Tweet What is Liam Byrne playing at? There has been exasperation and annoyance that Labour MPs were instructed to abstain on last night’s DWP Commons vote. This was to retrospectively revoke workfare recipients’ right to claim compensation in light of the so-called Poundland ruling. Readers will recall IDS and his minions fell foul of an [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Workfare’
Labour supports Tory sanctions on job-seekers – but 40 fight back
Mar 19th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Tweet A few months ago two young workers at Poundland appealed to the courts against being forced to work there for no wages at all or else forfeit all their benefits. The judge in the Court of Appeal decided in their favour, but also ruled that existing back-to-work schemes, of which Poundland was just one [...]
Workfare: London Bridge is the tip of the iceberg
Jun 11th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet The more the job market shrinks, the more the government is revving up its programme to force the jobless to work for nothing. Like so much else, it started with New Labour, but the Tories have now expanded the project of payless work out of all proportion. It operates either by threats (loss of [...]
Now we know what unpaid work experience really means
Jun 8th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet The Close Protection UK (CPUK) ‘London Bridge incident’ casts a grim spotlight on the nature of the government’s Work Programme. A total of 80 persons were bussed in from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth, 50 of them ‘apprentices’ paid £2.80 an hour (when the minimum wage if £6.08 an hour) and 30 unemployed paid nothing [...]
Better to be a banker than on workfare if you do something wrong
Mar 4th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet Penalties, as the current bonus season reveals all too clearly, are still a matter of class. If you’re a young person 16-24 on a work experience programme promoted as ‘voluntary’, and you drop out even for good reason, you stood to lose two weeks’ benefit (until the government was forced to back down by [...]
Workfare climbdown hasn’t stopped the Tories penalising the young jobless
Mar 2nd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Tweet It was always absurd that a young person aged between 16-24 was forced to undergo an unpaid work placement for up to 8 weeks on the basis that it was ‘voluntary’, yet if they left for any reason they would suffer the sanction of loss of unemployment benefit for 2 weeks. But what is [...]
Tory Councillor threatens to boycott firms dropping out of workfare
Mar 1st, 2012 by Carl Packman.Tweet It was voluntary before, but now, when the game was up, Chris Grayling came along and announced that “all benefit sanctions for work experience programme are dropped”, claiming to have only listened to employers, not protesters. Bookmarks Hide Sites
Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
Feb 21st, 2012 by David Osler.Tweet One of the numerous job creation schemes of the Thatcher years was known officially as Employment Training, although the acronym was colloquially translated into ‘Extra Tenner’, because that was how much it paid on top of the dole. These days, it seems, even an additional ten quid a week is a bit much to [...]
Your country needs you to work
Nov 17th, 2010 by Michael Meacher.Tweet The endlessly repeated mantra of the Coalition that ‘everyone who can should work’ seems reasonable on the surface, other things being equal. But of course in actual practice they’re not. Most obviously the work isn’t there to do: there are less than 0.5 million vacancies, but 2.5 million unemployed, so a nationwide average of [...]
