New Common - Coronacrisis biedt kansen aan schoolverlaters en werklozen

Corona crisis offers opportunities for school leavers and the unemployed

Opinion

It is better to consider the ‘crisis jobs’ proposed by the Cabinet to alleviate the worst staff shortages in care, education, and enforcement sectors as ‘development jobs’. This is argued by Start Foundation director Jos Verhoeven and Labor Market Professor Ton Wilthagen. Staff shortages in vital sectors offer new prospects for people who are now stuck at home or who have been made redundant.

By Jos Verhoeven and Ton Wilthagen

It is better to consider the ‘crisis jobs’ proposed by the Cabinet to alleviate the worst staff shortages in care, education, and enforcement sectors as 'development jobs'. This is argued by Start Foundation director Jos Verhoeven and Labor Market Professor Ton Wilthagen. Staff shortages in vital sectors offer new prospects for people who are now stuck at home or who have been made redundant.

Last month, Dutch Ministers Koolmees, Wiebes, and Hoekstra (of Social Affairs and Employment, Economic Affairs and Climate, and Finance, respectively) came up with an interesting idea in their broader plan on economic and job market support measures. They mentioned ‘crisis jobs’. People who are currently out of work could be employed to help relieve the pressure on such vital sectors as care, education, and enforcement. Koolmees indicated that the idea needs further elaboration.

We would like to offer our help because the essence of this idea links up with our vision, published earlier, of what we call valuable work. However, we do think it is important to agree on a few clear rules first to prevent that people are left empty-handed. Nor do we want this initiative to become a kind of ‘quid pro quo 2.0’ with terrible terms of employment.

For starters, let’s replace the term of crisis jobs by development jobs. It may seem like a purely cosmetic semantic change but it represents a fundamentally different point of departure. Of course this idea needs to be an effective way to meet the existing needs in the care, education, and enforcement sectors, but it is also an opportunity to really help people in the longer term. A development and career perspective can be outlined that appeals to people’s motivation and sense of being appreciated. This work should also provide an acceptable income and there should be a follow-up perspective when the work stops.

Employable groups

Not all jobseekers will be immediately suitable for this kind of work. It seems wise to act expeditiously by starting with groups that can be deployed rapidly. A specific group with good candidates for these development jobs are school leavers who, for the time being, cannot enter the sector for which they have been trained. It is crucial for young people that they do not make a false start in the job market because they have to sit on their hands for a long period of time. This stymies their development: they fail to gain experience and cannot build the professional network that is essential for their chances in the job market.

People who are already on unemployment benefit are potentially very suitable, too. They have been without a job for a relatively short period of time, and nothing ages human capital as drastically as being inactive. A third group consists of people who are working, but are in fact surplus staff or personnel hoping to hold on to their jobs until after the crisis. It is very much in the interest of workers who know they cannot continue at their current employer to go from work to work and avoid becoming unemployed. It is quite conceivable that they are prepared to make a stopover in the vital sectors on their way to a different job and perhaps find their ultimate job there as well.

Small window of opportunity

The project should have something of a crisis approach to it: set something up in this small window of opportunity. We are not normally a country that is famous for ‘just starting somewhere’. However, a few practical matters do need to be sorted out first.

In the first place, there is the question of how we are going to organize these development jobs. We advocate some form of social secondment. If he wishes, Koolmees could create a framework for this and find social partners to participate. There will undoubtedly be legal ramifications but in times of crisis, in which much is at stake, these can and must be resolved.

Secondly, we need to be realistic. Much of the work, for instance, in care and education, requires qualifications. If you are not qualified, you are not allowed to do that work. That is something to bear in mind, but creative solutions can be found, for instance, with ‘job carving’. This means identifying specific parts of the work of qualified professionals that can be done by workers participating in the development jobs.

The best part of it all is to develop something new in a crisis that can benefit us also in the time to come.

This opinion piece was published earlier in daily newspaper Trouw , November 24, 2020

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The corona crisis has compounded major societal challenges. Tilburg University shares knowledge and insights to reshape our society. We are happy to discuss this New Common.

Date of publication: 3 December 2020