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Know Your Role At the moment I'm unemployed, and living off my rapidly dwindling savings. I mean they weren't that much to start with, and with no income they're going fast. The obvious thing to do would be to head off down the WINZ office, and sign up for the "Community Wage" (or whatever they're calling it this week. Just one problem: I'd rather disembowel myself with a pair of rusty safety scissors and trepinate myself with a corkscrew than deal with those pigfuckers. Hardly the sort of image a public service agency wants to produce, but I can assure you it's all their own work. The entire of the WINZ mentality seems to be predicated on the ideas that you, the "client:" 1) Have no qualifications above the level of school certificate (if that), 2) Are functionally illiterate, and 3) Have no interest in actually getting a job, but just want to sponge off the state. To that end, they try to be as absurdly annoying, useless and incompetent as possible, thus ensuring that no-one will want anything to do with them and therefore the unemployment statistics will go down. At least, this is the only conclusion I can draw from their behaviour. As a friend of mine said recently, after spending four years of his life and accumulating a thirty thousand dollar debt in the quest to become a teacher, WINZ found it a little hard to grasp the idea that he might, horror of horrors, want to become a teacher, instead of just accepting their very polite suggestion that he scrub toilets for a living. (And I don't want to hear any whiny libertarian bullshit about how he should be happy to accept any job rather than bludging off the state. While he was accumulating that debt, the state was also paying large sums towards that expensive education of his. If he then goes off to clean toilets, that money is wasted. And the cost of a year or twos worth of benefit payments is a lot less than the cost of training another teacher when you need one.) Now don't get me wrong here - someone's got to clean the toilets (otherwise we'll all catch horrible diseases and our bottoms will fall off), but doesn't it strike anyone that trying to make a guy that turns up with a university degree in each hand whip out his scrubbing brush is something of a waste of resources? Knowledge economy, my arse. My own fun with WINZ started when I turned up for an "appointment" to apply for the "Community Wage." Some organisations might see the idea of an appointment as arranging a time where you come in and they have someone available to see you. Not, apparently, this one. After a couple of hours of watching the staff shuffle papers around in an attempt to look busy without actually having to do any work, I did eventually get to see someone. So after that two hour wait, it took about two minutes to enter the information from my forms onto their computers, about ten minutes to go through my qualifications and experience (I have more degrees than hands), and about five minutes worth of suggestions that I, at least metaphorically, scrub toilets. About a week later I got a polite letter requesting that I turn up to one of their job seekers seminars. Otherwise they'd cut off the benefit they hadn't actually gotten around to paying me yet. The letter came the day before this seminar (thus ensuring that I had to cancel plans for the day) and also asked that I fill in the enclosed form and bring it with me. There was no form. So I turn up to their seminar. I'd been warned to expect to be there most of the day. After briefly standing in line, I explained to the nice lady that the form they had asked me to fill in hadn't been in the envelope. "That's fine," she said, and gave me a copy of the form. The questions asked for exactly the same information I'd given my case worker a week earlier. I filled it in and handed it back to them. Then I was told I could go. A couple of months later I was invited to another turn-up-or-we'll-quit-payin'-ya session. This time it was with their job placement people. When I got there, they didn't actually have an appointment for me on record, and "asked" me to come back tomorrow. So, I came back again the following day. The nice man asked me for precisely the same fucking information they'd asked for on the two previous occasions, before telling me it seemed like I was doing everything right and there wasn't much they could do to help me. Not the stupidest waste of time WINZ has ever come up with, but certainly in competition. Possibly the stupidity prize may be claimed by another story from my friend with the teaching diploma. This time I think I'll just quote him: "...they recently invited me (in the context of feel free not to come, but if you don't we cut off your money - that sort of invited) to a 3 day motivational seminar. This was particular fun for me. We had seminars on how to decide what sort of job you wanted (If I forget, I can read it off the degree thingee I got), how to upskill (well, I guess I could get a THIRD degree if they really wanted me to), how to get motivated into applying for jobs (poor old unmotivated me has only applied for around 40 in the last 2 months)and how to make a CV (and I thought sending that napkin I wrote "gizza job" on with lipstick was how it worked). "My fav part tho' was when one of the motivational speakers, seeking to inspire us with the tale of how many obstacles Col. Sanders had overcome to start KFC, asked us if we liked KFC as a preface to his story. He went around asking a few people individually (y'know, that old teaching thing of getting them involved/making sure they're paying attention). Now, you may say that I have too much faith in humanity, but I honestly thought not even he'd be stupid enough to ask the punk chick in the T-shirt which read 'Animal Liberation/Human Liberation' and had a picture of a raised fist and a raised paw. The flow of his little spiel was rather disrupted by the speech we got on how KFC was a planet-raping multinational who exploited and murdered animals to support their evil capitalist consumerist empire. We can learn two things from this outburst 1) Yes, I am in love. 2) Winz employees are actually the stupidest people in the world." However, I think the prize winner has to be the simple fact that when I finally got a job it took me two weeks to actually get in contact with someone to tell them to stop giving me fucking money. I often wonder if these alleged cases of benefit fraud are in fact just people who have been trying to get in touch with their case workers for the last twelve years... In an attempt to discover the roots of this culture of gross stupidity, I headed off to the WINZ website. Once there, well, I could have looked at the Job Bank, but frankly I find it too depressing. The last time I checked it out, there were approximately three jobs, and two of those were for the "Community Taskforce." Of far more interest is their downloads section. There I found a PDF version of their annual report. The first thing that struck me about it is that between their insistence on having a percent sign in every sentence, their use of long words you feel they copied from somewhere else without actually understanding them, and their complete inability to draw a conclusion, I had a strong suspicion that I was reading a fourth form social studies report. Still, I read on. There was a lot of talk about how many people they'd placed in jobs, but their discussion of actually helping people get benefits seemed to basically come down to how much it cost them to make sure no one was getting money they shouldn't. Right. And what about these job placement statistics they were so proud of? Well, "More than 72,000 clients were placed into employment," and "stable employment increased significantly to a total of 13,537 clients." Given that their definition of stable employment is anything lasting more than three months, this seems less than impressive compared to their claim of serving over 400,000 "clients." Of course, having seen the quality of their "service," I kinda doubt they had much to do with those few people who did find jobs. They seem to be particularly concerned about Maori, and quite pleased with the results they'd achieved. Apparently 29% of their job placements were for Maori. Of course, separated from this fact by several pages is the news that 30% of beneficiaries are Maori. So, having given their best efforts to assist Maori, who are grossly over-represented in the unemployment statistics, they have essentially managed to stop it getting worse. Congratu-fucking-lations. Given their widely publicised fuck-ups in their management of Student Loans/Allowances, you might think some concern would have been expressed in the report. You would be wrong. Again, they seemed quite pleased with their performance, and felt that if they could just get those dirty students to apply at least five months early, everything would be fine. They did, however, manage to refurbish their offices for a lot less than it was expected to cost. I suppose that might be considered an achievement in some circles. Frankly, given their outstanding crapness, my advice to WINZ is simple. Either: 1) Actually do something to help people find jobs instead of the worthless arse you're doing now, or 2) Stay the fuck out of the way, quit bugging folks, and stop wasting time that could be used for something constructive like, oh, I don't know, finding a fucking job? -Hewligan (About to go postal in the local WINZ office) |
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