Australians can now rate companies that prepare welfare recipients for work with a crowdsourced review platform launched by an unemployed workers’ advocacy group.
Australians seeking the JobSeeker payment are typically linked to an employment service provider with whom they must regularly meet. An industry has emerged of these privatised commercial providers who are paid by the government to help these welfare recipients find a job, improve their CV, or other tasks.
The Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union (AUWU) is set to launch its employment services provider real-time automated tracking service in an effort to hold the industry accountable.
“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,” an AUWU spokesman, Jez Heywood, said in a post about the platform.
The service is a website app that combines a searchable database of service providers with a rating, service type and location. The rating is determined by a peer-reviewed system developed by David O’Halloran and Simone Casey. It also scrapes all the comments on the federal government’s JobSearch list of providers.
So far, the AUWU’s survey has 242 responses that users can view by using the map or by searching by type of program. The app even includes a “wall of shame” for the worst-reviewed providers.
Heywood says the union decided to launch its own rating system after a previous government-run “star” system was scrapped.
“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,” the post says.
In 2020, documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that more than 5000 payments for placing welfare recipients in jobs or education had been recouped — totalling more than $1 million — from service providers since 2015.
On July 1, the government employment service, jobactive, will be replaced with Workforce Australia.
Great idea. Although I’m not sure how easy it is to move provider, so maybe of more use to make the point that these vultures should be shut down immediately.
It’s extremely easy to move provider. I suspect this is because the complaints body, regarding complaints up to and including serious lawbreaking and fraud, openly admits they can’t do anything but contact the provider. They ALWAYS suggest changing provider as the first and only option for resolution. It’s a game of pointless musical chairs in which nobody is providing anything approaching actual service or ethical business practice.
This is one thing the Government has to look into if it is to clean up the system. I know there are a few genuine companies out there and they do try. But companies like Sarina Russo ( the owner is a stalwart member of L/NP) and a few others are questionable to say the least, This should be a prioriy for the Government if it wants to cut waste and try to claw back some over spending. of these organisations.
A fair proportion are less than interested in trying to find you work and would rather just collect money and pretend they care!
This sector seems like such a Rory that it’s amazing it’s not more of a political issue. We’re paying huge sums of money to “manage” the unemployed when there’s already a desire for corporations to get workers and services that help with that already. This is just one more middleman with their hands in the taxpayer’s wallet.
I suppose they serve a political purpose those – reinforcing that those on welfare are lazy feckless parasites that need too be managed this way.
Such a rort! God damn autocorrect!
Didn’t your English teacher tell you to check your work?
Why don’t they just get rid of these parasites…’private providers’…and return to the days when the Commonwealth Employment Service actually found work for people, and they were treated with a smidgen of respect?
The current set-up costs the taxpayer a bloody fortune, which goes into the pockets of the managers/providers…NOT the unemployed. Perhaps the new Labor government could add this to their list of ‘things to do’. They might even find it saves them (govt) some money!!
And they’re breeding like flies.
This sector is a rort. I am now retired but in my pre retirement days I dealt with a number of these crooks including ones with religous affilations like the Salvos. Like most privatised govt services they exist to transfer tax payer money to favoured private individuals not to assist their clients. Consequently their agenda is to do activities with their clients that trigger payments from the government. This includes simple things like just having a face to face meeting or running a course on writing a job application. So you heaps of these. If you get ignored, which often happens, you can be sure you will get a letter during may or june when the provider discovers they havent used you to extract as much money as they could have and the end the financial year is creeping up. The letter will include a threat that if you dont cooperate they will cancel your centrelink payment which reveals that the government is complicit in this rort.
To be fair if they get you a job it triggers a patyment but thats hard. Easier to play the other game.