Public employment service

A public employment service is a government's organization which matches employers to employees.

History

One of the oldest references to a public employment agency was in 1650, when Henry Robinson proposed an "Office of Addresses and Encounters" that would link employers to workers. The English Parliament rejected the proposal, but he himself opened such a business, although it was short-lived.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, every developed country has created a public employment agency as a way to combat unemployment and help people find work. In 1988, public employment services from six countries founded the World Association of Public Employment Services. As of 2016, 85 PES from all over the world have joined the association.

Public employment service by country

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom the first agency began in London, through the Labour Bureau (London) Act 1902, and subsequently went nationwide, a movement prompted by the Liberal government through the Labour Exchanges Act 1909. The present public provider of job search help is called Jobcentre Plus.

United States

In the United States, a federal programme of employment services was rolled out in the New Deal. The initial legislation was called the Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933. More recently, job services happen through one-stop centers established by the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, reformed by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2013.

Other countries

Further information: Public employment services in the European Union

• Pôle emploi, France's Public employment service
• Hello Work (Japanese government's Employment Service Center)
• PESO (Public Employment Service agency of the Philippines)
• Public Employment Service (Lithuania)
• AMS, Austria (Arbeitsmarktservice)
• Bundesagentur für Arbeit, (Federal employment agency of Germany)
• PSZ, Poland (Publiczne Służby Zatrudnienia)
• Hellenic Manpower Employment Organization, Greece (Οργανισμός Απασχολήσεως Εργατικού Δυναμικού (ΟΑΕΔ))

See also

• Employment agency
• UK agency worker law

Alternative Approaches

Achieving greater employment is a non-trivial task, since those who are seeking work may not be competitive for the work that exists. Yet there are extensive requirements for labour to be applied in socially and environmentally productive way, which are difficult to build traditional jobs around.

Communist countries solved this problem by creating simple jobs like painting fences. While ostensibly good for the community, such tasks were often mundane and of marginal benefit. The is because the task had to be obvious enough for bureaucracy to generate, and simple enough that anyone could do it. A similar approach is a Jobs Guarantee, which is also unlikely to generate nuanced tasking. Their typical example is running a soup kitchen.

The problem is that generating very specific and diverse tasking requires high fidelity consultancy with the community, which is inordinately time consuming and expensive when accomplished via government information gathering, such as surveys and grants. To identify interesting, bespoke tasks that are needed by a community, and then find people with the right skills who are motivated to do them, cannot be easily done via a top down approach. A policy rather needs to seed aggregations of people in a community who are able to identify useful tasks that aren't currently being done by public, private or charitable sectors, and are also able to vet candidates and then oversee the work for quality. Paying someone a government-generated wage is the easy part.

Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is arguably such a system, where assistance required by a disabled person is identified by the person themselves, and/or their guardians, and/or advisors. The tasking is then put out to an ecosystem of providers, who find qualified people well matched (and acceptable) to the client. The work is often quite manual and simple, such as taking clients on outings. But the client is also the arbiter of the service quality, and this is different to charitable providers who in the past were paid to care for a large number of disabled people, and obviously provided fairly scant and uniform services.

Another potential solution is Collaboration Vouchers where people in a community form registered groups. These groups have the option to propose tasks, which the government can then pay a wage to the selected person from within the group. The benefit of this approach is that, unlike the NDIS, tasks can be community (e.g. administering a men's sheds) or environment-centric (e.g. bush regeneration), while still being potentially nuanced and interesting. It is imagined that in many cases, retired (or at least financially secure) people would be casual volunteers, while younger (or less financially secure) people would be receiving the part- or full-time wage. However all would work alongside one another, with volunteers collectively overseeing performance of the wage recipients.

References

• DE Balducchi, RW Eberts, CJ O'Leary (eds), Labour Exchange Policy in the United States (W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research 2004)
• P Craig, M Freedland, C Jacqueson and N Kountouris, Public Employment Services and European Law (2007)
• International Labour Office, The role of private employment agencies in the functioning of labour markets (Report VI 1994) International Labour Conference 81st Session
• R Kellogg, The United States Employment Service (University of Chicago Press 1933)
• T Martinez, The Human Marketplace: An Examination of Private Employment Agencies (Transaction 1976)
• JB Seymour, The British Employment Exchange (PS King & Son 1928)

External links

• Official Website of the World Association of Public Employment Services