Sir, – In response to Brendan Lyons’s piece (“Making people jump for work that does not exist must stop”, Opinion Analysis, September 6th), I remember spending years on the dole in the early 1980s. We were made to sign on every week and there was no queue, just a massive scrum of over 200 men – the unemployed were sexually segregated back then – waiting for the doors of the labour exchange to open in the middle of the afternoon.
I’m lucky to have been continuously employed for the past 25 years but I’ve never forgotten what it was like to be unemployed, and I’m now frustrated that my own children, who have just turned 18 and 20, can find no summer work to help finance themselves through college.
The key phrase in Mr Lyons’s piece is, “for work that does not exist”. Arguments that so-called high levels of social welfare act as a disincentive for people to seek work might make sense in times of economic boom, but in the 1980s and today they make no sense whatsoever. Trying to reduce the State’s financial responsibility while attributing blame or guilt to the unemployed for not seeking “work that does not exist” is pure cynicism. – Yours, etc,