Workfare and the Loss of Self

Workfare is a terrible, inhumane policy thought up by a government that specialises in terrible, inhumane policies. As I’ve said before it is a truly awful time to be unfortunate and vulnerable enough to rely on the state. Not only are the benefits that allow you to survive being seriously eroded but you are treated like lying, cheating scum. Workfare is one such manifestation of this. And then there’s the ridiculous (I’d laugh if I could stop gnashing my teeth in anger) situation the government now finds itself in of Workfare having been declared illegal, but they’re going to retro-actively change the law.

Let’s have a quick re-cap of the case against Workfare.

If you are on the dole for nine months they can pack you off to a work programme. This may or may not involve you working for a company for free. They will tell you that you are doing it in exchange for benefits, but the companies are getting free (or slave) labour. Often you will be doing a job for free next to someone who gets paid for it. Imagine how that much feel for both of you. The unemployed person is being told they’re not worth the same as someone else doing exactly the same thing, and the employed person is being told their job is so worthless they can get someone else to do it for free. You may be told its work experience. It won’t be. They won’t listen to you and place you somewhere worthwhile or that may help you with your long time career aspirations and goals. They will place you with someone who has a cosy little partnership with the DWP. It also is taking jobs away from your fellow job seekers. Why would a company hire someone and pay them when the dole bunnies will do it for free? Many promises of permanent, paid employment at the end of the placement are just guff.

So, Workfare is damaging and dehumanising. Companies and the DWP are exploiting vulnerable people. What could make this worse? How about if charities were doing it? Yes, charities are using people on Workfare placements. The very organisations that claim to be helping the vulnerable in society are taking advantage of those same people, and, just because someone is a volunteer, don’t think they can’t be undermined. The message is clear; why would you want to do this because you think it is right? These fools are being forced into it. They could also, once again, be taking away hours that people rely on for social contact or to keep themselves busy in retirement or work towards a career in a specific field. I expect private companies to be prepared to do anything to make a buck, but charities? I honestly expected better.

There’s been calls for boycotts of companies using Workfare, and charities have been no exception. Frankly I think any organisation that takes advantage of people in such a way should be stripped of their charitable status. But much of this I already thought before. Then I came across this piece by Sarah Ditum expressing her regret that the Salvation Army, a charity close to her heart, were using Workfare.

I was disappointed as well. The Salvation Army are a charity that work with the poorest and most desperate people in society. I can imagine few poorer or more desperate than those on the dole, especially those who have been on the dole for so long they’ve been shipped off to a Workfare programme. It sounds like a sick joke. Ditum notes that the YMCA have similarly let the side down.

Then she made a very interesting point, and one I hadn’t considered before. The Salvation Army are an overtly religious charity. What happens when someone who, for example, is a hard line atheist and disagrees with any kind of organised religion, is asked to work for them for free? This could go for a number of charities. Suspicious of Oxfam’s practices in the UK and abroad? Tough. Can’t stand Help for Heroes rhetoric or over-simplification of complex issues? Don’t care. Disagree with the NSPCC’s  emotional blackmail in their adverts? None of our concern.

Of course, this could go for private companies as well. Someone who holds deep anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation beliefs would be loathed to be forced to work for Walmart partner, ASDA. Would an anti-sweathshop campaigner feel comfortable working in Primark? The examples can go into the thousands. No company is perfect and no charity has a cause that everyone can get behind.

Resistance, however, is pointless. Refuse and they will stop your benefits. Not only have they taken your freedom and dignity by forcing you to work for free but they’ve taken away your right as a human being to express your thoughts and views. The DWP is successfully dehumanising the unemployed, and this, although an issue burning for a long time, is just another reason to boycott Workfare.

Attack of the 50 Stone Benefit Claimant

Yesterday a particularly nasty suggestion from Westminster Council emerged into the public realm. Obese and ‘other unhealthy people’ will have their benefits docked if they don’t do as they’re told and get some exercise. There was also the suggestion of using ‘smart cards’ to track to progess of these fatties, a la Alec Shelbrooke’s insulting suggestions just before Christmas.

There are so many levels of wrong to this at first I thought it was a joke. Using cards to track people’s movements is a very, very suspicious move and an extremely slippery slope. As is telling people how to behave or no money to live on for you. Then there’s the issue of gyms. Gyms (and making chubby benefit claimants join them) are expensive. I Googled gyms in my area (not the wealthiest part of the UK by any means) and the cheapest private ones were about £24 a month. The council ones were between £19 and £23 a month. That is a lot of money for someone on the lowest rate of JSA (£52 a week). It’s unfeasible.

The astute among you will note that gyms aren’t the only form of exercise, and I agree with you. In fact I’d far rather go for a walk or a swim than run on a treadmill for thirty minutes. Except that gyms are very easy to track people in (I assume you just swipe your smart card at the entrance) so obviously if you’re main goal is keeping an eye on those disobedient chubsters gyms are the way to go. Otherwise we're just left with the option of trusting that people who say they walk the dog for twenty minutes every day are actually doing it. Trusting people on benefits to be in charge of their own lives? We can’t have that.

And it’s just rude. Singling someone out because of their size is unacceptable. I don’t care if ‘fat people cost the NHS money’. So to athletes, but I would never tell someone they had to stop playing football in case they got injured and spent my precious taxes on nurses and bandages. And as for those selfish fuckers who require care in hospitals for their offspring…words cannot express how angry I am at them. Don’t get me started on that dumbfuck who crashed his car and now needs a pot on his leg. No. The NHS cannot work like that, otherwise it’ll just turn into one arbitrary list of people who are banned from their GPs for various pointless reasons. I assume that the rather ominous 'other unhealthy people' phrase from the report I linked too means they will soon come for anyone who doesn't conduct themselves in the meticulously described manner laid down by their all powerful masters at the Job Centre.

Also, I fail to see what it is to do with the council or the government how wide someone’s arse is. With the exception of about 0.00000001% of cases a person being obese will not affect their ability to work in most jobs. I used to work in a warehouse. Three of the four of us on my Saturday shift were classed as overweight and yet we still managed a physically demanding job just fine. So why allow it to cut into employment benefits like JSA or tax credits?

So, having established that this is an unworkable idea, deeply insulting and just plain impolite, why have they been allowed to suggest it? Simple. Fat people aren’t people and people on benefits aren’t people so fat people on benefits are some kind of horrific, sub-human scum. At least that’s the image this proposal gives out. Like those ridiculous limits on what people on benefits can buy this is infantilising and patronising. It denies people control over their finances, their homes and, the absolute worst, their own bodies.

It’s very telling that this latest assault is aimed only at those outrageous enough to claim benefits. Fat people are attacked every day of the week but this proposal is particularly interesting. If being fat is unhealthy (as these proposals state) then why aren’t they putting in measures for people who are working and carting around a few extra pounds? I’m honestly surprised no one has suggested docking wages for overweight people in employment.    

I thought we were meant to be moving beyond the ‘Nanny State’? It doesn’t get much more Nanny state than punishing us for eating too many sweets. This proposal is utterly ridiculous and I hope to God, for the sake of the rights we should hold over our own bodies and the right to maintain dignity while relying on the welfare state, it gets dissolved in acid. If I ever meet the people who drafted it they will feel all of my fat bird wrath. I could knock these weasly fascists out with one tit.

Ghost Nation

When I was younger I had far better taste in music than I do now. This is because until I was about thirteen I didn’t really buy my own music, I just listened to my Dad’s. The thought has never even crossed his mind, but he is one of the coolest people I know. As he ferried me and my brother around the scabby fringes of West Yorkshire we would listen to his music. I have fond memories of Led Zeppelin, The Jam, The Clash, The Ramones and Steely Dan blaring away on the stereo in his car. One of the songs I remember most clearly (probably because it is objectively brilliant and still gets played at clubs and house parties) is Ghost Town by The Specials.

A few days ago the song came on while my music was on random. I must have been in a pretty reflective mood because suddenly I realised every one of the words being sung to me could describe the UK at this moment. The second verse rang particularly true;

This town’s becoming like a ghost town

Why must the youth fight against themselves?

Government leaving the youth on the shelf

This place is coming like a ghost town

No jobs to be found in this country

Can’t go on no more

The people getting angry

The song was released in 1981 during a time of turbulence and uncertainty in Britain. There were riots, rising unemployment and during the rest of the 1980s things would only get worse as Thatcher dismantled the unions, proved decisively that the Conservatives didn’t care about ordinary British working people and undermined British society so not people and their rights but profits and monetary value were considered the single most important thing of all.

The bleak story told in Ghost Town was of a town fallen prey to urban decay, unemployment and violence. Now, as I face 2013, I see the same problems destroying the lives of people around me. The government says there are jobs, but no one seems able to get them and more people are facing redundancy, pay freezes and cut hours. Inflation is pushing up food prices and yet it is perfectly fine to lecture people on how to eat and feed their kids. Education is considered so unimportant the government lets private companies run ‘academies’ that brainwash our children into a Thatcherite way of thinking. Those who depend on benefits, often the most vulnerable people in our society, are demonised and hounded by a system that it too scared to tax millionaires.

Government leaving the youth on the shelf

This is exactly how I feel. But in a way I’m one of the lucky ones. I got the opportunity to go to university like I wanted to. It left me saddled with a debt of £22,000 which I try not to think about but someone wanting to do the same thing as me now would be facing at least £30,000. I’ve not been able to pay back a penny of the money I borrowed. Neither have any of my closest friends from my undergraduate degree. This is because none of us have yet earned the £15,000 a year that requires you to start paying back. To get into the jobs we wanted when we started university (journalist, geologist, sociology lecturer, EU ambassador, engineer and petrol chemist to name a random sample) would have required us to take post graduate courses which have little or no funding available or work as an unpaid intern to gain experience. Few people can afford this.  

Again I was lucky. I used some family money that was left to me to put a deposit on a house to pay for an MA. I thought I might as well as these days it would have barely got me a cardboard box. But then I was then left unable by the almost entire absence of any money in the arts and humanities to continue to the level I wanted to. This is the doing of the current government. Personal experience suggests this to me because almost every professional at university I spoke to agreed I would have got funding for my MA as well as my PhD five years ago. I have no reason to believe they were just being nice to me.

Now to my friends who didn’t go to uni. Those who went straight to work found themselves constricted in jobs in companies who cannot afford to expand or whose only chance at promotion was to fund the training themselves. Few of them are now on more than £15,000 a year. The ones who went on to training placements, apprenticeships and NVQs found the same as those who’d gone to uni-when they finished there were no jobs for them.

The prevailing narrative is that young people should be thankful for any job that comes their way and forget any ambition they may have had or career they may have worked for. Jobs people enjoy are the preserves of the super rich and with the cutting of EMA, the rise in fees and the cuts to the education budgets this distinction will only increase. I’m pretty sure Mr Cameron has no idea how demoralising it is to find out you can’t do the job you wanted because the government has moved education and training down on the list of priorities.

The way young people are portrayed (explained more eloquently in this excellent blog post by Glosswitch) is also appalling. Apparently we have it better now than we ever have because we have mobile phones and don’t have to do national service. I would have assumed jobs and homes were more fundamental, but I’m clearly of a spoiled generation and should keep my trap shut. After all, we’re all in this together, aren’t we? Young people are feckless hooligans that need to be banned from wearing hoods and being in public spaces. They’re neglected and left with nothing to do then chastised for being angry and doing nothing. They can’t be trusted in their own homes until they are twenty-five (when they may well have kids of their own) and it’s perfectly alright to attack them and how they conduct themselves as ‘bad manners’ more than any other age group.  

The people getting angry

The riots in 2011 were painted as a load of feckless looters who were only after a new pair of trainers. But, as explained fantastically by a very clever lady on my MA who was doing her dissertation on the riots, thanks to Thatcherism materialism and extensive wealth are our modern status symbols. Those young people were trying to get the things they wanted and felt they were entitled to. Those TVs weren't just TVs, they were social standing. I am not defending the rioters and the arsonists and those who attacked the police who were just trying to do their job but the blanket condemnation is troubling and over simplifies the whole thing. Violence is not the answer but people won’t listen to the question.

They rioted in Manchester, a city I used to live in and have many friends in. Why did they riot in Manchester and not, say, Leeds or Newcastle (the other two cities I’ve lived in and know best)? Central Manchester is the preserve of the rich and ridiculous property prices are pushing ordinary people further and further out. It really is the London of the North. Disillusionment and wanting to claim back their city may have played some part in it. Again someone is probably going to accuse me of defending the actions of people who smashed up shops and set fire to buildings, but I’m not. I’m just trying to understand.

People are angry because the current government have demonstrated time and time again just how little they think of us and how little they think we are worth. People have a right to be angry and I think we need to get angrier. Our towns are left to decay, our young people are abandoned to a life of violence and unemployment and in desperation we turn on each other (immigrants and benefit cheats aren’t the problem here. Tory policy is).

The Specials were right in 1981 and they're right again in 2013, only I think, rather than Ghost Town, we’ve been left with the undermined, empty husk of a burnt out Ghost Nation.

Alec Shelbrooke; Remove Head From Sphincter, Then Suggest Policy

If you’ve been paying attention to our almighty Tory led government over the last couple of years you will no doubt have become aware that everyone on benefits is a lazy, cheating lay about who deserves nothing. As soon as they can find a way to placate those miss-guided liberals who maintain that people who rely on the welfare state have rights like anyone else, these spongers will be taken behind the chemical sheds and shot.

Well, it’s OK if that had slipped your notice because Alec Shelbrooke, MP for Elmet and Rothwell (depressingly near to me) has given us a reminder with a suggestion for a flagship policy in this hateful agenda. According to Shelbrooke people on certain benefits will be given their money on credit cards that prevent them from buying anything the government doesn’t think they should.

You’ve probably guessed where this is going. The two ‘big baddies’ of wasted welfare are mentioned. No fags and no booze for you naughty dole bunnies. You’re not allowed to gamble either. Or use ‘paid for TV channels’ (so…as I can’t find anything telling me specifically what that means, I’m assuming it’s anything that isn’t Freeview. I'm confidant that, if you're that way inclined, you will still manage to waste your life watching Freeview and fulfill another benefit recepient stereotype). As an aside I’m pretty sure if you’re locked into a contract with a company like Sky or Virgin they won’t look kindly on you cancelling it mid contract and will wallop you with fines, which you then won’t be able to pay because your only access to currency is a flimsy little plastic card that bars you from buying anything but pre-approved items.

One also can’t help but wonder how far they’d go with this. Will it be extended to banning you from buying anything but economy brand food? How about if you insist on shopping at Sainsburys? Will it frog march you down to Lidl to save the Treasury pennies? There’s also the assumption that the government (and Alec Shelbrooke in particular) know exactly what ‘essentials’ are. You might not starve to death if you don’t buy your child a birthday cake or present, but it seems unnecessarily cunty to deny them these little things because their parents had the audacity to lose their jobs.

Right, now I’ve done my nit picking we can move onto the moral objections. Chiefly among the moral objections is HOW FUCKING DARE HE?! What gives this trumped up Tory fuckwit the right to tell people how to live their lives? Treating people on benefits like idiots who don’t know what’s good for them is far more damaging than the odd snifter of booze or puff on a cigarette. It infantilises people and will only build up resentment for the government and the agencies that are trying to support them.

There is also the pretty insulting implication that people who are on benefits are utterly feckless and can’t handle being trusted with money. How would Alec Shelbrooke like it if they lost their job and, rather than being treated like a human being, they were treated like an incompetent fool that can’t be trusted not to drink themselves to death as soon as their given a lump sum in cash? Because that’s what this outrageous proposal will mean. This is the further dehumanisation and vilification of people on benefits. People who have done nothing wrong and need support. People who may be going through a very rough patch in their lives. Ideas like this, although not law, feed into misconceptions that blight the lives of millions of people. This will do no good at all.

Also has that arrogant thundercock ever considered that, when you’re at your lowest, you might need a few comforts to make you feel better? As us dole bunnies look like we’re about to lost the right to a pint down the pub with mates I suggest we be allowed to lynch clueless Tory MPs.

The Joys of Being Dole Scum

In January I booked a hotel for four nights in Whitby for me and a couple of friends to go to the Whitby goth festival. I thought this would be fine, because, when I booked it, I assumed I would be doing a PhD or between courses and therefore pretty flexible. But things didn’t quite go to plan and three very tragic things happened to me. One, I had to leave Newcastle, two I had to go on the dole and three I had to move to Wakefield.

If you’ve ever been to Wakefield I don’t need to explain which of those three was the worst. If you haven’t then good for you.

But I digress. I now am pretty solidly on the dole. As of Monday they started paying me and everything, although they took their sweet time. I’m now going to refer to a span of twenty two days as a ‘JSA Fortnight’. And, because I think it’s only fair that if you enter an agreement with someone you uphold your end of the deal I’ve been looking for jobs and signing on and not being late to appointments (harder than you’d think with the bus service near me). So I’ve maintained the moral high ground over the job centre. Go me.

Except my signing on day falls on a day I’m going to be at the seaside. It’s not a complicated procedure. You fill in a form and then come in the day after you get back and sign on and then everything goes back to normal. Except some of the things it asks you to do just seem a bit, well, dickish. For example, you have to say you are prepared to return from your holiday if you get offered an interview. If you do not say you are prepared to do this it goes to a decision maker and you could lost four weeks work of payments. For those of you who think that’s fair enough think about what that actually entails. What could possibly be your only holiday in years is cut short because some bloodthirsty capitalist can’t be bothered to reschedule. And what if you’re there with other people? Do they have to come home too? What if you can’t? What if you don’t drive or you didn’t take your car or you went with advance train tickets and don’t feel like selling your kidney for replacements?

Also I’m pretty sure most employers would be understanding and give you a couple of days grace. Yeah, I know I just called them bloodthirsty capitalists but I got caught up in the moment a bit. I apologise.

Anyway, back to that bloody form. You also have to promise that you’ll keep checking for jobs. I’m jammy. I have internet access on my phone (in theory. Previous experience suggests signal is less than reliable in Whitby) so I can check job sites etc. What if a person has no internet on their phone? They could look in a local paper I suppose, but how useful is a bar job in Brighton to someone who lives in Carlisle?    

But these are just pedantic points dreamt up by me on the bus home. My biggest bugbear is the wording and tone of the form. They kept most of it so I no longer have the juiciest examples but the attitude was that I had done something unforgiveable in asking to go on a trip that had been booked for nearly ten months and at the time of booking, as far as I knew, I would be free. It’s symptomatic of the view expressed by every oozing, self-righteous corner of this country that people on the dole (or any benefit you care to think of) are scum. We’re less than ‘normal’ people and not only do we not deserve the same rights we don’t even deserve the same courtesies.

To be on JSA in 2012 is to constantly search for jobs. It is to never go out, never spend any of the governments money on anything ‘frivolous’ (screw you wankers. I had a half hour wait for my bus and I spent dole money on a second hand paperback and a coffee. A Costa coffee. I am a terrible person). It is to understand that it’s only by the grace of the benevolent state that you don’t starve to death. Although they were so slow processing my claim if I hadn’t had caring and patient parents I would have starved to death. Twice. It is to feel constantly ashamed and like a failure and live with the reality that you are the lowest of the low. As if I didn’t feel like that already.

It’s the same sort of mind set that assumes dole bunnies are scroungers sitting on their arse all day. I know from personal experience that it’s really hard to do fuck all on the dole. Last time I was on it my old computer in its final weeks of life ate an e-mail where I applied for a job. They stopped my JSA for six weeks because I ‘failed’ (accidently I might add) to apply for one vacancy. I had applied for twenty three others in the previous four weeks. Oh, that was over Christmas as well.

So, although I think it’s perfectly acceptable to tell the job centre you’re going away, re-arrange your sign on date and, if possible, keep looking for jobs/checking on jobs applied for it is not acceptable to treat people like this. People on JSA, as the name suggests, are seeking jobs. That can be a really hard thing and if they’ve just been made redundant or something similar it can be a pretty shitty time. They need support not stigmatisation.

Disclaimer: the people who work at Wakey job centre are all really kind and helpful. It’s the system that’s bollocks, not them. As well as being insulting this form was also quite confusing so the lovely Wakey job centre people talked me through it.

P.S. This blog is not getting an introduction. Everytime I tried to write one it sounded shit so I gave up.