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Tuesday work for the dole

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.

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