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.

You may as well rob a few houses as a lot of this sounds like punishment for criminals

Where is the evidence of the “many” people working cash in hand please?

You can't work for 'the dole'. Either you are in paid employment or not. If you are employed you should be getting paid a living wage.
I have a feeling Truss and her crew would bring back work houses if they could.

Totally agree ^

I support it for those who are not working at least 20 hours per week IF ABLE, no small children etc. But for, say, 10 hours a week so it's not exploitative for the money (keeping in mind that many on UC will get housing benefit on top of that, plus discounts on CT) and doing things to support the community like mowing the lawn, volunteering, helping out at a food bank, rather than for private companies.

This is the scheme they use in Australia.

How can you even get to work on the low money given? Let alone pay for childcare? It's absolutely ridiculous, and designed to fuck over women and the unwell.

Some of the people unable to claim.low capacity for work would never be in a position to scrub graffiti from walls etc.

And what do the carers do with the people they care for? Bring them along to watch?

Lots of people are unable to work due to poor mental/physical health and addictions.
The NHS is so underfunded that people are waiting years for treatment. They can't work until they can access treatment.

They seem to have an obsession with people falsifying disability claims. Which is ridiculous given their own statistics say that only around 0.5% of disability claims are affected by fraud and error (I’d love a break down given how much error we know happens!).

Its particularly disgusting that David Cameron started his attacks on PIP and the likes after the death of his son. As if in his mind only people as disabled as his son was should count.

We had the old version of this in about 2013/2014 at a food manufacturing warehouse I worked at and the bosses were practically wetting themselves at the thought of the free labour they could get

It's not volunteering if people are doing it in return for monetary benefit, is it!

How many?

What's the annual cost and what does it represent as a figure of the overall benefit bill? Is it worth instituting an expensive and difficult to manage scheme to offset that cost?

Community Service is for people who done crimes.

Wrong. Lots of people in full time employment volunteer in all kind of community roles for no payment. These are the kind of activities people can participate in - providing benefit to the community. Plenty of time to search for jobs around that.

*’My niece worked full time hours in an out of school care setting. Mornings and after school. For £60ish a week. Twice she was sanctioned for taking a day off (with advance notice) to attend interviews. For five months she was given glowing reviews. Then, unsurprisingly, in the last month they decided she wasn’t a good fit in their team. So “regretfully” didn’t offer her the job full time at the end of the six months. Instead they got a new freebie from the scheme for another six month trial.

Less than a month after she was deemed unsuitable she got a call from them when someone unexpectedly quit. She was back to being a superb worker again and they wanted her full time.’*

Now you’ve sad that JustLyra I’m remembering a company that usually took on hundreds of extra workers every year over the Christmas period that didn’t need to bother under that scheme. If there’s an hour’s work that needs doing and you have to pay a normal worker £9.50 an hour and a ‘Welfare to Work’ person can’t get more than £60 a week, who will the company choose?

If there’s work available people can be paid for it at the national minimum wage. FFS.

This harks back to the woman who was forced to work at Poundland (a profit-generating business!) for her dole money and successfully sued the government.

It might be a good idea for the very small number of people who could work, but remain jobless for a long time. However, they should be paid minimum wage for their work. It might also be helpful for people who want to return to work after a long time out due to e.g. mental health problems, who aren't yet able to take on a full time job, but might be able to do a few hours a week as a means to building confidence and getting some recent work experience onto their CV. Should always be paid at least minimum wage though...

@DontMakeMeShushYou you know what I mean. Working in a charity shop for 10 hours pw. Doing some community gardening. Just something that contributes to the community, doesn't mean exploitation by private customers and allows time to look for a FT paying job.

There is no way that responsibility for monitoring for such a scheme should be foisted onto local groups or food banks.

Also the last thing places like that need is the job of training someone who is likely to get a job in a couple of weeks. Complete waste of their time.

I bet employers love it.
The Tory party pitches itself as the party for business, donors have their ear. I'm sure they'd be delighted to have a supply of labour that they don't even have to pay.

I mean let's be honest community service already takes away paid roles

That’s volunteering. When you have to do the work or face legal sanction, that’s Community Service.

Private companies * not customers

Exactly. It was massively exploited by big companies.

And it did people no favours in terms of references as they had to come up with an issue to show why they hadn’t employed them after the six months.

Nothing about being given work you can't mentally cope with if you're disabled I see.

And as others have said. It was done before. Workfare.

If the job exists, pay someone a proper wage to do it

@WakeUpAndBe, I think Truss has said Pensions, Disability payments and Carers Allowance will go up in line with inflation but other benefits have not been decided upon yet. Many single working people working 50 hours a week have only got a 2 percent pay rise this year. These people may not be happy to see their taxes go to give those we other not working or only working up to 12 hours a week a 10 percent pay increase. I heard this argument made on radio this morning by a single working man working 50 hours each week to pay his bills.

Yes I agree with this. I don’t think anything wrong with people claiming being asked to volunteer in certain circumstances.