AmericanAnDerTU

In recent news in Austria there was a proposal from the Austrian People’s Party Vienna mayoral candidate Christine Marek that has stirred the pot quite a bit. What she would like is that people receiving welfare and have not found a job within six months of first receiving welfare will be put to work or their welfare payments will be reduced or ultimately taken away.

Given that Austria is in a sense a very social country where its citizens enjoy many benefits from the taxes that they pay its citizens are used to having ready access to funds to help them in their time of need. I personally find systems like this to be fantastic as they provide a small safety net should one run into unplanned financial trouble (it can happen to anyone, like it or not). My largest problem with countries that have systems like this, however, has been that you will inevitably have people who would rather mooch off the taxpayers rather than actually pay into the system.

There’s been an outcry from some of the political left and from others that I’ve talked to via Twitter that this is a very unfair rule to implement because it can be hard to find a job in six months. To this I say hogwash. There have been many occasions where I personally have looked at the job ads in newspapers and found pages upon pages of jobs that are up for grabs. Certainly many jobs are not what someone perhaps went to school for or would exactly enjoy, but if you have to put bread on the table then you have to do what you have to do. This problem exists in the United States as well and my grandfather was guilty of it. Often people think of themselves as too good for a certain job, be it burger flipping at McDonalds, cleaning toilets, etc.

I think this has something to do with the fact that we have become far too used to having everything just given to us. Then you figure the lack of financial sense that has crept into the minds of the majority in the West and you have a recipe for disaster. The United States is a perfect example of what happens when you have a society too ready to take on credit and companies that are all too happy to give you a bigger shovel to dig your own hole with (my grandfather mentioned above had literally dozens of credit cards and I had one friend finance building his entire car with a credit card rather than take the time to get a small, low-interest loan from a bank). Thankfully in Austria the credit card companies and banks learned very quickly from their mistakes in the early 1990s of what giving credit cards out blindly can lead to, but it’s funny to note that these same credit card companies don’t give a damn in the United States.

What is wrong with making someone work for the money that they are given? It’s not as if you go into the office and are handed a tenner just for turning up on time, I mean, this isn’t Greece! No, you have to do like everyone has been doing for centuries and actually do work to get sustenance. Pay into the system one way or another, either through tax money from your wages or your own sweat.

The next argument I heard had to deal with these so-called slave laborers affecting the conventional job market. Mrs. Marek thankfully has already addressed this issue in her introduction of this wonderful plan: make these welfare recipients work for non-profit organizations such as Caritas, perform street cleaning jobs, etc. I personally like the idea of sending such people strictly to non-profit organizations. There are certainly many worthwhile causes that need volunteers and I would even suggest paying out a bonus if these welfare recipients were willing to go to a foreign country and do the work there (I’m thinking Peace Corps-type activities).

One problem that also exists across the West is the lack of mobility of the work force. It used to be that people often moved with the job and were essentially nomads. Nowadays you have the majority of people wanting to settle down in one place and stay there and never budge. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, but in terms of being someone with relatively few skills outside of strict labor it’s a pretty tough situation. If your job prospects in one area go tits up and you’ve built a house and settled in nicely it becomes very difficult to change locations if you have to. In the United States the product of this thinking is the housing crisis that led to the meltdown of Wall Street and the world banking system, because you had legislation that made buying a house very easy, too easy in fact, and everyone decided to dig in. Thankfully the Internet has also drastically changed the way the job market is and even people with few skills can still work from home as a virtual secretary of sorts and do well for themselves (my aunt does a job like this and she doesn’t even have a university education).

In closing I hope that systems like this are put into place across the entire world to prevent the abuse of systems that exist as temporary assistance and not a way of life. Systems like these would in fact help in places where any form of welfare is looked upon with derision and maybe make the introduction of such systems possible. These systems of controlling welfare payouts would also hugely cut down on waste and most definitely reduce the unemployment rates in countries using them.