Job seekers on work experience scheme to earn €306 a week

People who are unemployed will be able to take up 10,000 paid placements earning €306 a week under the Government’s new Pathways to Work programme.

The plan will link payments to a person’s previous earnings for a period after they lose their job, but that scheme will not be implemented until 2023 at the earliest.

Speaking in Dundalk on Monday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the Government’s Economic Recovery Plan was based on creating employment, with a focus on “building back better” after the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Pathways to Work 2021-2025 strategy has a target of exceeding the pre-crisis employment levels by reaching 2½ million people in work by 2024.

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It includes once-off grants of €1,000 for people who are unemployed to pay for short-term accredited training courses as well as offering subsidies of up to €10,000 for employers who hire people who are under 30.

With youth unemployment soaring during the pandemic over the past 18 months, the strategy aims to reduce this from 44 per cent to 12.5 per cent by 2023.

Four thousand of the 10,000 paid placements offered by the new work placement experience programme would be ringfenced for the under-30s, the Government said.

Minister for Social Protection Heather Humphreys said it would be open to people who had been on jobseekers' payments or the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) for more than six months.

Participants would have access to formal certified and sector-recognised training, the delivery of which would be monitored by the Department of Social Protection, she said.

Each would be paid €306 weekly for 30 hours’ work, which Ms Humphreys said was in line with open labour market rates and she encouraged employers and jobseekers to get involved.

JobBridge

The previous JobBridge initiative which saw people who were unemployed placed on internships with an extra €52 added to their weekly social welfare payments was much criticised.

More than 200 companies were investigated by Social Protection following complaints from participants, while an independent review of JobBridge found just over half of participants later found employment.

Asked if she was worried that similar issues could now arise, Ms Humphreys said: “This is a different scheme and there’s a lot more protections in place.”

She also said participants would get an extra €103 on top of their weekly social welfare payments and that the scheme was voluntary.

Ms Humphreys also said the new strategy included a commitment to work on detailed proposals on the development of a new pay-related, short duration, jobseekers’ payment.

She said the goal of the new system of payments was that someone who lost their job didn’t suffer a “cliff-edge” drop in their income.

She said she wasn’t putting a timeline for when this would be in place and proposals were not expected to be ready until next year.

This means that Budget 2023 is the earliest that changes could be announced.

Ms Humphreys was not able to offer an indication of the level that the pay-related jobseekers' payment would be set at and added: "We'll be looking at models across Europe. "

Implementing the 83 actions in the Pathways to Work strategy is estimated to cost €390 million.