To think people on benefits can’t win

[Flamingosareflummoxed]

I’ve heard so many people this week, in real life, moaning about people on benefits. I get it that we are all struggling. The cost of living is crippling.
But every week there are posts on here from women who were in 70K per year HR positions who are finding it difficult to get interviews for MW jobs.
There are no jobs.
The few jobs that there are will be flooded with applications, why would recruiters chose someone who has been unemployed for years?
Plus all those with long term disabilities who need reasonable adjustments.
Its like people want to bash people knowing there is no real alternative.

did you even read my comment? I said LCWRA which is a means tested UC benefit. DLA for kids absolutely can be lucrative. Unfortunately families are struggling and some see this as a means of income.

Stephen Hawking also had lots of experience and skills.
Not the same as a job seeker with disabilities who would be starting at the bottom.

I really don’t believe pp should say they or their children have applied for hospitality and caring roles. We have a number of care homes around here and they are desperate for staff.

The thing is have you ever interviewed some young people. A friend of mine owns an independent coffee shop. She has struggled and struggled to interview young people even for weekend and holiday work. They won’t look her in the eye. They are surly, they dress as though they have just got out of bed. In one interview the Mum turned up, she took on one young women who kept wanted mental health days.

Do schools even tell people how to apply for roles, how to dress, practise interviews or do the parents help.

"lucrative"? Have you seen the cost of disability equipment? I once had to take out a loan (interest free thankfully) for a piece of equipment just so that I can read.

LCWRA is £217 per month and has been frozen until 2030

Did you read my comment ? I was posting to advise that the list of concessions provided were not available as a result of simply claiming PIP, as implicated. DLA for kids is one of the hardest benefits to claim. All children are dependent, but for child DLA, you have to demonstrate how a disability results in your child being more dependent than a child of a similar age without the disability. If that money is then subsequently spent on supporting the extra cost of that child’s disability, how exactly is it lucrative ? And given that carers allowance is deducted in full from UC and replaced with a lower carers credit, where is the advantage in that ? Same with LCWRA - available to the most severely disabled people and difficult to secure. Given that the same extra cost of supporting the disability applies, how exactly is that ‘lucrative’ ?

You seem to have very little idea of how much disability actually costs to support. These extra benefits are paid in respect of that - you clearly think it puts some benefit claimants at an advantage, when in actual fact, the benefits that are a contribution - for the most severely disabled they don’t even begin to cover the extra cost.

Care homes are desperate for staff because working in care in shit.
When you are job hunting, seeing the same company/role coming up again and again is a red flag.
People get a job in care, and leave, because they do not get paid enough for what it entails. Which can be being injured etc.

And there it is. People are desperate yet turn their noses up at vacancies that they think are beneath them. Would you include shop work, bars etc.

The issue is that people with little in the way of qualifications won’t take these roles.

Yep. This. A family member worked in a local council run care home for several years and it was stable, reliable employment. That closed and the emphasis was on care in the community - which in practice meant no breaks, and no allowances for travel time/costs in between calls. It’s a shit show where staff are paid minimum wage and expected to stretch themselves to ridiculous lengths because the care agencies are profit based and don’t give a monkeys about their employees or those they are meant to be providing care for.

Sorry, but care work should not be for people desperate for jobs.
Do you think so little of the people that need care, to have people looking after them that can't be assed.

Care work is already taken by people desperate for visas/jobs.

Definitely. My adult children are settled in roles now but when one of them was looking for holiday work he wanted to do everything online and then claim he never heard back. That lasted a few weeks until I said I would find him something! He did join an agency and he always had plenty of options.

Admittedly that was a few years ago now but agencies can be good. We used one when my company wanted someone on a short term basis a few months ago.

Do you think that care work is suitable for people who are desperate and can’t find anything else ? Would you like a relative of yours to be at the receiving end of care provided in that circumstance ? Have you any idea of the shit show that is care work these days ? Minimum wage, zero hours contracts, no breaks, no allowances for travel time or costs between calls ? Not to mention the unsafe and a lot of the time unlawful working practices that result in injury.

What about bar work or will you have another reason why people cannot do that either, our chain coffee shop is often looking for people. It won’t be permanent but what are people expecting?

Unless of course you are better off on benefits.

I had two parents in care homes. Of course it’s not highly paid, it can be gruelling. I saw all of that. So what are these people who are desperate to work doing about ensuring that they can get a different type of role if care work, bar work is not their choice?

Yep. And that’s reflected in the truly shocking standard of care my elderly mum got at the hands of a care agency provided via social services for home care - for which she had to pay. Calls missed, rough handling causing injury, unsafe working practices, leaving mum unbathed because there wasn’t enough time allocated on the call, male care assistants assigned to showering and personal care. Not to mention care workers who were little more than teenagers, who spent the minimal amount of time on the calls and then spent the rest of their time sitting outside the house in the car drinking coffee, because the GPRS was registering them as still on the call. Took me a while to tumble to that one.

Could you make ends meet on bar work ?

My ds has done three years at Lancaster uni and has tried everything to get some part time work around his studies. In three years he has managed to get around three months of part time seasonal work.

Exactly this. He also had a full team of people behind him, ensuring that he had everything he needed to be able to work, including a full time carer and a personal assistant. If we could guarantee that other disabled people would be afforded the same, or even similar levels of support we might get somewhere.

I did a trial in bar work and was "fired"

Where I used to work agency workers were often offered permanent posts after having shown themselves to be reliable workers.

Sorry to hear about your situation. I'm a bit younger but am also ill. Quite hard explaining all those medical appointments/reasonable adjustments. And I literally can't do any job, for physical reasons. It's all very well in practice preaching "we are disability confident" but it doesn't really stack up in most cases. I also don't qualify for any benefit.

Lucrative? DLA?

DH earns fuck all - about 5-6k a year, self employed working stupid hours (sometimes he finishes at 2 or 3am) around the needs of our autistic DS.

We get £428 a month DLA, CA is about £350 a month. So less than £800 a month. The DLA is largely ringfenced for DS needs.

We are considerably worse off than when DH was able to work full time - and we've weren't well off then. DH also has considerably less down time and is getting burnt out, we're both chronically stressed and sleep deprived (imagine 13 years of the lack of sleep of the new born stage). But yes, we're raking it in and having a fantastic time.

You seem to have a chip on your shoulder about doing these sorts of roles. I worked in Boots on a Saturday, then went onto to bar work.

What do you want to do for work?

I have a job now, but there'd have been no point me applying for jobs I couldn't do - whether it's transport issues (I can't drive, even if I could we couldn't afford two cars), working hours (I can't do early starts or late finishes for reasons to do with my autistic DS), or physical capability (I doubt I'd last long in a physical job as my knee can't even cope with less than two hours gardening).

I don't think anything's beneath me, but I need to be able to get to it, it needs to work with DS and I need to be physically capable of doing it.

It isn't lucrative at all. Having a disabled child is expensive, all of the DLA I receive is spent on my disabled child's needs.