Workforce Australia has included people’s real phone numbers in fake résumés shown to JobSeeker recipients and published online.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has removed one phone number and is reviewing all the government employment service’s learning modules to see if others have been inadvertently included.
Welfare recipients are required to do certain tasks as part of Workforce Australia’s points-based activation system. These include applying for jobs, doing volunteer work and completing online learning modules for Workforce Australia (which replaced jobactive).
A module titled “Résumé templates: because you don’t have to start from scratch” included a seemingly fake CV but with a real phone number. Crikey confirmed this with the phone number holder, whose name we have withheld for their privacy and whose identity is different from the name listed on the CV. This person had been receiving phone calls as a consequence of their number being listed on the module.
Australian Unemployed Workers Union officer Jeremy Poxon told Crikey he was able to confirm another two phone numbers belonged to real people.
The department told Crikey it had apologised, removed the module from the Workforce Australia website and will audit all other modules: “The supplier of the online learning modules advised the department the phone number was not active at the time the materials were being developed.”
The department did not offer a further on-the-record statement. Crikey understands that an external supplier created the modules and told the department the numbers were not active when they were prepared before the creation of Workforce Australia in mid-2022.
Three of five modules have been removed from Workforce Australia’s website and the department is investigating whether this constitutes a privacy breach.
In the future, Crikey understands, Workforce Australia’s learning modules will not include contact details.
The perennial problem with the Welfare to Work industry is that it’s preparing candidates for jobs . . . . that aren’t there
Yes the headline unemployment rate is under 4%
Many unemployed are too sick to work or too old to appeal to employers, in fact more than half the unemployed are over 50 and have been out of work for more than 5 years. Unemployment benefits are so low that people sicken on them over time.
But wait! There’s more!
If you’re looking for work and are one of the lucky ones who get the phone call to calculate the national unemployment rate, but it falls on a day you can’t just drop everything and start work immediately because you’re sick, or you’re caring for children/elderly parents/relatives with disabilities at the moment, or you can’t work until you register your car and you can’t register your car without work and you’re one of the millions of Australians who live in a place with no public transport at all – you’re not counted as unemployed!
Whatever the headline rate of unemployment is, the true rate is always much higher, because of all the people looking for work who aren’t counted as unemployed the day the survey is done. It’s a joke.
the ageism and sexism is limiting this country ; full of boof headed machismo or vapidity without compassion- women are the victim ; gaslit and forced to support this immoral business model which blames victims of unemployment thereby putting them into fight mode – precarity and blame is the daily grind of getting 42 bucks a day to plug into multinational cartel pockets .. money for nothing for the job( ahem )provider and abusive waste of time and abusive assumption to try to climb out from for unemployed ( many women and mothers over 45 !)
It’s funny. I saw today that male community support workers earn more than $5000 per annum than female community support workers- both median and average wage.
My first thought was why do they earn more than me? Then I realised. Of course. They don’t have to choose between work hours and child care or elderly parent care. They usually have some woman to do that side of family responsibility for them- quite often a female CSW who had to cut her own hours.
Another problem is that employers mostly don’t want train anyone. They want employees who are ready to go, preferably with a couple of years experience. The idea of recruiting someone straight from school, or a recent refugee arrival with no local workplace experience, and training them has long gone.
And they want the semi-skilled (but very valuable) workers such as personal care and aged workers now to have ace data-entry skills so in between caring for people, they can also input all the data.
And twenty years of successive Governments have been more than happy to oblige by running massive immigration programmes.
JMNO – I worked in aged care for 20 years. The job has always required data input, whether by pen or pad. There are temperatures to monitor, checklists to complete, cleaning schedules that need to be signed off.. etc etc. Then there’s the constant education required to keep abreast of changes in regulation and knowledge.
The big problem in aged care is poor pay, shitty conditions and unpaid overtime. These things could all be changed if the political will was there, but it isn’t a job for everyone. Aged care workers are caring people. Workers without this quality won’t stay employed for long.
So the wunderkind that made up the fake resumes didn’t know how to make fake phone numbers for them?? No doubt they were paid some vast sum for this that exceeds anything the people they’re supposed to be serving will ever earn.
A cynic might think they used real numbers just for the fun of it, to harass the ‘bludgers’ a bit more.
“Workforce Australia has included people’s real phone numbers in fake résumés shown to JobSeeker recipients and published online”
Yet another Public Service fail? Where is the outcry?