Welfare traps snare part-time workers

REPORTS this week that welfare traps are stopping people taking up work are borne out by business people in Clare. Labour TD Michael McNamara said reform of the current system is required.

Rita McInerney of Ennis Chamber said there is too little flexibility in relation to welfare and that people in casual employment are limited in the amount of hours they can do without losing benefits.

“There’s an issue with people who are receiving unemployment benefits and being offered a part-time job or extra hours. They can find it hard to take it up because of the loss of their entitlements. What is very inflexible about the system is this three-day rule. We’d be saying that what should count is the amount of hours a person works before they lose their entitlement.

“Currently, you can work for three days and then receive unemployment benefit for two days. But what you can’t do is work five half days and receive unemployment benefit for the rest of the time. We’d be saying is that there should be more flexibility that would allow people to be employed over five or six days but still under 30 hours per week; that would still entitle them to employment benefit or rent allowance or whatever.”

Lahinch’s Michael Vaughan operates his own hotel and is president of the Irish Hotel’s Federation. The hotel industry, and much of tourism in general, runs on casual labour. He also feels there is too little flexibility and that, at times, it doesn’t make sense for people to take on work.

“In certain sectors of the industry, doing functions and that kind of thing, particularly coming up to Christmas, hoteliers do find that extra hours are available and that they are often refused because staff would lose benefits,” he said.

Mr Vaughan claimed the current system is not in tune with some types of business. “If businesses have regular hours it works out fine but when you have a business that is demand-led and has peaks and troughs, there is an issue,” he said.

He said there have been discussions with the Department of Social Protection about the issue but little progress has been made.

Deputy Michael McNamara said impediments to work need to be removed. “If there are obstacles to people going back to work then that’s something that would be of great concern to me and it’s something that needs to be addressed. When the welfare state was originally proposed in Britain in the 1940s in the Beveridge Report, Beveridge talked about five evils. Poverty was one of them but idleness was another and the whole concept of welfare was to be a safety net for people if they lost their job. That’s what it still should be.”

The Scariff man said people who are self employed have been left without a welfare safety net and that this is another matter to be addressed. While the Troika is urging reform, he doesn’t feel what it wants is what’s required.

“A general reduction in welfare is being sought by the Troika and I don’t know if that’d be particularly productive, given the cost of living in Ireland and the effect it’d have on families. The second thing is the effect it’d have on the broader economy. Shopkeepers across the country would suffer if there was a general reduction.”

He does agree some changes are needed and he would like to see barriers to people working being removed “sooner rather than later”.

While it may not be Labour party policy, he would also like to see some upper limit on welfare introduced.

“There have been cases of in excess of 60/70/80,000 euro going into single households. That’s something that as a Labour party TD I couldn’t and wouldn’t stand over; it’s not what the welfare system was set up for.”