Labour in Vain Resurrected As Work For The Dole

"Detainees were expected to work 6 hours a day but there was not much real work to do...The guards smeared the handrails with grease and we polished them with hessian over and over." Compare this wartime army punishment to private sector "Work For The Dole" programs today where for example "... the same doors (are) painted and repainted 3 or 4 times in six weeks (that didn't need repainting in the first place) and scores of participants sitting around for hours bored and miserable with no meaningful work to do" excerpt from http://storyofbernadette.blogspot.com...

World War Two army punishment. What's the difference between a criminal and a long term unemployed person? Answer: One is the victim of a government crime against humanity.

On a lighter note hear an unwaged mother's experience of dealing with private sector Job Capacity Assessment as part of Welfare to Work Reforms supposed to "help" mothers back into the workforce. Here is an audio recording of a disabled mother brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown shortly after a compulsory job capacity assessment carried out by one of the myriad private sector companies that treat disadvantage as a commodity. For the uninitiated, those with injuries or long term illness classed as unemployed such as mothers caught up in Welfare to Work reforms must undergo Job Capacity Assessment (JCA) for their fitness to work or else be forced to do bogus job training or work for the dole programs comparable to outdated WW2 army punishments such as "Labour In Vain".

PSP means Personal Support Program that provides free counseling and certain health services for the unemployed but is heavily rationed. CRS stands for the confusingly named Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service which is a private, for profit company that does little more than supervise and "monitor" an unwell welfare recipient's efforts to find employment and health services through the public sector. CRS provides no therapy for unwell clients whatsoever and has been known to treat clients with mental health issues with callous disrespect which has exacerbated their condition. Current campaigns by GetUp et al for better mental health services do little to address the underlying causes of mental health problems such as abusive supervisory approaches to the poor in the privatized job service sector, a lack of paid work in meaningful jobs and childhood trauma.

Recently the government has returned to a policy of using more accountable public sector Job Capacity Assessors perhaps because of the buried statistics on increased rates of jobseeker suicides that resulted from private enterprise handling such social issues.