On the Dole in the celtic tiger days

Cormac Battle · 24-02-2012 1:00pm #1

What was the deal with the almost 160k people who were on the dole in mid 2005? www.rte.ie/news/2005/0809/unemployment.html

later12 · 24-02-2012 1:07pm

That wasn't the unemployment figure, that was the live register.

It is an administrative headcount done on a Friday evening of lots of types of people who interact with the social welfare infrastructure, including those in employment and those on particular schemes. Of the unemployed, one must accept that there are always a certain amount of individuals in the labour force in short terms of unemployment when between jobs.

What you really need to look at here, to get a more adequate picture of the situation, is the long term unemployment figure for the boom years.

Track the magnitude of the red bar in the chart below depicting long term and short term unemployment.

mikemac1 · 24-02-2012 1:11pm

What is the definition of long term according to that chart?
Is it one year?

Thanks

later12 · 24-02-2012 1:13pm

Yes, one year or over.

I don't know how the demographics break down, but I imagine that many of those would have been older and very long term unemployed.

NIMAN · 24-02-2012 1:21pm

Bone idle gits?

There is no such thing as full employment, its a myth. When countries have full employment there is still a certain number not working for various reasons.

liammur · 24-02-2012 1:44pm

Cormac Battle wrote: »

What was the deal with the almost 160k people who were on the dole in mid 2005? www.rte.ie/news/2005/0809/unemployment.html

What you need to realise, is there is never full employment in a country, so around 3% unemployed is regarded as good as it gets.

There are a host of reasons for this.

mikemac1 · 24-02-2012 1:53pm

New figures from the CSO reveal that the seasonally adjusted Live Register total rose by 2,600 to 158,900 in July.

You picked July, the figure always goes up during the summer

Thousands of temp staff like teachers and caretakers and people working in the universities get released during the summer and hit the dole queue.

Sixty thousand or so school leavers finish, they've finished education so they can claim afaik

Graduates and college students who get a letter from college administration to confirm they are not in a full time course claim

No matter if the country is booming or bust the live register always go up during the summer and it will continue

In fact, 2,600 is a tiny amount for July, it's a pretty good number considering how many hit the job market that month

antoobrien · 24-02-2012 2:53pm

liammur wrote: »

What you need to realise, is there is never full employment in a country, so around 3% unemployed is regarded as good as it gets.

There are a host of reasons for this.

That's true, but didn't we also issue between 20,000 & 80,000 work permits per year (not all new, a lot would have been renewed) during the boom?

yuppies · 24-02-2012 3:45pm

mikemac1 wrote: »

You picked July, the figure always goes up during the summer

Thousands of temp staff like teachers and caretakers and people working in the universities get released during the summer and hit the dole queue.

Sixty thousand or so school leavers finish, they've finished education so they can claim afaik

Graduates and college students who get a letter from college administration to confirm they are not in a full time course claim

No matter if the country is booming or bust the live register always go up during the summer and it will continue

In fact, 2,600 is a tiny amount for July, it's a pretty good number considering how many hit the job market that month

From memory, when an older sibling of mine finished college in the first half of the last decade, they considered it too embarrassing to go on the dole and so lived off savings until they found a suitable job which they found after a few weeks I think... so I wonder how common this perception of it being 'embarrassing' to be on the dole was and if it contributed significantly to low unemployment figures?

eire4 · 24-02-2012 9:03pm

liammur wrote: »

What you need to realise, is there is never full employment in a country, so around 3% unemployed is regarded as good as it gets.

There are a host of reasons for this.

3% is about right. Norway's 2011 rate is slightly above 3% as an example. Probably anything about 6% or below and a country is doing well.

nice_guy80 · 24-02-2012 11:24pm

I was one of those people on the dole

I came out of college, had no notion of going straight into employment
especially not with the level of dole available and the rent supplement too

Did a few bits of work here and there, dossed around and enjoyed myself for the best part of a year.

Now I've a good well paying full time job, so it was time well spent

StillWaters · 25-02-2012 1:31am

liammur wrote: »

What you need to realise, is there is never full employment in a country, so around 3% unemployed is regarded as good as it gets.

There are a host of reasons for this.

3-4% unemployment is full employment.

That % is made up of those between jobs and those unable/unwilling to work.

xflyer · 25-02-2012 2:25pm

I was one of those people that year, not in July though. I'd just got redundancy in Dublin and was looking for work in Galway. Despite the boom that was not so easy for a middle aged man with very specific experience. I didn't sign on immediately as I was sure I'd walk into a job. When I finally did the man in the social welfare office told me off for not signing on immediately and very kindly organised back payments.

After a few months I finally did get a low paid factory job, other new employees had had similar experiences. You end up in a catch 22 situation. You can't get a job in your area of expertise and if you apply outside. They won't consider you. I was straight out told that I would probably leave within weeks. It got so I had to leave out stuff in CVs.

That's how you can be unemployed in a boom.

touts · 26-02-2012 9:41am

Some could have been unemployed for a period of time through no fault of their own. Companies went bust in the boom just at a slower rate. Remember when gateway computers closed. That was pretty much the high point in full employment. So a person could be on the dole for a few months while looking for something suitable. Generally if they looked they found it.

Then there are those who could not work due to illness or long term disability. Even in the boom companies were reluctant to hire someone with a history of mental illness or physical illness (a man in his 40s explaining a 9 month gap in his CV as "heart bypass” would rarely get hic cv past initial screening no matter how fit he was now). They could be looking but just not getting anything.

But then of course you have the long term unemployed who just couldnt be bothered. There are not as many of those as is often claimed but they do exist and tend to be clustered in certain estates or communities. These are the people that have been abondoned by society, or so the naive self-appointed do-gooders will tell you. However it is not that society has abondoned them it is that they have abondoned society. Plenty of people made their way out of bad estates and got jobs and a better life. The professional dole junkies are often third or fourth generation unemployed and have the skill of living off the state down to a fine art. This art reached its pinacle when some groups in Dublin and Limerick managed to convince the state to spend billions knocking their old free houses and build them new free houses in the same areas to maintain their ”communities”. This happened just as tens of thousands of unfinished houses started to become a problem but these houses were not acceptable because they would break up the ”community”. Without a doubt these dole lifers should be cut loose and told that they have already had more than their fair share of the social safety net and just because they squandered it during the boom is not an excuse.

McNulty737 · 26-02-2012 12:32pm

The system whereby you can continue to claim the top rates of social welfare for an unlimited amount of time in this country is mind boggling, and very damaging to the economy. Anyone can become unemployed, even during a boom...however, there are many, many people in the country who have no intention of ever working either through laziness or upbringing. That's fine, you cannot force people to work - however you are exacerbating the problem by continuing to pay them full social welfare. You also sending out a very dangerous message to young people that if you dont work, no problem - the taxpayer will pay your way in life.

People who have been on the dole since pre-crisis times should immediately be put to work sweeping the streets etc., or else be given just enough to survive in food stamps and the most basic of council housing. People need to understand the value of hard work, and lose their sense of entitlement if we are ever to pull ourselves out of this mess.

slickmcvic · 26-02-2012 12:40pm

I signed on that summer, just finished a cover teaching post and didn't get sorted until November that year.
Signed off in September and got a crappy hotel job that barely paid more.
......saying that though there was still nothin going on in many rural areas that the boom bypassed (where i was from)and signing on was the only option then for many

sock puppet · 27-02-2012 9:22pm

NIMAN wrote: »

Bone idle gits?

There is no such thing as full employment, its a myth. When countries have full employment there is still a certain number not working for various reasons.

It isn't a myth, most people just don't know what it really means.

On the Dole in the celtic tiger days

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