No increase to maximum payment levels for Jobseekers pay related benefit in Budget 2027.

They should be increasing the threshold for when it applies - average industrial wage and higher and then indexing the benefit
 
Purple said:
We are in full employment. There's little excuse to not be working.
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As a household, we faced 4 times unemployment during periods of what would be closed to full employment. These periods were relatively short. I think the maximum was about 4 months. But we were still not working during these times. I don't think I would have to provide any excuse for these weeks or months.
 
Premos said:
As a household, we faced 4 times unemployment during periods of what would be closed to full employment. These periods were relatively short. I think the maximum was about 4 months. But we were still not working during these times. I don't think I would have to provide any excuse for these weeks or months
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I agree. I want to see a change to the proposed system which links payment to previous income and tapers off to a low rate over a period of 18-24 months.
 
Jobseekers benefit is really an insurance payout based on PRSI. Of course it should be pay related and index linked. For too long it’s been lumped in with Jobseeker’s Allowance.

The standard rates for both should be different.

Introducing it was one of the best things FG have done. The next step should have been pay related mat. benefit.

For some reason only those on JA get the Christmas bonus.
 
Purple said:
I agree. I want to see a change to the proposed system which links payment to previous income and tapers off to a low rate over a period of 18-24 months.
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What are the changes that are proposed? I think the current system is much better for frictional unemployment
 
JoeRoberts said:
Not in terms of weekly hours worked.
From the CSO:
590k people working part time.
155k of these want to work full time.
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It's not that they want to work full time but the jobs aren't there, it's that they want to work full time and the jobs are there but because childcare costs are so high and we punish work with high labour taxes it makes no economic sense for them to do so.
 
In economic terms an unemployment rate of under 5% is full employment.
The long term rate is around 1%.
 
If we add in 50% of the number of part times looking for fulltime (assuming they half employed) then the rate is 7.5%.
The other 590k has many reasons other than childcare for not working fulltime.
We are nowhere near full employment in an economic contribution sense but it suits the Govt to promote that line and incentivise it.
 
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JoeRoberts said:
The other 590k has many reasons other than childcare for not working fulltime.
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Sure, but as you pointed out only 155k of those want to work full time. High taxes and high childcare costs could certainly account for a significant proportion of those.

JoeRoberts said:
We are nowhere near full employment in an economic contribution sense
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Sure, but that's mainly due to people being wealthy enough to not have to work.

Those who retire early. Those who were stay at home parents and never bothered to get a job when the kids grew up because they didn't have to. Those who are independently wealthy and either don't work or just work part time. Should we force all of those people back into the workforce?

JoeRoberts said:
but it suits the Govt to promote that line and incentivise it.
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How so?
 
JoeRoberts said:
We are nowhere near full employment in an economic contribution sense but it suits the Govt to promote that line and incentivise it.
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Employment rates are high in Ireland, but not very high.

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Employment rates and unemployment rates are not the inverse of one another.

The unemployment rate measures the percentage of those wanting to work that have work. "Full employment" means that all those who want work get it, but there is always some level of friction involved in entering the workforce or moving from job to job — someone completes the education/training in June but doesn't find, and start, in a new job until September; a worker is made redundant and some time passes before they find and start another job — and this is generally reckoned to be about 5%, so if the unemployment rate is 5% or less, labour economists etc will generally consider this to be "full employment".

The employment rate is the percentage of the population of working age who have work. But a non-trivial proportion of the population of working age don't want work, for a variety of reasons — they are studying, they have a disablity, they are homemakers with young children who do not want to put them into daycare, they are sufficiently wealthy that they don't have to work and they choose not to, they are carers for sick or infirm relatives, Consequently, no matter how thriving the labour market and how close to full employment the economy is, the employment rate will always be well below 100%.
 
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