Confused re attitude to benefits and work experience

Onehandflapping, what are these massive overheads? I used to work for a supermarket after school when I was 16. The training was on how to use an appropriate fire extinguisher and how to evacuate customers in an emergency. The training lasted about an hour and a half. What is this incredibly expensive training that people now need in order to stack shelves and operate a till?

Debsbear, are you be prepared to be one of the people who works for a small business in return for benefits?

They are being "paid" with the JSA they have already paid for by National Insurance.
Which is the insurance you pay against unemployment and ill health.

The answer is quite simple. The standard of living in the UK is too high to be sustainable without using cheap labour from abroad. It has become acceptable to pay peanuts to those in other countries while expecting to live beyond our means. People calling for a "living wage" fail to realise that this would mean the cost of sustaining our comfortable lifestyles would rise meaning that the "living wage" would need to rise again. Over the past 40 years our standards of living have risen ridiculously. ANyone equating shelf filling with slave labour has obviously no idea of what slave labour means. I don't think we should be forcing people to work for their benefits for large corporations but would have no problem with making work for small businesses and charities. It is also misleading to say that they are working for nothing, as at the moment they are being paid for doing nothing. Also, if you take into account all the benefits many of them are recieving, such as housing benefit etc they would be getting a better wage than many others

I see no reason why people on JSA should not be expected to do something to improve their employability. They are financially in a better position than all those graduates doing internships for nothing at all, who are usually expected to sponge off parents.

Some provision would need to be made for those with childcare responsibilities, but otherwise YANBU.

Tesco were doing a public service IMO, and so what if there was a little bit in it for them? I can't imagine it was much. The management and training overhead must have been immense.

Do you suggest everyone in the country has a husband at home who can do the school run?

What do you suggest for people who have employers who don't let them work from home?

Nowthenwreck.

I completely agree that housing is to blame for the majority of this situation. When my sister bought her first house in 1981 she paid 18,000 which was 2.5 times her husband's salary (hers wasn't allowed to be counted in case she had a baby). When we bought a similar first house 20 years later it cost 5 times our joint salary.

The house didn't change, our money didn't change, just the amount that the mortgage companies allowed us to borrow became the default cost of housing.

This is even more acute in the social housing sector which has, to all intents and purposes, been privatised. When we had real social housing, owned and run by councils, tenant paid nominal/token rents.

When the council houses were sold off the need for social housing still existed, and instead was paid for in the form of housing benefit paid directly to private landlords at commercial rates. As house prices and rents have increased it has become an upwardly vicious circle with ever increasing rents causing an ever increasing housing bill, and ever increasing margins for landlords without a penny of it ever being seen by the dole scrounging wastrels you think are spending our taxes

"Why shouldn't you work just so that you are not dependant on strangers (like me) to pay for your upkeep?"

I only claim Child Benefit. I don't claim JSA as I am not looking for a FT job and I make enough working from home and around my 3 children who are at school.

As for Tesco, they were able to make billions without free labour. Why should they benefit from a tax-payer subsidised lower wage bill when there are lots of other business and workplaces who are feeling the pinch and could probably offer more relevant work experience. (Not everyone wants to work in retail)

Catontheroof, do you have private medical care and do your children go to private school?

OP, you are saying that you think workfare would be a good thing if people were paid a wage. Yes, nobody is arguing that it wouldn't be a brilliant thing if Tesco etc created thousands of new jobs and gave them to unemployed people.

You think that everyone who is fit and is not caring for somebody else should get a job. Yes, that is the current system. People who are fit and well and are not caring for somebody else have to look for a job if they are claiming JSA.

So what is it that you think you are actually arguing against? Who is proposing otherwise?

Why shouldn't you work just so that you are not dependant on strangers (like me) to pay for your upkeep?

i agree. YANBU.

I also would like to know who looks after your children when you are doing this 4 hour commute OP.

So OP, what do you think of the plan to make terminally ill people work??

What if there is only one parent. They must work? And what if they have no childcare? What if their wages don't cover their childcare?

It's all very well stating a 'what's in it for me' attitude but really, what is that family going to eat? How is that family going to pay it's bills?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
That is all.

Coming at this from the other end, so to speak, if housing costs had not been allowed to get so insanely high, and employers paid employees proper salaries that one could actually live on, then 5 and a half million WORKING people in the UK would not have to claim Tax Credits.

The vast minority of people "on benefits" are unemployed, but the cost of living has far outstripped wages.
Essentially, for years governments have been subsidising business by topping up the salaries they should have been paying.

Working FT I would make around 20 K. Say I live in the South East.

12 k of that is rent.(conservative estimate) 2 K travel costs. 2 k childcare costs. 3 k bills.

That would leave me and my child less than £20 a week to buy food and clothes, not to mention school dinners, school trips etc etc etc.
Add Child benefit to that and it is still under £40 a week.

I know that many on benefits are working but I do not think that most are working full time. Why shouldnt' they work FT?

Not all jobs are offered full time.

Noone is suggesting that Tesco shouldn't make billions for their shareholders, just that they shouldn't be aided in this by giving them access to free labour instead of employing actual real life people on a living wage.

what's not morally defensible? That people can't work because of their children?

Since you mention your own circumstances, who looks after your children during this long commute and working day?

And yes, had the companies paid standard wage that would have been acceptable BECAUSE THAT WOULD HAVE MADE THEM JOBS! Not work experience

Also, work experience should be relevant and beneficial not a punishment - which is what the workfare felt like.

There is a problem with a lack of the 'soft skills' - getting up every morning, turning up somewhere, doing as your told, having a 'job' to do and just getting on a doing it...

But this is a problem for everyone who is long term unemployed because it's such a fucking soul destroying state of affairs.

Forcing them out of the door to go and stack shelves in Tesco is not the way to address this. Many people who are long term unemployed suffer from depression or at least experience some of the feelings and symptoms of depression.

I think that encouraging and enabling people to find worthwhile voluntary work in the community would also provide these skills, would give them experience in an area they might like to work in and might lead to work. I personally think that this would be a far better idea.

I wouldn't be affected by the workfare scheme and yet the thought of it made me feel quite anxious. That's enough to tell me that that particular scheme was wrong.