To ask what you think about ‘work for dole’ idea?

[WakeUpAndBe]

Is it reasonable or unreasonable?

Pros: on the surface it sounds reasonable. Means the public won’t view it as “free money” if people are working 30 hours a week for a lot less than the national living wage.

Cons: risks of exploitation and returning to Charles Dickens’ style workhouses for the poor.

Chris Philp said UC claimants should be forced to ‘work for dole’

“In his paper, Philp suggested those claiming universal credit should, after a certain time, have to work for their benefits if they were employed for less than 30 hours a week. He suggested those claiming benefits for a disability should be given work that they were physically able to do.
^^
“Philp said they could be asked to complete community work such as cleaning graffiti or clearing parks, charity work, supervised job searching or recognised training to top up their hours to 30 a week. He said a referral to the “work for the dole” scheme would be triggered between three months and two years after first claiming depending on previous national insurance contributions.
^^
“If anyone is not compliant with work for the dole activity requirements, they should automatically have all their universal credit payments suspended as long as the person is not working for the dole,” he wrote at the time. “Although the complete suspension of universal credit benefit payments may seem an extreme sanction, the evidence from the US suggests that this is required to make the scheme fully effective.”

Number crunching

The National Living Wage is currently £9.50 x 30 hours x 4 weeks = £1,140 for 4 weeks

According to the website, monthly UC is £265.31 for single and under 25,
£334.91 for single over 25,
£416.45 for couples under 25
and
£525.72 for couples over 25.

@Favouritefruits it's not stupid at all, it's very clever. It will bring more money into businesses and force people off benefits or towards suicide or crime, which will in turn benefit businesses. It's made up by people with large shares in businesses and those people are not stupid.

Shit idea. If there's work to be done it should attract a wage.

If there is work to be done then that = a job.
A job = employment contract and fair hourly rate, annual leave, pension and sick pay.

Let's not backslide into a system fucking indentured servitude and workhouses, as much as many people seem to want to punish people for being on benefits.

Typo'd as it made me so angry. The above should read "a system of fucking indentured servitude and workhouses" which still isn't very good English, but you get the gist.

I think that constantly setting up Mumsnet threads to test out Tory ideas without admitting who you you are is a form of trolling. There used to be so much on Mumsnet. Now there's threads daily from some corner of the Tory policy outfit or other. Mumsnet should do something about it. Nobody is fooled anymore.

No party doing this is making any headway with their image as an honest party. Say who you are, then we can respond or not, and the threads can be put with other sponsored threads. No need to be underhand about it.

The idea is a very good one for the % of people who have never worked or been out of work for a long time. Not SAHMS but people who have been work free for their adulthood.

Having worked with a community that was stagnating and had a high% of unwaged families, I was involved in a local scheme doing this. The number of people who were scared, anxious, uncertain about whether they had anything to offer an employer; those whose levels of organisation left them incapable of timekeeping, staying on task, recognising a task, taking orders etc was ridiculous.

Our issue was that if they tried to find work they lost their benefits. So we ran a pilot to let people work 1 day a week, then 2 etc with no loss of benefits and a top up from the employer. The work had to be basic, skill building, overseen, real. We also ran literacy and numeracy courses alongside it.

The vast majority of participants managed to gain skills, got used to a daily timetable and many were offered work.

But that old stereotype reared its head and the majority of them refused job offers. Not because it was too hard, or they didn't want to get up in the morning, but because the safety net of benefits, the LA knowing who they were, all our community input would be lost to them. And that scared the living daylights out of them.

Paying for things like council tax, prescriptions, school dinners, uniforms, bus fair, all sorts of every day things added up to a goodly % of earnings and many just couldn't see the benefit or were scared that they'd get behind in payments. Or even, for some, the changes in payment dates for rent etc. That meant a payment gap, temporary arrears, that affected their LA rating.

But they all enjoyed the work experience and wanted to work! It should/could be a very useful scheme.

That's why I regularly speak out against the Benefit Trap. For the poorest it remains a very real issue.

Now they are not jobcentres, they are benefit centres. There is zero help to get a job.

Im not sure about this to be fair. Most recent experience here is from 2020. My age 50+ DH lost his long term job during Covid for whistleblowing. Couldn’t afford the £10k to take it to tribunal (cheapest employment solicitor quote to get things started) even though ACAS said his case was open and shut. So he was on the new style JSA (only benefit an immigrant on a partner visa can claim) and had a work coach at the Jobcentre.

All the interviews with the work coach were over the phone as covid. But they required he attend virtual how to write a CV and how to do job interview type classes. He also had to keep a spreadsheet with all the jobs he’d applied to with links embedded and send that to the work coach every week to prove job searching. The work coach was nice though, I think they weren’t as heavy on sanctions during the pandemic as they usually are. But he sent out hundreds of applications a week and had half a dozen different CVs for different types of jobs (he’s very skilled and experienced in multiple career fields and wasn’t being fussy)

The CV class was actually very helpful….because he’d not been getting any offers for interviews. But when they told him to hide his age…yes literally….put degrees but no graduation date, professional qualifications just say current, not date awarded. Cut work experience to be only the most recent 15yrs. Don’t put your physical address (because regional discrimination exists). Don’t put citizenship/type visa, just leave blank and say have right to work in U.K. if asked (because of British jobs for British only attitude).

Then he was getting head hunted and found an amazing job pretty quickly. Which he still has :) So while it wasn’t much help, it was the right kind of help for him.

Agree 👍

@Discovereads That's interesting, and well done to him.

But, that isn't the job centre helping him find and apply for a job. that's information, and good information, you could get it elsewhere, such as online, but my point remains; it used to be they were very hands on with actually phoning up for you.

Why did we regress? It cannot be because anyone in charge thought that would help people get jobs. The system worked, and they took it away.

Now because of the process you describe it's al on the person to get the job and it's so easy to fiddle. The link can be an agency you registered with, which you may know can garner sweet F-A most of the time. it could be 'I made my CV for one hour' or it could be 'I did an online course' there's many free ones on job hunting.

You can very easily fiddle that little system and never get work.

They could very easily implement something that would actually get people jobs. There are people out there who have no phone manner but are willing to work hard behind a counter or in a back office, but they can't read or write properly and so won't be able to apply for jobs effectively.

Why not just help them? I'll tell you why not! (see above)

No it isn’t a Tory thing being rolled out. It is just a made up thing that no party is suggesting.

Surely if someone was working 30 hours a week then they should be paid the correct salary for that job.

I can see I don't live or work in the same world as some here.

If a local job exists and nobody local has the skill to do it, what then? A proper Workfare arrangement, short apprenticeship, training period, is invaluable to both employer and would be employees.

We had one firm who had any number of people in to learn filing, phone answering etc. They never offered anyone a job because their contribution to the scheme was the time, skills and support of their staff. They were brilliant, and still do the same for kids that don't leave school with qualifications. Again, never offer a job but do a lot of nurturing.

Absolute godsend for many.

If a local job exists and nobody local has the skill to do it, what then?

Back in the olden days, the business would take on an apprentice and train them up while paying them a fair wage for the work they did while training.

This applies to all kinds of role. E.g. Big 4 accounting firms take on unqualified people and spending 3 years training them to be accountants.

The fact that companies would rather not pay to train people is not something the government should be condoning.

Training =/= workfare

One is absolutely appropriate, and is what business do to invest in their workforce for the future.

The other is a hugely exploitative system designed to funnel public money into the hands of private sector shareholders.

I was a higher rate tax payer for a long time, and at the upper end of lower tax bands for years.

I have put substantially more into the community than I have ever taken out of it.

Under your idea of what is fair, maybe I should get one of these serfs in for free? Or maybe the safety could work as just that?

@mrsjohnnylawrence
But, that isn't the job centre helping him find and apply for a job. that's information, and good information, you could get it elsewhere, such as online, but my point remains; it used to be they were very hands on with actually phoning up for you.

The information wasn’t available online at the time, hed followed all the online advice and templates for CV writing. None of the online stuff says how to hide your age. All the templates say put degree and date. Or put address here. Or list all your work experience. Some even recommend add a photo/selfie. Other articles say, send a video CV. Disastrous when ageism is what is getting your CV binned.

I agree with your point on they used to phone up for you, but times have moved on you cannot phone up about a job anymore and talk to a person who can book an interview. No one can. You can’t even walk around handing out CVs to look for a job anymore. It’s all done online and the JobCentre doesn’t have the staff to do online job applications for job seekers.

Yes stuff can be fiddled, I know the phone calls with the work coach, the coach would ask my DH to randomly forward a few job application confirmation emails (the ones you get saying you’ve applied for vacancy # etc) to her that she’d pick off his spreadsheet. If he’d made the spreadsheet up, she could have caught him. She did this during their call and probably just opened and checked then deleted. But it was how she verified his proof of job searching.

The classes he did, were all JobCentre run ones over MS Teams? Or Zoom? Cannot recall exactly and they tracked attendance and had cameras on…so couldn’t fake that.

@SamphirethePogoingStickerist Are you old enough to remember YTS schemes (and whatever they were named subsequently) They ended up being abused by many employers ie getting the kids/young people to do scut work, no proper training and for peanuts. And no job at the end of it.

Employers don't want to spend the time and effort training people - those who do offer proper apprenticeships and time out for NVQs etc

I’ve worked in a couple of companies that have employed people on the dole for ‘work experience’. No word of a lie, all the companies will just see this free labour. There were staff crying out for more hours, but it was all given to these poor people who had to work in order not to be sanctioned. They were made to work 5 days a week, 5 hours a day with a 15 minute break. All for free. In busier periods too. It was horrendous. Benefits are hardly free as the majority only receive peanuts.

Don’t be fooled by them stupid biased programs focused on the lazy, the film makers only show what they want the public to see.

Uurgh hideous, especially the bit about disabled. What have we become when we won't look after the most vulnerable in society.

The Guardian reported on it yesterday. I hadn’t heard of it before, so it was new to me (and many others in here too).

Worth being informed about his previous ideas. Isn’t it?

I think all benefits should be contribution based. No-one should be able to stay on benefits indefinitely with no expectation of them finding a job. There are jobs everywhere nowadays, no excuse for being unemployed unless you have a severe disability.

I literally saw an article in the Guardian yesterday and was curious. That’s it.

I am not affiliated to anything political.

Why can’t people be interested in politics and want to discuss things they see in the news?

Well, it comes from a paper written by the treasury minister, albeit a while ago. The policy itself was introduced under a previous Tory administration and the Cameron era onwards have tried to introduce it and reintroduce it under a number of guises since 2010. It is definitely not "made up"

I don't think any of them are currently angling for it, just that the article is seeking to highlight the ideological attitude of someone who is currently deciding how stuff gets spent

So I can claim benefits for a similar amount as working? Please let me know where?!

I am severely disabled and bed bound. As a result, I qualify (not an easy thing to do by the way!) for maximum amounts of Universal Credit and PIP.

After my rent and council tax contribution have been paid, I have £589 per month to survive on. Bearing in mind the estimate is households with a disabled occupant have expenses roughly £583 higher than the average household, this isn't much. My energy bill alone is now £400 per month, and due to my conditions this is non negotiable.

I am also supposed to receive care of 30 hours per week, however social care contributions have been slashed. I now receive just £289 4 weekly from social care, which covers just 4 hours per week. So I can either pay for a little more care and not eat at all, or do what I'm doing and go without care. So currently I'm often dirty, unwashed, in soiled bedding. And still hungry.

Before ANY of you claim living on benefits is the life of Riley, take a walk in my shoes. (Would love to be able to go for a walk...)

This. It's really very simple.