Ireland has been one of the EU countries hit hardest by the escalation of the global recession in 2009. With unemployment soaring, and the Irish economy in a state of emergency, the SFA has identified the need for new ways of thinking about employment creation and social welfare.
SFA President Patricia Callan, speaking to EurActiv, argued that existing mechanisms do not take into account the large number of highly skilled people who have been laid off, some with multinational experience, some with small business experience.
This high-skill pool is not suited to current social welfare restrictions or traditional types of retraining opportunities, argues the SFA boss. "By and large," says Callan, "these training programmes are quite basic and were designed in 1980s policy terms for those who had left education early, not for people with degrees and masters".
Free enterprise scheme
The SFA believes that simply sending people on training courses is not going to get them a job, precisely because jobs are so scarce in the current economic climate.
"What they actually need to do is wait out the recession, and keep their skills in use and up to date. The best way to do that is physically doing projects," argues Callan.
However, small companies cannot hire new high-skilled employees due to financial limitations, particularly in a time of recession.
The SFA is thus calling for a radical restructuring of the unemployment benefits system, the so-called 'Free Enterprise Scheme'.
Essentially, this scheme would allow recently unemployed workers to keep their social benefits, while retaining their skills through practical pieces of unpaid work with small companies.
The SFA believes this would benefit both workers and SMEs: the small company gets the benefit of the high-skilled worker's expertise without the expense of hiring them, while the worker maintains and upgrades their skill set and adds new project work to their CV.
"Assuming that this expertise is worth it, then the small business will thrive, and that will in turn lead to new opportunities for job creation," said Callan.
Under the current system, citizens can only claim benefit if they are seeking employment. "It means that you can't volunteer or set up your own business," said the SFA boss.
A risky business?
The SFA accepts that this system would be somewhat revolutionary, and may provoke scepticism at government level, but the association argues that unprecedented crises require unprecedented solutions.
"I don't think anything similar has happened before. In logical terms, we would never have suggested it before, but these are very different times and they require some innovative thinking," argues Callan, who believes that governments, rather than making the wrong decisions by doing what they have always done, need to be creative and take risks.
Bodies like FÁS (the Irish National Training and Employment Authority) are admitting that they do not have a clue how to deal with the people coming through their doors, according to the SFA.
Callan concedes that there are potential risks - "there are dangers to this: genuine concern over social welfare fraud and employers taking advantage" – but overall she believes that a new type of training mechanism that "caters for the fact that there's a radically expanded skill base these days" would prove successful.
"Preventive measures now will be cheaper than the long-term cost of companies collapsing left, right and centre because the government was afraid to take a risk," she concludes.
