The listing of the Salvation Army op shop in Tempe, NSW as a potential Covid-19 exposure site should give people pause for thought over the morality of forcing impoverished people to work for 'welfare' without the rights afforded to the employed.

Every day thousands of unemployed Australians are forced to work in op shops around the country without the simple right to take a sick day. Religious charities pocket both the benefits of that free labour on top of the hundreds of millions in government funding to their very own Job Active/ParentsNext agencies that send people to work in their own stores.

The DESE site claims only not-for-profit organsiations can exploit Work for the Dole participants. In practice this often means religious charities. An evaluation of the Work for the Dole found that 27% of respondents worked in charity stores, over double the proportion carrying out any other activity.

In her 2019 article, What is wrong with Work for the Dole – reciprocity fail, former Jobs Australia policy advisor, Dr Simone Casey explains:

...most Work for the Dole activities are in large charities which can run the program at scale... evangelical Church-based charities with enormous factory buildings in industrial estates. In the various rooms of these building there were a range of basic activities available such as bead jewellery (i.e. threading beads onto a string); second-hand clothes sorting (for thrift or opp shops); and furniture restoration (i.e. cleaning and polishing donated goods).

The Salvation Army Annual Report (2019) boasts 10,000 'volunteers' across 340 op shops, St Vincent de Paul claims over 41,000 across all their activities, the Uniting Church 1,700 and the Brotherhood of St Laurence cite 1,200.

The slick Annual Reports where these figures are presented paint the number of 'volunteers' as an indication of the good will their brands enjoy, a blatant misrepresentation of the fact that job-seekers have no negotiating power in dealing with these organisations which also own the Job Active agencies that can cancel their Centrelink payments.

If these so called 'volunteers' are forced to work 25 hours a week at minimum wage amounts to a healthy donation of $500 a week per individual! These charities like to dazzle potential donors with numbers so I thought I'd shed some light on the incredible transfer of wealth from our poorest people to these charities below.

What makes this exploitation more egregious is that these charities also run Job Active agencies bringing in millions more in government funding for sending income support recipients to work in these op shops and cancelling their payments under the flimsiest of pretexts.

The abuse of this system by organisations selling themselves as doing a public good was brought into the open during the #NotADoleBludger campaign in 2019 which was an attempt to fight back against biased media reporting on income support recipients.

The privatised Job Services Australia took over from the government run CES as a response to rising structural unemployment- to create a system which increasingly places the blame and the cost of job shortages on the individuals with the least input into the policy system- easy targets of political spin. Far from creating jobs where there are none to be had, the new system is a thinly veiled mechanism to strip the poorest citizens of their most basic right to social security.

The punitive de-merit system brought in by the Liberals handed the power to suspend Centrelink payments to the corrupt Job Service network. Despite wide-spread rorting by employment services, Work for the Dole was expanded.

As the program grew, injury figures skyrocketed.

If the death of teenager Josh Park-Fing is any indication, industry and government have shown an appalling history of transparency and accountability in protecting the safety of Work for the Dole workers.

Australia has now put our most vulnerable citizens' welfare in the hands of an industry so dysfunctional that the government had to push the reset button on more than one occasion.

While there are billions of dollars for employment services- not to mention $10,000 to each income support recipient forced onto the cashless welfare card- the government claims it can not afford to raise income support levels off the OECD floor.

Forcing people to work while labelling them as unemployed in the midst of a pandemic it has mismanaged on every front is a betrayal of everything the labour movement set out to accomplish.

It is time for this outrage to end.