The CEIG group is up-front about their own concerns about the concept of a "community wage". They say there is a perception that the schemes will be used to "punish" people for being unemployed, and that the new policies imply there is enough full-time work for everyone, and a match between skills of the present unemployed and available work. CEIG fears a displacement of existing workers with the new schemes, and that they will be used to drive wages down.

CEIG is calling for community work schemes which are themselves part of a wider approach to unemployment, including: reducing the standard working week to 30hrs, redefining "work" to encompass service and leisure involvement which is not currently being acknowledged, incorporating the non-paid work into the evaluation of the success of the economy, and using social accounting principles.

Their proposal: Communityworks. They suggest a pilot programme to be run for a two-year period from 1 July 1997. The individual projects would cover a wide range of work, and leisure with a training component built into all projects. Fully paid and trained supervisors will be employed on two-year contracts. The participants would have up to two years on a project, and be able to transfer between projects in that time. They would work between 6-8 hrs a day, two days a week, and receive $80 per week Participant's Allowance, which would not effect current benefits or other allowances.

Source - notes of OHP presentation from Community Employment Initiatives Group Christchurch faxed to the Jobs Letter

Meanwhile, Dept of Corrections service development manager Mike Curran is re-assuring people that the prisons are not going into markets "where we would immediately drive people out of jobs..." He says that `slavery' is not an appropriate label for what amounts to giving prison inmates a constructive activity. Curran: "We tend to target the sort of jobs that no-one else wants, like clearing swamps and packaging nails into plastic bags ... the sort of stuff that private industry generally can't get people to do." He points out that profits would not be huge from the prison ventures the department had security costs that other businesses don't have to face, and many of its workers were unskilled, resulting in lower productivity.

Source - Otago Daily Times 29 April 1997 "Proposed prison work policy `slavery', unions say. .

Brown says he wants to be judged on his success in helping to reshape the welfare state: "I am not interested in measures that just alleviate the problem of youth and long-term unemployment for a few months. I'm interested in developing a welfare state built around the work ethic. In 1997, there have been 600,000 young people aged under 25 without work. How is it a society like ours can get itself into a position where we are wasting talents like this?"

Brown says there will be four options for the young unemployed a £60-a-week subsidy to employers who offered a straight job, a premium to the state benefit if work is taken in the voluntary sector, jobs in a new environmental task force, and relaxation of the 16-hour rule to allow youngsters to train without loss of benefit. He is also backing changes to the benefit structure designed to remove disincentives to work for jobless households and single parents.

Source The Guardian Weekly Volume 156 Issue 20 for week ending May 18, 1997 "Brown promises radical welfare Budget" by Will Hutton, Patrick Wintour and William Keegan

" This change of emphasis is important because it underpins Labour's technocratic approach to running Britain. Once you have dispensed with the idea that conflict is natural even healthy and that there are no real class or sectional interests, the answer to every problem is to call in the experts.

[...] The obsession with stability is part of the pretence that conflict is no longer necessary nor desirable. What is happening is not that conflict has been eliminated, but that it is moved from the centre of the political arena, where it belongs, to the fringes, where it does not. As such, making economics into a conflict-free zone is doubly dangerous, because into the vacuum comes social authoritarianism ..."

-- Larry Elliott, columnist for The Guardian, May 18, 1997