The Party Politics of Unemployment

The reaction of many people to the employment problem is simplistic. They associate the problem with the stewardship of a particular government. Inflation continues to be a constant and unemployment levels continue to rise. The answer many people put forward to this is the changing of the present government.

The question which most young people will have to ask themselves, is whether a change of government in November will give them any greater guarantee of a job. It's the view of this writer that it won't. A number of factors are operating which will mean whichever of the majority parties assumes power in November, the situation will remain relatively unchanged.

The smother job which is being done on the present employment crisis bears witness to the last point. First employment statistics are recorded by direct registration, rather than by sample of the potential work force. This latter method is used in a number of Western countries for calculating the numbers of unemployed. Under 16 year olds can't register and many married women don't consider it worthwhile registering because they can't get the benefit in many cases.

The process of registration is made deliberately difficult, with the continued need to report in regularly despite the fact that there are few if any job opportunities for many people. These sorts of things drive the numbers of registered unemployed down.

The public service too, plays its part in helping to disguise the true extent of unemployment in NZ. Some departments have almost entire sections staffed by special workers. Departments such as Railways, have nationally 700 or so special workers on.

This serves two purposes. The 700 workers are a direct charge to the Labour Department, and so this reduces the publicly stated cost of running the railways. The Railways, like a number of other government departments, acts as a sponge for the Labour Department, where the latter can shuffle off a number of special workers to other departments and so reduce the registered un-employed. Putting special workers out to other departments in this way fulfills another purpose in this smothering of the problem.

A hallmark of the 1930s was the relief gangs. Today the special worker working alongside the permanent worker in a government department, is not identifiable or visible either to the public or his workmates. He or she is just one of them.

Unemployed people never physically come together as they used to in the ′30s with dole queues either, which again reduces the visibility of the problem to the public. The cheque paid through the mail to the beneficiary's address has seen to that.

This also means that it is far more difficult for unemployed people to organize, a fact which has not been lost on many politicians and departmental officials.

The party political response overall has been to deal with the problem of the unemployed, rather than the problem of un-employment. It has done this in a number of ways to try to make the problem of the unemployed less visible, and so mask over the whole problem of unemployment. Despite all the attempts to deal with the problem of unemployment through Export ′78, energy research and exploration, these have been at best superficial attempts to deal with a major economic problem.

It is not the writer's aim to create cyncism about party politics in NZ, or about politics in general, but young people voting for the first time should be well aware of the limits of party politics. They should not expect too much from the single act of exercising the vote to put this or that party into power.

Voting for a party is only one minor political act and decision which can be made in a whole range of political acts and decisions. For the unemployed and those concerned about employment, a far more important activity is self help activity - organizing in local areas around local issues and local needs. This will be dealt with more fully in another section.