The party is over, it’s time to pay it all back

AT one point in my life, before I found salvation in ink and paper, I was a member of what sociologists call ‘ the precariat’; a group of people whose lives are coloured by unstable, insecure labour, by lowpaid, often temporary, employment.

Those who exist within this social class can never plan for the future, theirs is a life of uncertainty, with little hope of being entirely free of the State, of standing on their own two feet.

Amidst these run-of-the-mill jobs, these short-term, part-time contracts, there was always forms to be filled, visits to the social welfare office to be made, xs to be crossed, os to be circled, signatures to be signed.

On the one hand I was grateful for the help, on the other I grew resentful of the hoops I was forced to continually jump through.

One morning a letter arrived from the social welfare office – usually a cause for concern. I opened this letter, fearing the worst.

Inside was a cheque, not my regular weekly one, but an additional payment, a back-payment.

They hadn’t been paying me enough; a clerical error meant I’d been short-changed over a number of months. This back-payment amounted to more than I earned in a week. Naturally, my first emotion was pleasure; similar to finding a fiver in an old pair of jeans times one-hundred. That pleasure quickly faded though, to be replaced by fear. There’d been a mistake. This money wasn’t mine to spend. It was a trick, a way of catching me out.

But my overriding feeling was one of guilt.

Here I was, working a few hours a week, receiving help with my rent, hand-outs from the government, contributing very little to society, a drain on the state.

And someone had saw fit to give me more, to trawl through my history and deign that this part-time worker, sometime jobseeker, long-term pest hadn’t been receiving enough assistance.

I held onto that cheque longer than I did my communion money, waiting for the phone to ring, the error to be rectified. But it never was, and, when I eventually lodged the money, I used it to help pay for a deposit on another new flat, another fresh start.

Approximately 222,300 have been experiencing that same pleasure, fear and guilt over the past few months. This hotchpotch of emotions has been brought about by the special COVID-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP), the €350 weekly offering which, for almost 40% of those left out of work by the pandemic, constitutes more than their weekly income.

Such was the need for haste, there wasn’t time to decipher who would benefit most from this payment. It was simply a case of getting the money out there, protecting those with bills to pay, mouths to feed, heads to keep above water.

It was a good move by those in Government, a way of quelling at least some of the uncertainty which befell us at the outset of the pandemic.

But the sunshine days are now over. We’ve only just arrived in Phase One, made ourselves comfy, when talk has turned to how we’ll pay this money back. We knew it wasn’t free, knew our day of reckoning was imminent, but they could have waited till at least Phase Four.

Before anything can be paid back however, this PUP payment has to be brought under control. Those 222,300 people who’ve been living the high-life need to be wrangled off it and sent back out there, back to their two nights in the shop, their odd shift in the factory; sign on, sign off and cop on.

And rightly so. Anything else would be unsustainable. Also unsustainable is a weekly income of less than €300 per week: wages plus welfare.

These are our working poor, our precariat, they do their best, try their hardest, would gladly take full-time employment if it were available; many took these jobs in the hope their 10 hours a week will eventually lead to a full-time role. And this is their reward. Those on the dole are often accused of not wanting to work. The reality is, the next step on the ladder is to join those 222,300 people, replace one fragile existence with something even more ephemeral. Under the circumstances can you blame anyone for staying as they are?