The Pandemic Unemployment Payment is a malevolent force corrupting our youth. It finances our raves, ketamine addictions and lifestyles of miscellaneous layers of depravity. Worst of all, it is making us too lazy to work. It simply must be stopped.

As the Government threatens the imminent wind-down of the PUP, I’m sure you’ve noticed them too: an epidemic of articles portraying the Pandemic Unemployment Payment in exactly that misbegotten, shameful light. Specifically there’s one genre of article which seems to be snowballing. This can be summed up as “Find a few random small business owners who say they can’t get people to work for them because of the PUP.” 

In the month of June alone, the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Examiner, Mirror, and the Irish Times AGAIN, have all published some variation on the theme. Each piece offers a member of the managerial class carte blanch to pontificate on the motivations of unemployed people. What these articles don’t seem to do, ever, is to actually speak to an unemployed person.

Well, luckily for these media outlets, I am extremely unemployed. Like, apart from writing this here article, I’m about as unemployed as a person can be. I also never qualified for the Covid pay, so you can rest assured I am not in the pocket of big PUP. 

I believe this qualifies me to write a rebuttal of sorts.

TAKING ADVANTAGE

I’ve been reading these articles closely. Here is a flavour of what those interviewed have had to say… 
Denise McBrien, general manager of a D4 gastropub, claimed their staff shortages were because people were earning “pretty much the same amount” on PUP as they would working for her.
Lorraine Butler, managing director of CPM Ireland – “an omnichannel, out-sourced sales agency” – told the Irish Independent that people were signing up for interviews, purely to keep their benefits going, and then not turning up. 

How, I wonder, did she arrive at this conclusion about the people who didn’t turn up for an interview? Did someone email her afterwards, like a robber in an old-timey movie taking credit for a great stick-up? 

“Ha-ha! You’ve just been swindled by the South Paw Benefit Cheat!” 

However, at no point in any of these articles are the subjects asked to provide any concrete evidence. 
The only explanation provided is that there is “a sense of some people taking advantage of the payment.” 

On what authority is this ‘sense’ actually based? I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but in general I feel like a random person’s vague intuitions should be printed in the horoscopes and not the business section of any reputable newspaper.

ENTIRE GENERATION

So let’s examine the central assertion of these pieces – which is that people are not returning to work because of being able to claim the PUP – and see what the available data does tell us… 

Research conducted recently by the Economic and Social Research Institute found that only 4% of people were in fact financially better off not working, and collecting the PUP, than when they were working. In addition, the Senior Research Officer at the ESRI, Claire Keane, explained that they did not find much evidence that the PUP has weakened the incentive to work. 

This begs the question: why are so many versions of the same story appearing? Why is it that a handful of disgruntled business people are being given an uncritical platform to shape cultural attitudes towards thousands of students and unemployed people? 

And it really is a handful. In fact, one guy even crops up twice.

PJ McMahon, operations manager of the Schull Harbour Hotel, told the Times that young people have saved all their PUP so they don’t have to work for the summer. He also appears in a similar piece, written for the Examiner.

I decided to do some more research, and happened upon an article in the Southern Star, dated March 5th 2020, just before the pandemic shut everything down. The headline read: “Experience Sunday lunch with a difference at the Schull Harbour Hotel.” The piece sang the praises of their delicious new Sunday carvery menu, spearheaded by the hotel’s innovative head chef. A quote from McMahon’s Irish Times interview drifted through my head like a ghost in the night.

“Everyone is struggling. Chefs are probably the biggest struggle... A lot of chefs have worked six months out of the last 18, so many have moved on to other jobs.”

Now, I could jump to the conclusion that Schull Harbour must have lost their head chef due to Covid, and that the manager’s complaints about the PUP were a misdirection of his anger at the dearth of a comparable carvery-wiz in West Cork. If I did that, you’d rightly tell me to piss off, that there was no evidence whatsoever for that assertion…

In all fairness, it really would be ridiculous for me, a 23-year-old unemployed comedian, to hypothesise in a major national publication about the business circumstances of a West Cork hotelier. That would be like if, oh I don’t know, just as a completely random example, a West Cork hotelier deciding to speculate about the motivations of an entire generation of unemployed people in two major national publications.

BARGAINING CHIPS

I do believe there is a case of misdirected anger here. People have been leaving the hospitality industry as a result of Covid – but generally for more dependable employment, not to stay on the fucking PUP.

Internal research by the Restaurants Association of Ireland found that 20-25% of the workforce in restaurants went to different sectors or left the country. Adrian Cummins, CEO of the RAI, describes the situation as a skills shortage… 

“We don’t have the skilled workforce to fill the vacancies,” he commented. 

Now, I’m not an expert, but I think there might just be a very simple solution here: pay people more, or improve their working conditions, or preferably both. 

Service staff have to work notoriously tough shifts and inconsistent hours; there’s almost no job security at the moment; and a lot of the time they get yelled at by managers – and by ignorant customers too. Not to mention the fact that they’re potentially putting their own – and their loved ones’ – health at risk by going to work in the middle of a pandemic. 

It’s understandable if someone is hesitant about going back to work of that kind, especially if they have transitioned to a more settled job. 

When justifying low wages, employers love to invoke the free market, the idea that labour costs are determined by skill level and demand. Well, here they are now, openly admitting that being a waiter or a chef is skilled work and currently in high demand, and yet some employers don’t seem to want to increase wages accordingly.

Instead they shift the blame onto the PUP, students, and employees who don’t want to work for them. 

On one level, this is hilarious. Like could you imagine if I wasn’t getting any Tinder matches, and instead of changing anything about my profile, I pitched an article to Hot Press like “How the Tinder algorithm is conspiring to destroy my love life”? 

Would that be considered worthwhile news? No: Hot Press have already rejected that pitch three times, and actually I’m still shopping it around if any other publications want to pick it up.

What I’d say to any employer is that it’s nobody’s duty to work for you. It’s your responsibility as an employer to incentivise people sufficiently to want to work for you.

Which brings us back to the PUP.

The simple fact is that the PUP gave low-wage workers a modicum of bargaining power in the corporate dynamic for the first time in decades. It’s not much, but it provided people with a slightly less Scrooge-like unemployment benefit (especially under-24s, for whom the current Jobseekers’ Allowance is only €112.70 per week). This gave some of them at least enough time and space that they could find something they might actually want to do. Even that, it seems, is enough to terrify the corporate elite.

I really don’t mean to denigrate individual employers personally; there are lots of good people trying to run small independent cafes, restaurants and bars for whom the past 18 months have been a rolling nightmare, as they try to stay afloat through successive lockdowns. I genuinely believe the government should have done a lot more to alleviate their financial burden.

It is the system which disproportionately platforms these voices that is at fault. By publishing so many articles about the risk of benefit cheats, the media shifts the conversation to a place where removing PUP is assumed to be the ultimate goal, a marker in our victory against Covid. Importantly, this moves discourse away from the lessons we can learn from the success of the scheme. 

The PUP showcases how social welfare can potentially empower the most vulnerable and take a couple of bargaining chips away from the people who have historically had them all. My view? We should in effect keep the PUP forever, by increasing all Jobseekers’ Allowance to €350 a week – and eventually low-wage employers would have no choice but to offer higher pay, or at least better working conditions.

Unfortunately this isn’t going to happen. PUP will be gone as soon as the government can feasibly get rid of it, and there probably won’t even be that much pushback. In the meantime, I’m probably going to have to apply for a job at the Schull Harbour Hotel to get by. 

On the bright side, I heard they have an excellent Sunday carvery.