Time for today's #MOstrike story from me.
My previous JSP was considered by services Australia as a 3 star centre, I didn't know this before, but I'm surprised they managed to achieve that many, here's why:

My first case worker was *kind* enough to let me choose my WftD job, instead of doing fence posting on a farm, I was put into "jewellery making". This involved travelling 25km away to a place that was a hired out church, by another alleged church.

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While using yarn to create bracelets and earrings was interesting, the items we made were being sent to other countries to be sold as jewelry made by locals. The workers in charge of us were allegedly not being paid, and provided their own materials for our "work".

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Then that WftD "job" transitioned into making coasters from coloured pencils. We needed to use a hand worked jigsaw against a table to create pencil slivers to make the coasters. Instructions weren't clear at all for anything we made. I raised concerns with my JSP.

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That WftD was closed down, we had no idea what we were meant to do for two weeks. Then I was transitioned into a data entry job which *seemingly* had much more importance - we were transcribing old newspapers into a digital database.

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The person running that job acknowledged that they could have made the job quicker if they had implemented a skimming program which meant our job was only proofing the copies imported - however that wasn't the policy, purely to keep the WftD program running longer.

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Skip forward a year and a half. I'm studying full time, and at the time was also working three part time jobs. This is also two case workers later. In the middle of one of my shifts I was called by my JSP demanding that I come in for a review meeting.

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The JSP knew my circumstances, they knew my shifts in advance, they knew I was working and took me out of the middle of a shift. They knew that my uni was an hour from home and I had tried to condense all classes into as short a time period as I could.

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This wasn't good enough for them. They told me that because I wasn't making myself available to come into the JSP, even though I'd informed them that I could a week later, my Centrelink entitlements were ceased.

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I don't know about you, but being told in the middle of a shift that money you rely on to live is being cut off - it doesn't exactly put you in the right mindset to be an effective worker.

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Because of this incident, I had to take a day off uni to sort everything out with Centrelink, where a worker advised me on how to raise a report against the JSP. I was changed from providers that day, and reinstated on Centrelink.

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Thankfully, the new provider was classed as a 5 star one, and I have received respect as a human at least. I haven't heard from them much since I've had some intense health issues, which I've respected as well.

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When it comes to Mutual Obligations, overall, it's very one sided, where the job seeker is the one who is expected to do all the work. Now we're striking and the minister is calling us "Bizarre"?

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I ask the minister, is being told by a case worker at a JSP to remove all work experience of being an educator from your resume, leaving the job seeker leaving that mandatory meeting suicidal, "normal"? I wouldn't wish that on my greatest enemy.

#MOstrike