Czech President Pavel repeats stereotypes about social benefits
For me, Sunday's television interview of the Czech President by Václav Moravec was the biggest disappointment of his time in office so far. The president said that he wants to meet with Labor and Social Affairs Minister Jurečka on revising social benefits because there are people here who have allegedly grown accustomed to them and yet another generation is growing here who live on welfare instead of working.
Pavel is repeating the stereotypes usually voiced by somebody incapable of seeing that “yet another generation on welfare” is a problem that is structural in nature. Of course it is not a problem of the people themselves, and what’s more, it is above all a problem in regions with structural afflictions.
This is a complex problem for the government to solve, not for individuals to solve by “finding jobs”. Below I will randomly list some of the problems that constitute a systemic trap for many of the people who therefore have to apply for benefits:
1. Zero educational mobility, i.e., the schools cement poverty in place. The Czech schools count to an extreme degree on children’s families being involved in their educations. If parents cannot collaborate in this way because they are uneducated themselves, for example, then they cannot aid their children with their homework and learning, which means it is quite difficult for their children to eventually access higher education. For children who are not progressing there is no network of support, and there is also no training for teachers in how to handle them, there are no rules here, as there are in other countries, to limit school failure. Essentially, it just depends on what kind of luck the children have in terms of the teachers to whom they are exposed. We know there is no small number of teachers here who will not hesitate to give low or even failing grades to first and second-graders, which should be a crime. The socially excluded localities are also dotted with dozens of segregated schools for Romani children.
The number of children who leave school after ninth grade is therefore growing, and in the Karlovy Vary or Ústecký Regions, 15 % of young people under 18 do not continue on to any secondary education, which is an enormous number. If we factor in the current critical lack of places in the secondary schools for today’s 15-year-olds, the result is that these people will attain less education than they otherwise would, and therefore will have lower incomes, and thus will pay less taxes and apply for benefits more often. To greatly simplify the situation: The Czech schools are raising these welfare dependents.
2. Expensive housing and trafficking in poverty, in which discrimination also plays a role. Property owners today have such a strong position with regard to their tenants, and there are also so few rental units available, that many people have to assume the debt of paying high rents if they don’t want to end up living under a bridge. Again, discrimination plays a role here in the regions – for example, if you are a Romani person living in Ústí nad Labem, you have no chance of renting any housing other than an overpriced unit at the Mojžíř housing estate, which then becomes a socially excluded locality where rents are significantly higher than in the rest of the city, which also means more people there have to apply for housing contributions and subsidies because they simply cannot afford to live there otherwise. That’s what we call a vicious circle.
3. Generally low salaries at a time when people here are still recovering from the accumulated 40 % inflation over the last six years and more than one-third of the population has a problem making their money last until the end of each month. Yes, the solution to that is usually a second or third job, but is the point of life to work oneself to death just to pay for rent and food, i.e., for the basic comforts of life? This is a return to the 19th century, before the welfare state was ever even invented.
4. The Labor Office is not playing any role here whatsoever when it comes to requalifying people or to finding them jobs, one is more or less left to one’s own devices and again, if you live in one of these regions and you don’t have any qualifications, will there even be any jobs for you to choose from? Assembly plant jobs paying minimum wage will be your only option. Who supports this? All of the past administrations, including this one, with the aid of entrepreneurs and industrialists. The Czech economy stands or falls on the cheap labor that is useful to the automobile industry above all, of which we are so proud. However, all it takes is for one over-indebted factory, like Liberty Ostrava, to declare bankruptcy and you have thousands of people without jobs and on welfare from one day to the next. It’s not exactly easy to find another job as a smelter.
5. Commuting to work is a problem, and not just from peripheral areas. Public transport does not work, bus and train lines have been closed down, everybody has to own their own car. For example, from the Karlovy Vary regional town of Žlutice, people normally commute to a factory in Plzeň 50 kilometers away for night shifts because there is simply no work closer to them. An auto parts company from a neighboring district had to set up its own bus to bring employees in from the surrounding villages, again because public transportation does not exist there.
6. A large part of the people on welfare actually are unable to work for medical reasons and for other reasons are not on disability pensions. I know many people who stayed in a job for a month or two and then had to go back to register for unemployment because their health gave out. Less educated people mostly just get to choose from physically demanding jobs which likely aggravate their medical conditions.
7. “Yet another generation on welfare” has been raised by society itself here. However, the solution is not more repression against such people, but the creation of conditions facilitating their employment. They want to work, many of them also work under the table because they cannot get any other kind of work.
8. Not everybody has the capacity, the energy, the intelligence or the skills to develop themselves, to overcome all of these barriers which are systemic, and to then join the middle class – or at least not to be impoverished and welfare dependent. The nonprofits which aid such people do not have enough money or people. That is also why the Czech Republic has one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the EU; in other words, if you are born into a poor family that is on welfare, there is a high probability you will also be impoverished and on welfare as an adult, because during your childhood and youth, nobody will support you, nobody will manage to remove you from that environment.
9. Benefits today are being drawn by just about one-third of the people who actually are entitled to them. Hundreds of thousands more people should be drawing them and are not doing so for some reason. Somebody needs to explain to the president that the number of impoverished people here is enormous, but they do not appear poor at first glance and don’t boast about it – every day is a fight for survival for them, though.
10. The president showed his basic ignorance of the mechanisms behind these phenomena in society and reiterated stereotypes associated with poverty and welfare here. To tell the truth, I expected more from him.
