MEDIA ALERT: Unemployed Workers protest the Employment Minister over Workforce Australia
This government has given welfare recipients little choice but to protest. Our lives are on the line.
Today, at 12pm, a contingent of unemployed workers and welfare recipients are rallying outside Employment Minister Tony Burke’s office in Punchbowl.
Starting today, Minister Burke is rolling out Workforce Australia – a new system of digitised mutual obligations that’ll force people to perform up to 100 points worth of activities to keep their poverty payment.
This week, the new Labor government have said they support mutual obligations, and have made no effort to fundamentally reform a system that punishes poor people for their own poverty.
Yesterday, at 3:30 PM, the Department of Employment finally responded on behalf of the Minister to our 34-page submission. The response was a joke that would have attracted a fail grade by any standard, responding to none of the carefully researched points and recommendations we made.
Minister Burke himself said yesterday he wants to "do us a favour" by keeping 'Mutual' Obligations going so we remain "engaged" with the punitive employment services system. This was a frank admission that he knows the system is so awful that unemployed workers will only engage with it under the threat of punishment and starvation.
Tony will meet with business magnate Sally Sinclair, the CEO of the National Employment Services Association, but he is yet to meet with us – the union representing unemployed workers.
This government has given welfare recipients little choice but to protest. Our lives are on the line.
Media contact: Jeremy Poxon 0404 089 575