Police Checks: How ‘User Pays’ Fleeces Us All

Today, many jobs require some sort of police check to ensure that the prospective applicant is not a criminal. In the past, this kind of thing was reserved for a specific type of employment and the cost of the police check was borne by the prospective employer. Not anymore. Now, even someone delivering pizzas has to have a national crime check and guess who pays for it? Yes, the poor student or down on their luck unfortunate reduced to this kind of work. It is a scam, of course, with multinational corporations like Uber making money out of this overly officious security requirement. Police checks: how ‘user pays’ fleeces us all.

Indeed, it reminds me of Robodebt, where the onus was put on those falsely accused of defrauding money from Centrelink to prove that they hadn’t.

Shame and harm at every JobSeeker turn – and now with added AI slop

National Police Checks Are A Corporate Scam

If the 4 Corners expose into paedophiles working in child care centres around Australia is anything to go by, the whole police check thing is a waste of time. How have these men managed to game the system to get their Blue Cards and national police clearances? Is there anything lower than big companies making money out of vulnerable people and consumer safety measures? American multinationals are experts at this exploitative corporate behaviour. I call it the financialization of everything. Over in the US, which our Australian business leaders slavishly follow, they turn every aspect of human life into a financial product to be traded and gambled upon.

Exploiting Job Seekers & The Unemployed Via User Pays

Unemployed people and job seekers are targets for national police clearances for every job, no matter that the work is not particularly sensitive. It is like their penchant, in America, for declaring every document in the government top secret, better safe than sorry, and we can profit from it via user pays. Online employment services try and upsell you to extract a fee for their services. Why derive income from just employers when you can milk the cow from both ends? Make the unemployed pay too. Verification is another corporate money spinner targeting the unemployed through Seek, same MO as the national police check. Overkill by charging lots of unnecessary fees to the job seeker has never made these companies less profitable. It is all about profitability in the era of the shareholder is king. Consumers and workers come a long way second in the estimation of boards and CEOs.

User Pays Through The Nose To Enrich The Billionaires

To get a job you must jump over these hurdles and pay for the privilege of doing so. Will it really make us all more safe, I doubt it, because if you really want to defraud these cursory checks it is easy to do so, by the evidence we see at large. 99.9% of those paying all these fees and charges to corporate Australia and the multinationals are clean skins without criminal records. It is a revenue raising practice in all but name. Police checks: how ‘user pays’ fleeces us all.

American Multinational Does Not Pay Its Share Of Tax

“News Corp, the owner of most of our capital city newspapers, could start by paying corporate tax for the first time in a decade if they really wanted to back Australia. Appealing only to the dumbest Aussies, who have no idea who owns what, News Corp is an American company. Hypocritical News Corp call for us to back Australia. The provincial backward looking campaign is but a smokescreen for an advertising feature. Legacy media is on its last legs and the world has rapidly moved on from newspapers and free to air TV. These ad revenue dependent business models are very last century.”

• (https://www.golfdom.com.au/hypocritical-news-corp-call-for-us-to-back-australia/)

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of  What Price Life?; The Stoic Golfer; Money Matters and America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.

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