Time required to look for jobs
It's different being out of work
In the BBC debate Should benefits be linked to community service?, some people suggest that as people who are employed manage to find work despite working full time, then unemployed people should be able to do the same. People who are in jobs only look for new jobs as and when it suits them, in between doing other things. For unemployed people, it's an essential activity. Also, people looking for jobs from within jobs know what they are looking for and focus exclusively on those jobs.
Looking for work from an existing job
When I was looking for work from my existing employment, I mostly looked through the specialist IT industry journals Computer Weekly, Computing, Dataweek and Computer Talk, responding to various advertisements. (Yes, there were four IT industry journals in the seventies, but the two that remain each took over one of the others in the eighties.) I registered with the agencies and they did most of the spade-work. Finding another job didn't occupy anything like the amount of my time then that it has done in my periods out of work. I updated my CV, photocopied it as many times as necessary then posted it to all the relevant agencies. After that, I carried on with my life without worrying about the situation. If, during my freelance period, my contract ended without a replacement being lined up, I spent more time chasing up agencies but I had time to do so.
Much harder for unemployed people
Unemployed people have their preferences but cannot restrict themselves to those preferences. They need to look for other jobs too, but this requires time spent on research to find out what alternatives might be suitable, and to get re-trained. Unemployed people also need to take a lot more care about CV presentation. My current CV is only a single page (plus a two-page IT supplement for some job applications) but it is the result of much research and fine-tuning over many years, resulting in many CV improvements. Most significantly of all, recruitment agencies are rarely interested. Unemployed people cannot rely on agencies to do any spade-work. For all these reasons, unemployed people do need a lot more time to look for jobs than those in work.
Political interference
In the days when the government adopted a hands-off policy and unemployed people had all the time to themselves, time was not an issue. In recent years, policy changes have disrupted my plans for re-training and the new proposals that the government outlined in July 2008 will, it seems, even more severely limit the time I have to do proper job seeking. If my worst fears are confirmed, I'll end up accepting my punishment but losing a lot of my motivation for getting a real job. That's not what the politicians want and it's contrary to what the public expects to happen (they assume that such punishment will force me into a real job), but I've been on New Deal and I know how it affected me. I'll still apply for jobs, of course, but if I get one, it will be despite government policies and not because of them.
In the BBC debate Should benefits be linked to community service?, one person suggested that jobcentres could find the real jobs for the unemployed while those people are picking up litter or whatever. My restrained response to this is that the idea comes from somebody who clearly has no idea how the system works. Perhaps this is because the name jobcentre is a misleading description. Despite the vacancies advertised therein, these offices are not really job centres, but unemployment benefit centres. Of course, jobcentre sounds much nicer and that may be one reason for the name. Another may be to delude people into thinking that finding a job is easy. Some people have indeed been deluded, but such people will have their illusions shattered if they end up signing on for benefits in a jobcentre.
It's easier to get a job from a job
This is very true, as I know from experience both of changing jobs and of being unemployed. Some people suggest that, on this basis, forcing unemployed people to do something for their benefits will equalize the situation. I doubt that, because employers will know that the forced work isn't the same as a real job. Also, because the forced work is likely to be very low-grade, labour-intensive work with minimal equipment, it will be seen as punishment for being unemployed rather than anything else. Employers will still discriminate between those who already have genuine jobs (or who are just starting out on their careers) and those in forced work.
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