Since the dawn of modern welfare programmes, opposition as well as concerned advocates of unemployment benefits have cited the gap between benefits and low wage employment as a deterent to getting people back to work.
The recent OECD
Benefits and Wages report looks at the ‘generosity’ index of countries’ benefit programmes and “a special chapter calculates parents' out-of-pocket childcare costs and asks whether, given these costs, parents of young children can ‘afford to work’”.
Anecdotally, we’ve all heard the ‘no’ answer to this question, but we also continually hear of welfare-to-work programmes in industrialised countries, where public assistance for transportation, vocational training, childcare and substance abuse, is given to welfare beneficiaries who are transitioning back into the workforce. While this assistance is essential and has helped transition thousands of unemployed workers, the challenges are still very real and single parent miminum wage households often subsist below poverty levels.
While there are no easy solutions, there are bookshelves of success stories, such as Rodney Carroll’s
No Free Lunch, which details how Mr Carroll overcame his own impoverished circumstances and helped to build the United Parcel Services’
Welfare-to-Work Partnership. UPS’ tradition of partnering with local communities and government organisations has made a difference to over 65,000 once jobless Americans and has been a sound recruitment model for the company.
Although welfare reform is, and needs to be, administrated through government programmes, cooperating with private enterprise offers real-time possibilities and long term solutions for achieving rising employment across the map, and for mitigating current and future skills shortages in local labour markets worldwide.
[Related article from Vedior’s Recruitment News:
OECD countries cut benefits]