Tagged with Workfare

Workfare: London Bridge is the tip of the iceberg

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 benefits if you refuse) or inducements that turn out to be imaginary (unpaid work will improve their CV or lead to a real job with the same employer). Or the welfare-to-work privateers (G4S, Serco, A4E) provide ‘work experience’ in their own offices, while the High Street supermarkets take on unemployed people as unpaid temporary workers. Even hospital trusts take on jobless people to do ‘general tidying’ or ‘assisting with feeding patients’. Continue reading →

Now we know what unpaid work experience really means

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 at all, in order to act as stewards for the jubilee pageant. Dropped at London Bridge at 3am, they were told to ‘camp’ there on top of the concrete, change into cellophame macks and combat trousers in the open air, woken at 5.30am, and then did a 16-hour shift, with just a sandwich and bag of crisps, and no access to useable toilets for 24 hours. Continue reading →

Better to be a banker than on workfare if you do something wrong

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 public pressure). If you’re a banker and you’re guilty of large-scale mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI), you have your bonus reduced by 25-40% – not quite the same existential penalty when your bonus was £1.45m. Continue reading →

Workfare climbdown hasn’t stopped the Tories penalising the young jobless

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 most revealing about yesterday’s government backdown is:

(1) that it was strongly resisted by the relevant government ministers, Duncan Smith and Grayling;

(2) that the employers didn’t reject work experience under such conditions because it was exploitative, but because it harmed their own reputation to be seen administering such a scheme. Continue reading →