HIGHER taxes to increase the numbers working in the public sector should be agreed, a church conference in Dublin on employment has been told. This was one of the proposals made to combat unemployment.
The conference, "Enough Good Work for Everyone", was organised by the Council for Social Welfare of the Catholic Church and the Department of Social Issues of the Irish Inter-Church Meeting. It discussed the report of an Enquiry into Unemployment and the Future of Work, prepared by an interdenominational working party of the churches in Britain and Ireland.
Published last April, the report's conclusions were widely debated as part of the British election campaign. Yesterday's conference discussed its application to Ireland. Mr Andrew Britton, the executive secretary of the report group, said they had concluded that a number of measures needed to be taken.
One was changing the structure of taxation to make it less appealing to lay people off and replace them with machinery. Taxation should favour job creation, with machinery and energy taxed instead.
Most non-traded services like education, health and a lot of construction took place in the public sector. "There needs to be a substantial increase in the public sector, and if that means higher taxes, then so be it," he said.
The problem of long-term unemployment would remain and would involve high-quality training and job schemes. "A good test is: are they ones we would be prepared to go on ourselves if we were unemployed?" he said.
The Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev David Sheppard, who was chairman of the sponsoring body, said unemployment must be put at the top of the political agenda. "Today a company will say it had a successful year if it increased its profits and shed 150 jobs. We want to see success defined in terms of taking on extra people," he said.
Father John Sweeney SJ, an economist at the Centre for Economics and Ethics in Leuven, Belgium, said it was not true that education and training would solve unemployment.
Instead, we should turn part of the considerable private wealth being generated from successful participation in the world economy into more wage packets ford those who contribute to social wealth. It should include subsidising the jobs of those with low skills.
He was critical of the proposal, made elsewhere by the Conference of Religious in Ireland, for a basic minimum income for everyone as an answer to unemployment. What most people wanted, he said, was "a work-based social life and stimulus to personal development through being needed in the economy.