Long Term Jobless Face Compulsory Manual Labour

[SiHart]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11704765

Long-term benefit claimants could be forced to do manual labour under proposals to be outlined by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

He is due to outline plans for four-week placements doing jobs like gardening and litter clearing.

He said the message would be: "Play ball or it's going to be difficult."

But the Archbishop of Canterbury warned that the planned welfare changes could drive people "into a downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair".

Under the plan, claimants thought to need "experience of the habits and routines of working life" could be put on 30-hour-a-week placements.

Anyone refusing to take part or failing to turn up on time to work could have their £65 Jobseekers' Allowance stopped for at least three months.

The Work Activity scheme is said to be designed to flush out claimants who have opted for a life on benefits or are doing undeclared jobs on the side.

What do you think of the idea? Is it going to lead to Councils making more redundant because they can get cheap free labour to do some of their jobs? Will it actually incentivise the long term jobless getting back to work?

Si xx

[Lissa]

It's a policy that will play well in the Daily Mail and will force the workshy into contributing something to society but it is too blunt an instrument to be effective. I'm fine with a hardened sponger being made to pick up litter 6 hours a day, 5 days a week but I'm less fine about someone who is trying to get a job with no success (whether due to age, skills, appearence, background etc) who is suddenly forced to spend all day, every day working for next to nothing and who therefore hasn't got time to apply for jobs, prepare for interviews and put the hours in searching for work.

[Si Hunt]

Yes.

Because yes it can be abused - as Si says, by councils using the new manual workforce INSTEAD of paid workers, and when people who, perhaps, legitimately can't find work being forced out to pick up litter (and, I have to say, while I was job hunting I needed every hour to go to interviews, search the web etc. When are you supposed to job hunt if you're out every day doing manual labour?) - BUT so can every other rule. In fact, this is neccesitated by the very fact that people abuse the money given to people who can't find work by using it to live on without looking for anything better.

So I say yes, for people who are genuinely able to work and deliberately not trying to. I don't know about full-time because, as I mentioned, I don't know how they'd find jobs then, but if you are able-bodied and have been out of work for a year, why shouldn't you spend your mornings doing unpaid rigorous work, and then your afternoons searching for work? If I was a potential employer, I'd be more likely to take a chance on a long-term benefits claimant if I could see from a Government record that he'd had the discipline to turn up every day to 3 months unpaid morning work.

Si.

[Jason Thompson]

if you are able-bodied and have been out of work for a year, why shouldn't you spend your mornings doing unpaid rigorous work,

There's a word for forcing someone to do unpaid work....

This is, as Lissa said, too blunt an instrument, and tackles the problem of benefit scroungers by penalising those who actually need them. If you've been genuinely trying to find work unsuccessfully for a year, why should you be forced to do anything unpaid? If there are these jobs available to be done by unpaid labourers, why can they not be turned into real jobs with pay and taken on short term flexible contract?

And, at the risk of sounding like a screaming tabloid, once we start with this 'force the jobless into unpaid labour', when do we stop? Will successive governments shorten the time required before compelling people to do this unpaid labour in order to counter the scroungers who still got a year of undeserved benefits out of it?

If I was someone who had been trying to find work for ages and not been successful, I would be feeling miserable (as indeed I was by the time the nine months it took me to find a job after I left my first full-time job had elapsed). To then have the degrading experience of being compelled to do menial labour tasks for no remuneration would make me feel even worse.

If I was a potential employer, I'd be more likely to take a chance on a long-term benefits claimant if I could see from a Government record that he'd had the discipline to turn up every day to 3 months unpaid morning work.

If I was a potential employer I'd be far more likely to take a chance on a long term benefits claimant who undertook voluntary unpaid work rather than one who only did it because he was compelled to in order to avoid losing his benefits or worse. Also worth keeping in mind is that many employers won't take 'overqualified' applicants, or people they think are going to disappear in a few months when something better comes along, so 'interim employment' is hard to come by already.

It boils down to this: the government is proposing creating a whole bunch of jobs (menial as they are) and refusing to pay people to do them. Why is that not slavery? Do you know the prison service has been reformed so that criminals are now not allowed to be forced to do menial labour while in prison because it breaches their human rights? Why are convicted felons sitting behind bars safe in the knowledge that they cannot be forced to do things that the government is now proposing forcing law-abiding citizens to do?

Yes, there are scroungers who live on benefits because the system allows them to do so. The way to tackle that is to change the system so it is not so easy to scrounge, not to make scrounging an unattractive proposition at the same time as making those who actually need the benefits feel even more worthless than being unemployed already does.

[Lissa]

There is an easy compromise - have full time job search facilities where the long term unemployed have to go to a government funded site for 30 hours a week and look for a job. That gets them into a working routine while not stopping them from applying for jobs.

[Anthony Williams]

Is it slavery, though? The government is already giving them free money - why not make them work for it?

[Dino]

There's nothing the Coalition can do to me that New Labour haven't done before.
I've worked for my dole on 13 week placements in charity shops (Over staffed with other New Deal placements and people on community service!) so working for two weeks to get a benefit (I don't claim housing) isn't as bad to me as others would think.
And even if we stop the Coalition getting a second term, the unemployed will still be the governments bitch.
The only job lead I've got is I might be collecting people's Census next year in March... for a 37 hour job... which might give me as much as £10 an hour.
I could do £10 for 37 hours... but 37 hours is the sum total of the job?
If it was £10 for 37hours a week, I'd be laughing. But it isn't...

[WhiteCrowNZ]

I've spent small periods of time unemployed and it's totally soul destroying enough. Filling out applications, going through all kind of interview processes. Then the morning post feel as you sort through the letters you get.

You open one from that last interview, and it starts off quite hopeful, but then has the word "however" in it. I remember when I *did* get a job offer I had to read it about 3 times to check I'd not misread it.

My story is the story of most people who fall into unemployment. The system is there to allow us to stay a bit on our feet whilst we find something else, and the majority of people use it like that.

There seems to be a small proportion who do abuse the system, but get the most coverage. And they're used as an excuse for whatever for the rest. The idea of being paraded around doing community service tasks to me just makes me feel a sense of disgust - it's the idea that someone who's unemployed should be made to do community service just like someone who'd broken the law. It essentially criminalises unemployment in my view.

If someone has been long term unemployed, and not getting job offers, then they need a lot more mentoring and one-to-one help than something like this. The only problem providing real mentoring and job skills is *whoops* it costs money to run such schemes ...

[Captain Tancredi]

Looks as if the cost of applying for jobs could start getting expensive too:

Royal Mail has been given the green light to raise the cost of a first-class stamp by 5p to 46p next April.

This would be the largest increase since first-class postage began in 1968.

A second class stamp could rise by 4p, taking it to 36p, under final proposals from regulator Postcomm.

Royal Mail will decide next month whether to implement a rise of that magnitude. It currently loses 6.4p for each stamped letter it delivers.

It wouldn't take much for a determined jobseeker to be spending £5 of their benefit on postage alone, never mind envelopes and printing.

When you can get a box of perfectly acceptable cards for 99p these days, I do wonder whether this will be the last Christmas that many people post them...

[Jason Thompson]

Is it slavery, though? The government is already giving them free money - why not make them work for it?

I'm sorry, I thought that's what national insurance contributions were for, among other things. People who have been employed and have become unemployed have paid a contribution to the state to help cushion them in the event of losing their job. People who have not been able to get a job straight after leaving education have never had a chance to make those contributions, but will begin to do so (effectively paying the state back) once they are employed.

The fact is that demand for jobs exceeds supply, and getting a job is not as easy as some people seem to think. I have a degree. If I lose my job, I cannot simply apply for a job stacking shelves or working behind a bar, because many employers will not take 'overqualified' people. People abuse the system, so the rest have to suffer for it, it seems. It's like keeping the whole class in after school because one idiot flicked a bogey at the teacher. It wasn't fair then and it isn't fair now.

And I still want to hear a reasonable explanation from the government as to why this is an acceptable policy but making criminals do similar manual labour is not.

[SiHart]

They've gone from "Something has to be done" to persecution very quickly if you ask me.

Si xx

[WhiteCrowNZ]

And I still want to hear a reasonable explanation from the government as to why this is an acceptable policy but making criminals do similar manual labour is not.

Cos criminals have human rights. People on benefits obviously don't.

Actually I could see this practice challenged under EU laws.

[Andrew Curnow]

At best it's an ill-thought out idea, and at worst I have to agree with Jason that it's morally very dubious. Suddenly the benefit system, designed to help those who need it, is becoming conditional - "Play ball or it's going to be difficult." If there's a job to do, it's a job and somebody should be getting (at least) the minimum wage for it (or is that not the law now?).

What worries me is the notion of applying conditions to things that, effectively, we pay for in taxes already. Once you start down that road, I can't help but think that it's opening the floodgates - what about only treating people on the NHS if they've given up smoking, or can prove they don't eat junk food, or if they take some exercise?

[Si Hunt]

Sounds like a great idea!

Si. :mobile

[Jason Thompson]

what about only treating people on the NHS if they've given up smoking, or can prove they don't eat junk food, or if they take some exercise?

To be honest I don't see that as quite the same thing. I think there is an argument against continuing to provide medical treatment for smoking relaed illness if the person concerned doesn't take some responsibility on their own shoulders and actually stop smoking.

Where it is a valid comparison, however, is in the fact that such a policy would have to apply on a case by case basis. This employment benefits plan as presented draws no distinction between those who are scrounging and living off unfairly claimed benefits and those who have spent the time trying and failing to get work, for whatever reason (and yes, there are legitimate reasons for being out of work for a year no matter how hard you try). It is not applying where the problem actually is, whch is in the system itself allowing people to claim money for sitting at home on their backsides in the first place.

Where the system needs to be fixed is at the source. For one thing it might help if job centres were not allowed to insist people attend training courses and other apointments on particular dates (at the cost of ceasing their benefits) where such dates clash with interviews for potential jobs. I know at least two people that has happened to. It makes no sense in a system that is supposedly geared towards getting people back into work!

[Perry Vale]

Well, I've been unemployed for 2 years now, with a brief 3 month interlude doing bar work (I only found that because a friend of mine was running the bar), so yes, I find this news very depressing.

I suppose a lot will hinge on exactly who they apply this too, but the rhetoric doesn't bode well. Quite often I've gone in to the "Job"Centre to sign on with, say, three e-mail printouts of genuine jobs I've applied for (but often with many more than that), and been commended by the staff for doing so. Many staff have told me that so many claimants can't even do that, and that I am clearly doing everything I can to find work. So will these new rules apply to these other claimants (who clearly aren't trying), or will I be lumped in too?

[Darren]

It's like using a mallet to crack a nut. This could in part be influenced by the media who love to report scroungers on benefits with 8 kids but still manage to own two cars and a 40" telly.
Why not create apprenticeships via local companies; gardening, plastering etc where the jobless would work for three to six months and then be retained by the company and put on a salary if they showed commitment.
A bit better than the "work or starve" attitude.

[SiHart]

I suppose a lot will hinge on exactly who they apply this too, but the rhetoric doesn't bode well. Quite often I've gone in to the "Job"Centre to sign on with, say, three e-mail printouts of genuine jobs I've applied for (but often with many more than that), and been commended by the staff for doing so. Many staff have told me that so many claimants can't even do that, and that I am clearly doing everything I can to find work. So will these new rules apply to these other claimants (who clearly aren't trying), or will I be lumped in too?

I see quite a few unemployed people who visit the library to do some job searching. There's one, who's quite notorious with us, who gets given a target each week for the amount of jobs she should apply for. She will apply for that many and no more. She's been offered jobs and turned them down because the hours don't suit her (despite her having no dependents, no partner, living alone) and quite frankly no job is ever going to offer all the things she wants. She's been unemployed for the three and a half years I've worked here and will probably be so for a lot longer.

Si xx

[Si Hunt]

When I was out of work last year I was shocked at how little the job centre staff cared that you were trying to find work. Each time they just said "Applying on-line? Reading the papers?" and if I said yes they signed my book and let me go.

Si.

[Jason Thompson]

And therein lies a major part of the problem: the jobcentres are not set up to make sure people are actually looking for work. If you had to come in at set times and show evidence of application for jobs there would be some framework for deciding who deserved the benefits and who did not. To simply base it on how long you've been out of work and claiming benefits is absurd.

The really sad thing is that there quite evidently is this view among the population that all out of work people are indeed scroungers, and that anyone can simply get more work by applying for it. Today's Metro leters page was full of people praising this idea, and saying things like 'they'll be pleased to feel like they're doing something worthwhile', or 'why don't they just set up their own business doing things like this if they can't find anyone to employ them'. I'd guess most of those correspondents have never been out of work.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

And I still want to hear a reasonable explanation from the government as to why this is an acceptable policy but making criminals do similar manual labour is not.

Community service?

[Rob McCow]

This is all because the Tory policies are going to chuck 500,000 people out of work in the next few years. They want to cover it up, so if they force people into meaningless, humiliating jobs then the unemployment statistics won't look so bad.

Where are all these jobs going to come from? Are they going to have twenty people coming round each street to do the bin round? Will everybody in Tescos have their own personal shelf to stack? Will there be peasants employed to carry Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague around London in palanquins? It seems likely!

[Jason Thompson]

Community service?

That's still only a sentence for minor offences. Yet when we lock people away for drug dealing, murder or rape they are protected from being forced to do such manual labour. It's perverse.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

Well I'm not pretending to be an expert on human rights legislation, but I'd imagine the kind of manual-labour that is prohibited is of the breaking rocks up with a mallet variety - pointless physical labour meant specifically as a punishment. Proper, productive jobs or tasks that just happen to involve a manual element are probably a separate thing entirely.

[Jason Thompson]

Well I'm not pretending to be an expert on human rights legislation, but I'd imagine the kind of manual-labour that is prohibited is of the breaking rocks up with a mallet variety - pointless physical labour meant specifically as a punishment.

No offence, but I wasn't speaking from a position of ignorance when I made the original statement.