Unemployment but we need work visas??

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.".
Interesting, but not relevent. (In addition, I did point out that my opinion wasn't purely based on prejudice, but also life experience)

Clubman, do you lack the adaptive behaviour known as prejudice? A trait that is often necessary at times for human survival?

Back to the plot. Why would you suggest that all these people are unemployed when there are quite evidently jobs available for them?
 
umop3p!sdn said:
Back to the plot. Why would you suggest that all these people are unemployed when there are quite evidently jobs available for them?
Well let me quote some (admittedly not very authoritative) evidence from the [broken link removed]to support your own earlier prejudice and experience based assertion that some people would lose too much by going back to work (something that I never disputed per se by the way):

There are a total of 150,000 people on the live register. This includes about 80,000 lone parents, many of whom want to return to work, but will be forced to pay penalties if they work over a certain number of hours.
 
Let me also quote the SBP, which I may add was not the story i read.
"Earlier this month, the Minister for Social Affairs, Seamus Brennan, said that urgent reforms were needed to reduce the numbers of Irish people on the live register, particularly those in long-term unemployment."

So do you think the Minister is full of crap as well clubman, or is it just that you consider yourself to be better than him, the same as you consider yourself better than all of us?


Additionaly. From the SBP. "that just 1,200 of the 86,000 people who came to Ireland from the accession states were on the live register."
Thats 1.39%. thats a lot less than the 4% of irish people who are on the live register. So why isn't our number on the register down to 1.39%?
 
legend99 said:
So do you think the Minister is full of crap as well clubman, or is it just that you consider yourself to be better than him, the same as you consider yourself better than all of us?
No. Where did I say that anybody was full of crap, that I was better than others or that work was not needed to reduce the number of unemployed further?
 
Right I tracked it down.
The number was 150,000. I had the 3 in my mind because he mentioned that he thought unemployment should be only 30,000.
[broken link removed]

brennan makes the same point here:
[broken link removed]

This is an analysis by a reporter of what Brennan said
[broken link removed]


So the bottom line is still the subject of this thread.
Unemployment but we need work visas??
 
It is based on my own prejudices, and life experience.

Agree with umop3p!sdn - a lot of what we know is down to life experience and here's another example...

Last year my other half employed a man of African origin who held a Spanish passport and was therefore entitled to all the EU has to offer.

He worked a 40 hour week for a few months at a rate of E9.50 per hour and then announced that his wife was pregnant and that he was going to quit work to stay at home with her as he would be better off with social welfare payments, rent allowance, medical card etc.
 
legend99 said:
Right I tracked it down.
The number was 150,000.
As mentioned earlier the live register is not an accurate measure of the number of unemployed people. If the minister was quoting the live register figures as the number of people who are unemployed then he was indeed talking crap.
 
Precisely what social welfare payments was he claiming? By voluntarily quitting his job he would not get unemployment benefit or assistance for several weeks compared to somebody who was let go/made redundant. Once he did qualify he would have to show that he was genuinely available and seeking work for payment to continue. After a few months (three I think) he would be required to attend an interview in order to accelerate his return to the workforce or retraining and continuation of unemployment assistance/benefit payments would be contingent on his cooperation. Without more detailed information this anecdotal evidence says nothing about the situation in general and may, in fact, be inaccurate.
 
Without more detailed information this anecdotal evidence says nothing about the situation in general and may, in fact, be inaccurate.
He told my husband, his employer, that this was what he was planning to do and reappeared some months later to seek out another employee with whom he had been on friendly terms.

My husband asked him if he wasn't working as he appeared at the business in the middle of the day. He said that he was claiming social welfare and was delighted to have his rent and medical expenses paid and said he was a fool to have worked at all!

I don't have any proof other that what he himself told my husband, his employer. No enquiries were received by the company from Social Services.

He may have used another identity to claim welfare payments or may have destroyed his French passport and claimed asylum - I don't know how he got it, but he said himself with a huge that it was easy.
 
In the absence of any further detailed information social welfare fraud is as good (or bad) an explanation as any. I still reckon that any meaningful extrapolated explanation of the cases of the other 149,999 people on the live register from this individual anecdotal case is meaningless.
 
Glad to see you are dismissing what Minister brennan had to say on the subject as crap....fair play for knowing more about Social Welfare than the Minster for Social Welfare
 
Well according to the CSO he is talking crap if he's using the live register statistics as aan authoritative measure of unemployment. I'm not claiming credit for knowing more than him. I'm just drawing a conclusion from what the CSO site says.
 
legend99 said:
Glad to see you are dismissing what Minister brennan had to say on the subject as crap....fair play for knowing more about Social Welfare than the Minster for Social Welfare

Just because he is the minister does not mean he knows much about social welfare it just means he is a TD in the party in power who got his reward for his service to the party (that said he might be well informed about his ministry just that its not a prerequisite for the job).

It is also possible he was spouting off a load of rubbish to appeal to voters with anti-immigrant views, after all he is a politician.
 
"It is also possible he was spouting off a load of rubbish to appeal to voters with anti-immigrant views, after all he is a politician."
That's hardly fair comment about one of the few FFer’s who had the courage to stand up to CJH and spent years in the political wilderness because of it.

I can only speak on this topic from a personal perspective. In my company we would be in serious trouble because of staff shortages if it were not for immigrant workers.
For us it is not just the availability of immigrant labour that has helped our business but the superior quality, from attitude and intellect to skill level and reliability.

So perhaps the reason that there is a proportion of locals that cannot get a job is because what is on offer from our fellow Europeans is of superior quality.
 

So should society be expected to support native people who quite frankly are unwilling to work, unwilling to train themselves and apply themselves to make themselves better and who generally are of the attitude of happy days with dree welfare?
 
legend99 said:
So should society be expected to support native people who quite frankly are unwilling to work, unwilling to train themselves and apply themselves to make themselves better and who generally are of the attitude of happy days with dree welfare?
What is the basis for this attack on most or all unemployed people? More anecdotal and life experience alone or some objective, measurable and authoritative data?
 
My fist reaction to your question is no, society should not have to support those who are able but not willing to work. Things are, however, not as simple as that. Much of the very long term unemployed are a legacy of the very high unemployment rates that we had in the 80's and early 90's and those people, mostly men in their 40's and 50's, are pretty much unemployable as their skills (if they have any) are totally out of date. I think it would be vary hard for people in this situation to get a job. I have a lot of sympathy for those that this country failed in the bad old days and I don't think they should be demonised at this late stage.
I also have a great deal of sympathy for single parents and don't think they should be forced into a low paid job when the state has failed to provide any proper child care for working parents (or the mechanism for it to be provided by the private sector).

I have no doubt that there are a good many people out there who are abusing the social welfare system. The ones that spring to mind for me are parents in stable relationships that fraudulently claim loan parents allowance and those who work in the black economy but claim allowances.
 
ClubMan said:
What is the basis for this attack on most or all unemployed people? More anecdotal and life experience alone or some objective, measurable and authoritative data?

its not an attack my learned friend. it is a point for debate. And yes, i have a problem with some people who claim social welfare which is paid for by you and me when some of those people are clearly riding the system.
What would happen if we all decided we didn't want to work?
 
OK - any chance that you could back up that point for debate with evidence to support the following:
native people who quite frankly are unwilling to work, unwilling to train themselves and apply themselves to make themselves better and who generally are of the attitude of happy days with dree welfare?
... otherwise people might just assume that this is a sweeping generalisation based purely on prejudice and dismiss it as such.
 
You know what, you're like Dunphy...you just take the polar opposite point of view of whatever anyone says.

My evidence is that an extremely close relation of mine is involved in the weekly payment of social welfare and has been told by dozens of people over the years that they way prefer bring on welfare because it suits them and they have no interest in working. She estimates that between 20% and 30% of people she pays say this.