AUWU Announces Initiative to Scrutinise the New Employment Services Model
We cannot trust the government to regulate an industry fundamentally premised on the exploitation of human misery for profit.
Launched today, April 1, the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union Rating Scale (AUWURS) survey allows unemployed workers to share feedback and criticism of those who need it most: the employment services industry. Given the government’s track record of holding zero providers properly to account, once again we’ve decided to help them out.
Pioneered by AUWU advocates and volunteers David O’Halloran and Simone Casey, and withstanding the test of peer review, the AUWURS objectively rates Employment Services Providers based on the experience of unemployed workers.
Using the data made publically available by our “good friends” at the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE), the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union (AUWU) is proud to aid the new licensing system provided for in the Mutual Obligations (Streamlining Participation Requirements and Other Measures) bill.
Seeing as the government has abdicated its responsibility to properly regulate their own industry, we’ve decided to do it for them, on the largest possible scale: by aggregating all of the AUWURS responses by provider location, rating factor and service type, and placing them into an open source, searchable database.
But this won’t just be a boring spreadsheet. We’ve taken Sarina Russo’s motivational #HustleGrindset speeches to heart. Our database also contains the geographical location information of each ESP. The combined ratings data and location information will allow us to generate an information-rich, auto-updating map of every provider location in the country.
Figure 1: Preview of ESP RATS map listing every one of the 7,000+ existing provider locations around Australia
After a short period of time collecting initial survey response data, The Employment Services Provider Real-time Automated Tracking Service (ESP RATS) will be available shortly at https://auwu.org.au/esp-rats
And we haven’t stopped there! We’ve also scraped every single comment left by unemployed workers on the https://jobsearch.gov.au website to display with all the other data. We know how fond ESPs are of this feedback, and this has sharply informed the guiding philosophy behind the RATS.
The previous government-run system to rate employment service providers – the now-scrapped “Star” system – was a sad joke, and failed to help job seekers make informed and safe choices. It’s ludicrous that, after all these decades of the privatised employment services system, there has been no independent body to rate job agencies, document their bad behaviour, and bring them into line.
We know how much Services Australia loves to hold us close and watch over us, but we thought it was time that tender loving care should be shared with Employment Services Providers (ESPs). Maybe if they get closer attention they’ll feel happier and stop suspending the payments of nearly half of all welfare recipients considered most vulnerable by Centrelink.
The survey launches today at https://auwu.org.au/auwurs-survey or you can go directly to the survey at https://nck8mhyds9i.typeform.com/AUWURS. After a short period of data gathering, the full open source database and map will be made available over at https://auwu.org.au/esp-rats.
Media contact: Jez Heywood / media at auwu.org.au
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