The unemployed will be ordered to do periods of compulsory full-time work in the community or be stripped of their benefits under controversial American-style plans to slash the number of people without jobs.
The proposals, in a white paper on welfare reform to be unveiled this week, are part of a radical government agenda aimed at cutting the £190bn-a-year welfare bill and breaking what the coalition now calls the “habit of worklessness”.
The measures will be announced to parliament by the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, as part of what he will describe as a new “contract” with the 1.4 million people on jobseekers’ allowance. The government’s side of the bargain will be the promise of a new “universal credit”, to replace all existing benefits, that will ensure it always pays to work rather than stay on welfare.
And if that’s not reactionary enough…
The Department for Work and Pensions plans to contract private providers to organise the placements with charities, voluntary organisations and companies.
Just let the private sector loose on those proposals.
Where to start? Firstly, Labour should take a helluva responsibility for this, they started this hideous Frankenstein monster of welfare reform (thank-you James Purnell….) no wonder they are kinda quiet on this. The ConDems are just taking it to another turbo-charged level.
Secondly, will there be rights of appeal when stripped of benefits? Will there be procedures in place for claimants to do this? We will have to wait and see. But these are scary times.
Interestingly, the ConDems and neither did New Labour look and take notice at this research by the DWP on reviewing Workfare schemes globally in 2008. The conclusions were that…
Workfare doesn’t work!
The research found that workfare doesn’t improve job prospects rather it can limit the chances of employment by failing to provide skills training and also time available to find work. And because of the compulsory nature of workfare, people drop-out of welfare and therefore as it acts as a deterrent it is harder to measure the tangible outcomes of welfare.
Finally, workfare can make life so much worse for people, for example, who have disabilities or are lone parents who have problems with meeting the demands placed on them to will ultimately receive penalties and sanctions that could lead to a complete withdrawal of benefits.
Additional research claims that the tough sanctions regime underpinning WfD (Work for the Dole) and other Australian labour market programmes may have a detrimental effect on labour market prospects. In 2000/01 alone, a total of 350,000 penalties were imposed that ‘counterproductively diminishe[d] many jobseekers prospects of finding employment’, with the burden falling disproportionately on young people and indigenous Australians.
What would be better for ordinary people facing unemployment is proper paid work within reasonable travelling time and with proper child care and training. A housebuilding programme, a energy saving programme, free universal childcare are things that ordinary people need doing. They could provide an enormous number of jobs.
All workfare ideas spring from right-wing theories that the reason people are unemployed is that it is too cushy. Workfare is about bullying people, stigmatising, vilifying and scapegoating the poor for the economic woes of society. It would not do of course to look into the role of the rich and powerful or the organisation of the economy in creating economic problems. Better to find groups who are relatively powerless: yes pick on the weak and hope that you are never faced with physical or mental disability or left with children and no way to earn a living.
And just a final final, why the hell aren’t the TUC condemning this outright because Workfare is an ideological attack on pay and conditions, ultimately workers’ rights by driving down wages overall something which the TUC should be organising around now!
What next ….Serco run workhouses?
Update: See as well post by Andrew Coates here.
[...] http://harpymarx.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/workfare-creeps-in/ [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave Edwards and Moonbootica, HarpyMarx. HarpyMarx said: Blogged: Workfare creeps in…. http://harpymarx.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/workfare-creeps-in/ [...]
I have read quite a lot on workfare introduced as you know by Bill Clinton to remove the ethos of entitlement to welfare. I have also read an excellent thesis by a Professor at Princeton on European schemes and comparing those to the US.
I think you will find that the general public will be in agreement to the scheme. One only has to listen to tradesmen who come to my home who complain about their neighbours refusing to work and having no need to because the State provides. It is rather alarming and understandable when they work hard to pay their taxes to support those who will not work.
In my area the local economy would collapse without migrant labour. The jobs once done by local people who prefer not to work. A reminder too that JSA and the New Deal were a form of workfare and similar systems operate throughout Europe. They may dress up the name of the scheme but they exist.
I do not think making the unemployed contribute to their community by participating in activities on behalf of the community amounts to bullying or scapegoating. In fact I would consider that doing such things would be better for the individual and provide them with opportunities. At one time unemployed people would turn out with those employed to undertake projects such as clearing river banks, tidying up graveyards etc etc. Now they don’t – it is only the employed and retired that do this. We as a society should hang our heads in shame in allowing this welfare dependency to develop as it diminishes self respect and personal responsibility. Shameful.
If there is work that needs to be done, why not employ those denied paid work to do that work for a wage? If you make people work for their benefits what difference there is between workfare like that and a sentence of community service as meted out to some petty criminal as a punishment by a magistrate?
You appear to have no idea what you’re talking about Jane.
Everybody who signs on and receives Jobseeker’s Allowance HAS to accept ANY referral for work given to them by their local Jobcentre. They also have to provide documentary and other verifiable evidence that show that they have been “actively seeking work” themselves. If they refuse to apply for a position, or refuse an invitation for an interview for a position, or throw an interview for a position, or turn down ANY offer of work from ANY employer without good reason they get “sanctioned” immediately and stripped of their benefits for up to six months.
Nobody is unemployed by choice.
Nobody can pick or choose to work, or not to work, or what kind of work they are willing to do after 13 weeks of unemployment.
Personally I’m not really looking forward to seeing frail unemployed girls and women made redundant from their clerical positions forced to pick up litter or remove graffiti from walls or similar amongst gangs of burly swearing youths and men. Anybody that believes that a sentence of twenty eight days hard labour help given to someone with umpteen GCSEs, A levels, degrees and professional qualifications, who has been excluded from work due to their age or indifferent health or whatever, will help that person get back into gainful employment must be insane.
The whole point of workfare isn’t to help workfare participants “get back into work” but to appease ignorant people like you, Jane, who feel better about paying their taxes if they see unemployed citizens punished for finding themselves in a situation that is completely and utterly beyond their control.
how do these crypto Tories get onto these progressive blogs?
Of course there are some ‘malingers, etc, just as there are many tax dodgers, corporate or otherwise, but even the DWP notes that such benefit fraud is minimal. It’s also not surprising that the ‘public mood’ is against welfare at present (though wait untill unemployment rises) as N/L and its cronies in the media have leaked and published hundreds of stories about fraudsters, etc and we have witnessed Eastern Bloc style adverts on buses which have sought to conflate all claimants with the small amount who defraud the sytem.
it may soothe your puritanical and victorian desires, but as Harpy notes, workfare doesn’t even work
As someone who works in the welfare rights field I can pretty well assure Jane that workfare will degenerate into scapegoating of the poor. I would also bet good money that the insight of the tradesmen she meets would prove quite shallow once you asked about their understanding of their neighbours circumstances…many people complain about the person on their estate who “has nothing wrong with them” but gets “all the benefits going”. It is not really a cool appraisal of the facts but a socially acceptable way of blaming someone for the difficulties of the economy and the failings (real or perceived) of the benefits system.
In fact many of the weakest in society will be further punished for the crime of being at the bottom of the social pecking order. For instance the ATOS system of medically assessing people with serious health problems and disabilities turns these people off Employment & Support Allowance unto Jobseekers Allowance. These are the people who will be the long term unemployed who will find it extremely difficult if not impossible to comply with the workfare regime. These are the people who will get squashed: not the scroungers who will, by virtue of being largely imaginary, get away with it yet again;-)
Frankly the Janes of this world deserve to lose their job and be made to suffer workfare personally to see what it’s like.
“why the hell aren’t the TUC condemning this outright because Workfare is an ideological attack on pay and conditions, ultimately workers’ rights by driving down wages “
Mass immigration is an attack on pay and conditions which drives down wages, but the TUC are all in favour – so at least they’re being consistent. As Marx said “The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”
Jim – what’s all this about “frail unemployed girls and women made redundant from their clerical positions forced to pick up litter or remove graffiti from walls or similar amongst gangs of burly swearing youths and men” – are you suggesting there are some jobs better suited to males and some better suited to females? Maybe someone will write an up to date ‘Testimony of Patience Kershaw’ about the graffiti-removal squad.
“I try to be respectable, but sir, the shame, God save my soul.
I work with naked, sweating men who curse and swear and hew the coal.
The sights, the sounds, the smells, kind Sir, not even God could know my pain.
I say my prayers, but what’s the use? Tomorrow will be just the same.”
Surely males and females are exactly the same, with the only differences being those conditioned into us by patriarchal capitalism?
As a crusty born-again reactionary I’m allowed to think like that, and even concede that you may have a point – but you aren’t !
Don’t be silly Laban. I all for girls and women doing any kind of job THEY WANT TO DO but I am against forcing girls and women into manual jobs and into rough company AGAINST THEIR WILL. If women want to be combatant soldiers good luck to them but I wouldn’t want my girlfriend driven against her will, under threat of destitution or worse, into a chain-gang peopled by hordes of crude, foul-mouthed yobs who spend their day menacing her and teasing and insulting her with sexual innuendo while swearing continually like troopers. Nobody should be FORCED into any environment that places them at hazard of that they find personally intolerable.
Are YOU saying girls and women SHOULD be forced to do hard manual work against their will in the company of people that unsettle and upset them?
It’s not just girls and women, but disabled people who are passed as ‘fit for work’ by the miracle workers of Atos. We are going to be a magnet for bullies.
This is no different to the current requirement on Flexible New Deal?
“a chain-gang peopled by hordes of crude, foul-mouthed yobs who spend their day menacing her and teasing and insulting her with sexual innuendo while swearing continually like troopers”
And how did they get that way, eh – only 2/3 generations from the men of 1945?
As Norman Dennis put it : “No loss of reputation has been swifter or steeper on the left than that of the working-class male: from heroic proletarian father to unspeakable abusive beast in one generation.”
A truly ridiculous and puerile response worthy of any self-respecting right-wing tabloid reading nutcase. Fancy quoting from Norman Dennis! You remind me of the American Evangelist justifying capital punishment in Texas because the Old Testament advised taking “an eye for an eye” (Exodus 21:24) who then went out for a sumptuous lobster dinner ignoring another Biblical command forbidding the righteous from consumption of crustaceans! (Leviticus 11:1). A truly hopeless example of someone grasping at straws but funny too as per its obvious desperation to defend the indefensible.
Anybody that has had any dealings with men doing manual labour, e.g., masons on building sites, knows that they adhere to certain standards of behaviour that would be beyond the pale in an office or other situation in which there is a mixture of the sexes. They haven’t “become” like that they have “always” been like that! In my opinion it is entirely wrong to force ladies and girls into an environment like that against their will. The reason petty criminals are given sentences of community service like this is because the experience so brutally, grinding awful it acts as a powerful disincentive expressly designed to discourage recidivist behaviour in wrongdoers.
Unemployment is a tragedy not a crime which merits punishment least of all from victims recruited from unemployed girls and women or the sick, disabled and disadvantaged.
Whoops! It’s not a “punishment” at all is it?
It’s “compulsory voluntary work” isn’t it?!
Ridiculous and utterly pointless.
I wonder what the Coalition is going to say when, at the time of the next election, unemployment is still pushing two and a half to three million? The Work Programme will then have been running for about four years, many hundreds of thousands of people will have been driven from their homes, sanctioned, done workfare (some of them many times), have been made sick, sicker, mentally or physically ill and so on and so forth in a society that has become colder and more casually cruel by orders of magnitude.
Will the Coalition STILL be brazen and dishonest enough to continue blaming the unemployed for their plight when black propaganda like that has been proven to be a lie?
My prediction is that the Coalition will inevitably end up loathed and despised even more that John Major’s administration, which was universally hated and stank in like meat rotting on the bone.
Forgot to say – I do agree with Tim. Outsourcing welfare is like outsourcing prisons or justice – the state abdicating its reponsibilities.
Under the previous Tory government we had Youth Training Scheme, Youth Opportunity Programme and Training for Work. Under each of these someone who had been unemployed for 6 months or more would be given some training and a work placement (sometimes the work placement provided the training). The idea was they would gain skills and develop the habit of getting up each day to go to work, maybe their work placement would develop into a job or they would get the contacts they needed to get get another job.
Did this help get people back to work? No! In most cases it didn’t. Sure there were a few exceptions but in the vast majority of cases they went back on the dole for another 6 months until they qualified for another round of YTS/YOP/TfW.
What happened is the employers, rather than taking people on as employees, would take on a ‘Trainee’ for the period of the placement (typically 1 to 6 months) and the end of which they would drop the exiting ‘Trainee’ and pick up the next one from the pipeline. This only ended when the job market picked up in the late 90s and the pipeline dried up.
The key difference between these past programmes and the new ‘Workfare’ programme is that this new programme doesn’t seem to offer any training and under the old programme claimants were entitled to travel expenses and an extra £10 a week benefit.
Whatever you are, Laban, you are no gentleman.
What I find hysterically funny is that the people that are seeking to impose workfare and sanctions on the unemployed are all pretty much scumbuckets themselves. For example, if you make a false application for a job by exaggerating your qualifications and experience or whatever, you can summarily be stripped of you Jobseeker’s Allowance. And yet Iain Duncan Smith, the “quiet man” behind these “reforms”, “bigged” up his own CV quite shamelessly according to a Newsnight investigation…
‘Aspects of Iain Duncan Smith’s CV, relating to his education, are inaccurate and misleading, an investigation by BBC Newsnight reveals. The investigation into the Conservative Party leader’s education and early career – broadcast at 10.30pm on BBC TWO last night (Wednesday 18 December 2002) – was presented by Michael Crick, author of the best-selling biography of Jeffrey Archer.
The University of Perugia
Iain Duncan Smith’s biography on the Conservative Party website, his entry in Who’s Who, and various other places, state that he went to the Universita di Perugia in Italy. This is not true: his office now admit that he went to the Universita per Stranieri, which is also in Perugia.
The Universita per Stranieri – or University for Foreigners – was founded in 1921 and is a totally separate institution to the medieval Universita di Perugia, founded by the Pope in 1308.
Although the Universita per Stranieri is a respected language school, it did not grant degrees when he studied there in 1973, although some students attained diplomas.
Mr Duncan Smith’s office has now admitted to Newsnight that he didn’t get any qualifications in Perugia or even finish his exams.
Dunchurch College of Management
The first line of Iain Duncan Smith’s biography, on the Conservative Party website, claims he was “educated at Dunchurch College of Management”.
In fact, Dunchurch was the former staff college for GEC Marconi, for whom he worked in the 1980s.
Mr Duncan Smith’s office has now confirmed to Newsnight that he did not get any qualifications there either, but that he completed six separate courses lasting a few days each, adding up to about a month in total.
Newsnight has now spoken to 19 former tutors at Dunchurch. Most agree it is over-emphasising his experience at Dunchurch to describe it in the way he does.
John Garside, a former Dunchurch tutor, says: “I’m puzzled, flattered, but puzzled. What we did was offer short courses… it was not a continuous form of education by any means.” ‘
This material comes from the BBC.
Here’s a link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/12_december/19/newsnight_ids_cv.shtml
You have to laugh don’t you?
Existing schemes, like the Flexible New Deal, already require people to do ‘work placements’. I did one this year at a local psychiatric hospital. I got my dole, a luncheon voucher, and had to save every bus ticket to get the fares back at the end of the week (at around £17 a big sum to advance out of the £64 benefit).
I made it plain I did not want to do this for my dole – making a data base out of their material and my own research of services (charity as well as public) for the elderly with psychiatric problems. It is simply not right that we are used to do things which are plainly jobs without proper pay.
This however is forced manual labour as an explicit punishment.
It is being compared to community service because that is what it is (and believe me I know people who have had community sentences and they do exactly this kind of thing).
Meanwhile Ken Livingstone has passed to the side of reaction:
http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/ken-livingstone-back-forced-labour/
Total agree Andrew. And totally angry about it as well, vilifying and stigmatising people… Workfare will continue this demonisation. Yeah, absolutely about the Flexible New Deal and thank-you-very-much James Purnell!!
Ken Livingstone …. what a f-cking joker!
I was wondering if it’s possible to make legal challenges to workfare. For example, under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 or in Europe (ECHR.) Are there any pro bono welfare lawyers out there?
The New Deal failed.
The Work Programme will fail.
All schemes like those mentioned above are bound to fail while the number of job-seekers far outstrips the number of available worthwhile jobs in the economy. I define a “worthwhile job” as paid work with a high enough salary or a high enough hourly rate, with enough hours, to enable an adult to support himself/herself in a state of reasonable comfort and security. Part-time temporary minimum wage low-skilled menial jobs are NOT “good jobs”.
Whenever we hear about the 300,000 – 500,000 vacancies that supposedly exist in the economy the powers that be insinuate that not only is each and ever one of these positions a “good job” but reserved for a member of the millions unemployed to take if only they were willing. The truth of the matter is somewhat different. Most of these vacancies are poorly paid and part-time and in any case are destined to be snapped up by young, fit and active people who are already in work and moving from one job to another for whatever reason. The unemployed especially the younger, older or sicker members of the unemployed, will almost always be passed over by employers who, for obvious reasons, favour currently working applicants.
Bluntly the truth of the matter is this: While a government can force unemployed, sick and disabled people to apply for every job that’s going in a capitalist society no government can force a public or private employer to take them on and employ them.
This is why the New Deal failed and why the Work Programme will also crash and burn even though the unemployed, sick and disabled look set to be brutalised, impoverished, bullied and starved. Ultimately, even threatening them with summary execution wouldn’t be able to drive these unlucky people into work because the decision as to whether they work or not lies with their prospective employers and not with them personally.
How is it when it’s reckoned there are on average 70 applicants for every job right now that you can think people who can’t be bothered to apply for jobs are having any affect at all on the economy. They’re not all they’re doing is making it easier for other people to find and maintain work.
Also because the private sector will challenge this in court (landscapers who currently rely on council contracts etc) this can only end one of two ways, the scheme is scrapped or minimum wage is scrapped.
If you do not work at least you know that your work has not got a net negative impact on society and the environment as a whole. People don’t consider that but some jobs we pay for people to do we would gladly instead pay people not to have if we had the opportunity.
For example a pound in everybody’s banks charges a month might pay the telemarketers to annoy you every so often and maybe sell you a bad financial deal once or twice costing you even more. But 20p a month pays them to live on benefits. Money well spent IMO.