Cutbacks sought to clear jobless queue

CUTS to the minimum wage or welfare reductions are needed to urge the long-term unemployed back into the workforce, says the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland.

Employers felt there were too many risks with people who had been out of work for long periods, it said.

"To be honest, there's two ways to get them back into the workforce," CCIQ president David Goodwin said.

"Reduce welfare which reduces the incentive to not work or reduce the minimum wage so employers will be prepared to take a risk.

"If you have someone applying for job who has been out of work for two years and another person who has been out of work for two weeks, I know which one I would employ. That's a practical reality."

He said the Government needed to provide incentives for employers to take on the long term unemployed and reform unfair dismissal laws.

Welfare groups also said there were far more issues than Prime Minister Gillard's suggestion that people move cities to find work and these included transport, poverty, education, skills and housing affordability.

"What's required is not tougher talk or bigger sticks.

People who are long-term unemployed are currently living on $34 a day, in poverty, already expected to look for 10 jobs a fortnight, and must accept job offers or face having an eight-week suspension of their payments," said Australian Council of Social Service's Dr Cassandra Goldie.

"What's needed at a time of near full employment is a serious evaluation of why it is that a group of people remain shut out of the paid workforce.

"The Federal Government must take up its share of responsibility to help those currently locked out of the jobs market to break back in, and financially support those who are doing it tough. Employers must also do their part."

Amber Gilbert, 18, left the day after she finished school in Warwick last year to move to Brisbane.

"The only jobs I could have got there were fast-food shops or Woolworths. I wanted a better job than that," she said.

Although the move has been tough and she misses her family network, she has picked up a receptionist job at Sitech Constructions and is studying

business administration through Sarina Russo Institute to improve her skills.

"Heaps of my friends have moved to Brisbane either for work or for uni," she said.

"There's not a lot of work in country towns.

'In Brisbane, you can do whatever you want in life. In Warwick it was just fast-food shops."

Russo's head of apprenticeship services Steve Wyborn said the workforce was already becoming mobile, but the detail of how to increase that was complex.

He said an unemployed person in the depressed city of Cairns would still be unemployed in booming Gladstone unless they were made job-ready and had the skills needed.