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• Tom Drake-Brockman
• Sydney
• Australia

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A proposal for massive reduction of unemployment.

All employers, large and small, private and public, should be obliged to provide part time work for unemployed people. Each workplace would be given quotas scaled to its size. The unemployed would be free to choose their preferred workplace (providing a quota was not already filled there) and their employer would pay the equivalent of their work relief benefit as a wage for the time worked. That might only be 2 or 3 days a week, depending on the award rate for their industry. Private businesses would be fully reimbursed by the government but all employers would be expected to provide on the job training in return for the free labour. If permanent employment was not offered within say, three months, the job seeker would have to move to another workplace of his/her choice.

This scheme would have multiple benefits. It would:
• provide invaluable work experience and enhanced opportunities to showcase personal skills,
•fast-track people into real jobs providing real social justice to those genuinely seeking work
•eliminate passive welfare, restoring dignity to the unemployed
•remove any incentive or opportunity for rorting or loopholing the system,
•slash welfare and bureaucracy costs while massively boosting national productivity,
•help entrench a new ethic of mutual obligation that Western democracies so urgently need to counter a pervasive culture of greed and entitlement.

Am I dreaming or is this not a viable solution?