saying that having a job can't be good for someone's life, of course it can. But they're not necessarily; employers have a very real power over workers, and particularly in an unorganised workplace, where employees have absolutely no power, that power can make someone's life much worse.

Just this month I've talked to workers who were trying to fight back against really awful sexual and racial harassment, another worker who was made to work so many hours that she fell ill, and someone else who was driven out of her job. A few weeks ago I walked past an accident on the street - someone had been crushed to death at work.

There is more to this life than having our labour exploited.

Entitlement

I've become convinced that I will know the last person on the unemployment benefit in Wellington. Over the previous few years, as they've been tightening up access to the unmployment benefit, the main effect is that people have got better about sharing tips. Political activists generally have the resources and the inclination to fight bureaucracy. I've also done union education to union members, it is clear that most people have neither the information or the energy.

Tightening up access to benefits doesn't mean that only the deserving gets them. It makes sure only those who are prepared to fight get them.

Lets look at an example of this - one of the many changes the government is currently proposing to our benefit system:

Sixteen and 17 year olds are able to access Domestic Purposes Benefit for the Care of the Sick and Infirm (DPB:CSI). In terms of long term outcomes it is preferable for young people to be engaged in education or training. The eligibility criteria will be tightened so that for 16 and 17 year olds DPB:CSI is only available when there is no other carer after consideration has been given to alternative arrangements and family circumstances.

This sounds perfectly reasonable. I'd hate the idea of a 16 or 17 year old giving full-time care to a relative, they're too young for it.

But lets see what it would mean for a 16 or 17 year old who was the only person available to care for her mother who has

The first thing that'll happen is they'll ring the contact centre, who will give them at least one piece of inaccurate information.* Then they'll get an appointment with a case manager who will either tell them that there's no problem, of course they can have the DPB, and not to worry about anything, or that there's no way that they can have the DPB because they're sixteen.

When (and if) she gets told that she can only get the DPB if she is the only person available then she will have to meet Work and Income's test. Obviously this hoop isn't set yet, but given the way most Work and Income systems work lets assume that it'll involve the discretion of the case-manager, and some documentation. We'll cut her a break here and assume that her family circumstances aren't painful - that she's OK disclosing the reason that she's the only person available to care for her mother to a perfect stranger. But she will have to find that documentation, she will have to find someone to care for her mother while she does this, she probably doesn't drive, so this all happens on public transport, and it may not be cheap.

Remember this is just the additional hoop. Even to get this point she will have had to get a medical certificate saying that her mother needs full-time care. She probably won't know about this requirement until she talks to WINZ, so that's an additional trip to the doctor (who knows where that money is coming from).

All this so a 16 year old can look after her parent full time for $175 a week.

* This (and other comments about WINZ workers) isn't supposed to be a comment on the workers at the contact centre, who have a very stressful job, but instead on the training they are provided.

Sickness, injury, disability or pregnancy

I haven’t had an opportunity to look at the government's benefit proposals in detail (I plan to do that tomorrow – it's even sadder when you know I’m on holiday), but I want to start by discussing the, much publicized, announcement that WINZ will focus more on getting people on the Sickness or Invalid's benefit into work. I don’t know the details; in his interview with Kathryn Ryan the Minister of Social Welfare was very vague on how much this would be voluntary, and how much it will be compulsory. His favourite phrase was 'nothing will be compulsory at the moment' (which strongly implies that it will be compulsory in the future). So rather than discussing the particulars, I want to talk more generally about disability, sickness, and employment.

The sickness benefit is available for people who are unable to work due to sickness, injury, disability or pregnancy. The invalids benefit is available for people who are permanently and severely restricted in their capacity for work because of a sickness, injury or disability (why the difference? I don't know. Although it's made even more pointed by the fact that the Invalids benefit is paid more. I'm lying I do know that it's a nasty sort of moralistic division between really deserving, and possibly shirking poor).

The 'services' currently provided by WINZ focus on teaching people how to look for a job and matching up people and jobs (I'm being very generous with my description here). By making such a big deal of offering these services to people on the sickness and invalid’s benefits (and later forcing people to use them) the government is saying that they think the main things people on the Invalid’s and Sickness benefits need to get into jobs is access to these services.

I say bullshit.* I'm going to explore the actual barriers that stop people who are sick, injured, disabled and pregant from getting a job.

The most obvious barrier is the sickness, injury, disability, or pregnancy. To get on the sickness or invalids benefit you have to have a doctor sign off saying that you are unable to work, so it's not just a barrier - it's a medically certified barrier.

There are all sorts of things that the government as a whole could do to ensure that people who are sick, injured, disabled or pregnant can participate fully in society. For example, many health conditions are exacerbated by living in low-quality housing that isn't properly heated (read most NZ houses). The government could do something about this, both by providing more, warmer, state houses, and by instituting better building standards.

What about stress? Many (most?) chornic healthy conditions are exacerbated by stress. Poverty is stressful (and anyone who is on these benefits is poor). Dealing with WINZ is stressful (I've known people suffer from serious health relapses due to the stress of trying to deal with WINZ). There are many thing that the government as a whole, and WINZ in particular could do to improve the health of many people who are sick, injured or disabled. Why aren't they starting there?

Lets move away from the sickness, injury, disability or pregnancy for a bit. After all to focus on those is still to imply that it's a problem with the person that they are not currently employed, and that's not what I believe. There is a huge amount of unreasonable prejudice against hiring people who are sick, disabled, or injured. Everyone I know who has fitted in those categories has had a much harder time finding a job than similarly qualified and capable people who don't. Why not start by working on the people with the prejudice, rather than ask people who are discriminated against to jump through more hoops?

That's only the start though, because it's not just the unreasonable prejudice that is the problem, it's the prejudice that is considered totally reasonable. For example, if someone had a chronic health condition that didn't stop them working a forty hour week most of the time, but that flared up a few times a year and the worker required a couple of weeks off a time, then it would be considered perfectly reasonable not to hire them. Or if someone had a full-time job and then developed a health condition which meant that they could only work three days a week, it'd be perfectly legal to fire them.

WINZ is obsessed with work as the be all and end all of people's contribution to society. But we only get to contribute to society on employer's times. Employers don't have to (and generally don't) take on workers whose health allows them to work some of the time.

This is ridiculous. Why do we let our economic system dictate our participation in society, rather than organise an economic system that allows everyone to participate? Almost everyone can do some useful and meaningful work, if they're allowed to do it on their terms. The fact that it doesn't work like that, that we aren't all able to contribute according to our ability is not the problem of individual people, who have sicknesses, injuries, or disabilities, which don't fit employer's wants.

* For the sake of clarity I also want to emphasise that these ‘services’ are generally not what unemployed people need to get jobs either. I think changing the Reserve Bank Act would do more to lower unemployment than all the 'work4u' seminars in the universe.