combines with
Tuesday work for
everyone
The idea: Everybody in Australia in the
21st century has to do something useful on one set day a week (say,
Tuesdays) to earn their living -
- Children must be helpful
- Sick people try to cheer their
carers
- rich people are busy all day
making big donations to community projects
- people with useful waged jobs
just keep on working
- people with useless waged jobs
try to do something useful
- criminals also have to do
something useful for a change
- For the 'unemployed' , the dole
represents 'a fair week's pay for a fair Tuesday's work', and by
any standards, no union or company director can object to that
rate of pay. The rest of the week the unemployed can look for a
full-time job.
'Tuesday' work for the dole - or for anyone
else
- I could build up my self-employed small
business recycling organic waste from local fresh-food
shops. My unemployed mates are building up their small businesses
in association, in profitable uses for the organic wastes.
- An unemployed science graduate is
researching on ways to make food
waste edible for pigs without transmitting diseases.
- Many people mend and renovate
furniture and other things to sell, that normally get
thrown out and wasted because new things cost less than the cost
of mending.
- Another friend sells baskets
outside supermarkets so that people need fewer plastic bags.
Another collects cardboard boxes from the back of supermarkets and
brings them to the front so that shoppers can use free
cardboard boxes instead of plastic
bags. (They can put their waste paper out for collection in the
boxes after they have re-used them enough)
- Some of my friends have a 'Tuesday business' called
Weedslashers. Farmers and councils
can book us for an eight-hour work day slashing thistles,
blackberries and bracken, and public transport refunds the travel
costs in return for a work-completion docket. We are paid by the
dole, so farmers can afford us. Some of us get permanent jobs
through our performance in this. Some country boys do
rabbit-catching this way, and their friends make rabbitskin
products to sell.
- Some of my unemployed graduate friends do their Tuesday Work
in investigative research and
journalism.
- Some people on the dole spend Tuesdays
finding useful jobs for other people
to do on Tuesdays.
Advantages of the Tuesday Work for the
Dole
- 800,000 jobs in Australia alone need
doing and there are 800,000 unemployed there. Unemployed
people doing Tuesday Work for the Dole can start to do the 800,000
vacant jobs that can't be done at present because there is not the
money to pay for them. Helping the old and sick, tutoring the
young, making and selling inventions that have no finance,
landcare, helping in a 'Made by Australian Companies' shop,
beautifying the local environment, home renovations for the poor
and unemployed and poor - thousands of jobs to do that would not
be making anyone else unemployed.
- In fact, it may often prove the value of finding the money to
have full-time workers, not just
Tuesday ones, or work up a business so it can have full-time
workers.
- Inexpensive to run. Tuesday Work
for the Dole scheme does not require expensive administration -
people just look queerly on anyone who cheats by not getting up
early and putting in a full day's work on Tuesdays. It's regarded
by everyone as more un-Australian to cheat on this than it is to
strike on a Labor Day weekend. Its a social sanction, not one to
be policed by bureaucrats.
- Work experience. It gives
unemployed people a chance to experience work every week, so that
they do not lose their unemployability through rusting. Everybody
gets up in the morning on Tuesdays, so habits can get broken.
- Saving capital. Because it is
permissible to make money from your Tuesday job, you can build up
capital towards a loan for a small business.
- Non-bludge. Unemployed people are
not regarded as bludging on the dole because they all work hard on
Tuesdays to earn it.
Freedom-to-Work Day. It is a
Freedom-to-Work Day. In the past we had a society in which everyone
was supposed to have the freedom to do no work
one day a week. That has gone.
In the future, we could have a society in which everybody had the
freedom to work one day a week.
