Voluntary work or lose benefits

[Marjoriew]

Government intend to cut benefits of claimants on JSA who refuse to do voluntary work of 30 hours a week over a 4-week period.
Benefits could be stopped for up to 3 months if claimants refuse to comply.

This year another rate has been added to the minimum wage: £2.50 per hour for the first year of any apprenticeship. That comes to £75 for a 30 hour week. I wonder if the Govt will call it something like an apprenticeship to get around it?

This is what I'm wondering chibi.

200,000 people min are about to be put out of their jobs.
Dave has said that he wants the voluntary sector to step in and cover these losses.
However most people in the UK currently volunteer, and like to choose what they spend their time on. Where is the army of volunteers going to come from, who will be willing to assist in anything rather than just things that they feel strongly about?
And then we have...
People on benefits to be forced to do "voluntary" work.

So that fits the jigsaw together.

Its one of those ideas that sounds great in theory, but is going to be very difficult in practice and probably counterproductive.

N Ireland had a similar scheme that ran until the late 90s whereby long term unemployed people could do full time voluntary work whilst on unemployment benefits. It was completely voluntary, but extremely popular.

It also sent employment rates through the floor - that is, if you were on this scheme you were massively LESS likely to get paid work.

There's a good reason that in general you are only allowed to undertake very limited amounts of voluntary work while on JSA.

Not only does being in voluntary work take away your time for jobhunting, there's also a hard to pin down but definite psychological effect - if you are in work, working hard, and doing good and useful things (as these people were), then it feels like you don't NEED to get a job, since you already have one.

I take the point that this is meant to be aimed at the (in practice pretty small) number of the ltu who are pretty much unemployable. But funnily enough, I don't see the voluntary groups etc falling over themselves to take those people on.

Inevitably the people they'll pick up are - for example - the 50 somethings who are good reliable workers but ltu because of local labour market conditions. Jobcentre workers will send them towards this programme because they have nothing else to offer them, and they know that they'll be welcomed with open arms.

On the bright side, lots of useful work will probably get done, paid for by the state, by workers who would love to have a productive job but can't get one any other way. But then on the other side of it, they'll probably be jobs that were previously being done by people being paid properly that have been cut & are now on the dole . . .

I'm sure we did it here in the 80s. Will have a google.

Not unless you call litter picking a trade. Apprentices would at least have the chance to earn a decent wage once they've trained which I suppose is the pay off for crap wages for the first year or two. Also apprentices tend to be school leavers and so don't usually have a home, bills and children to pay for.

I was clearly not advocating sending people on JSA to work as care assistants or gut chickens, come to that. I'm pointing out that there is nothing demeaning about picking up litter and there is no reason why an unemployed 57 year old shouldn't do it.

There are unemployed lawyers working for free in lots of firms, in a desperate hope to keep their skills alive until they find work. Fortunately my employer is not using any. But no one in the media cares about that.

Someone on another thread was drawing an analogy with the workhouse - saying soon Dave will have the unemployed picking oakum. Nice hyperbole.

Only then this despicable government actually went and did it (my newspaper says hard manual labour). Good grief. Criminals on community service have to do manual labour. Dave clearly thinks the people he is quite deliberately throwing out of work can be treated like criminals. The bastard.

Cant see a problem with it. Those who claim that its a stigma, and suggest that these people wear luminous tabards branded with 'unemployed' or whatever, are simply showing their own prejudices about JSA

Volunteers will be insured I assume?

I was not encouraged to do any voluntary work!! I asked if I could re apply as a special constable as I'd done it before, but was told no!!! I couldn't be a regular officer as can't do full nights etc, but I was bloody annoyed!!

Now they want voluntary!

Can't win.

Violet, you don't think that lots of people doing 'voluntary' (actually involuntary but there you go) work will take lessen the need for employers to pay people to do that work? It's fairly simple maths.

Actually, I think it is demeaning to pick litter if you're being forced to do it and you're not getting paid at least minimum wage for working.

And, as chibi said, if this happens then why are employers going to employ people to do these jobs when they can just ring up the Jobcentre and get some dole scum to do the work for free?

I also think its ironic that governments in general (not just this one) get really enthused about the supply side - 'making workers employable' whenever the demand side is really fucked - there are no jobs.

Then, when the demand side picks up, unemployment goes down, they stop worrying about it, and all the funding for the supply side stuff goes.

The time to be doing things like this (well, not exactly like this, since previous form shows these sort of schemes are very poor value for money) is when the employment market is booming, and you have a chance of picking up those who are still stuck on benefits.

But do we ever see a govt announcing a big new scheme for long term unemployed people when unemployment rates are at rock bottom? - nope, not a chance.

The truth is they need to cut the amount of benefits paid the biggest issue is not that somebody cannot get a job, but that it's not worth them working because they loose more than they gain. Either wages have to increase dramatically or else benefits need to be reduced.

BigTuna, I think the chance of employers wanting to take on a 'difficult' long term unemployed person for a month is minimal - it takes a long time to settle someone into a job, even if they are well motivated to learn quickly and work hard . . .

So what jobs are these people to do then? Apart from picking litter (bye bye street cleaners and park keepers). If they have to be unskilled manual jobs?

I think this will swiftly be extended to cover everyone on benefits into a range of jobs recently vacated by people who were paid properly to do them.

But why shouldn't people who are long term unemployed and claiming to be actively seeking work and available for work have to do something useful in return for their JSA?

Perhaps this will make people try a bit harder to find work. There is work out there, a lot of it, but not necessarily work that people want to do.

retiredGoth -- our local MP (Lib Dem) had a public meeting last week and was quite shocked at his reception which was anger. He was genuinely perplexed why a meeting at a student's union, in the week where a raise in tuition fees was announced, and one of his campaign pledges was not to vote for a rise in student tuition.

I also think that the effect of putting volunteers into running everything which was previously done by regular paid people, is that a lot of it will be lost. Take people who tidy parks - they do much more than just pick litter. If they are replaced with people who only pick litter and don't even do that very well as they don't want to be there in the first place and aren't being paid, then you've got problems.

Georgimama, for the reasons I outlined in my post above - jobhunting seriously takes time, and once you are working, even if 'paid' by benefits, psychologically you feel you are doing something useful, and the push to find work drops off.

Believe me, I was involved in doing the numbers to kill off the NI scheme, people loved it but it cost a fortune and results were dreadful, people on the scheme were massively less likely to find work than those not on it.

There is not a lot of work out there. I have been looking for a new job, and reading all of the adverts in both my local papers, and the free papers on the tube, looking at the websites for local councils and other job websites. There is sod all there. Where there used to be 5 or 6 pages of jobs, now there is 1/2 a page. There is no doubt that the job market is static at the moment - everyone is waiting to see what happens.

Why shouldn't they be paid for working if they're working? And if long term claimants are going to be difficult to settle into the month's work then what happens? Who's going to be overseeing them if it's not an outside employer?

There are jobs but not necessarily the exact type of work people want, or necessarily where they are. I can't see why people can't move for work either but that is a whole other debate, apparently.

Takver I'm sure that is true.

My brother has just started regular voluntary work, with a view to getting some experience. Now that he is "working", and busy, and tired, he has lost the impetus to apply for paid jobs.

Georgi I live in London, quite a big place, and many of the publications that I look at are pan-london. The jobs sections used to be huge, now they are tiny. It is a myth that there is loads of work but people turn their noses up. There are hardly any job ads of any type of work.

Well apart from teachers for some reason, there are hundreds of those.

The other thing to notice is that the pages that used to be full of jobs are now full of adverts for dodgy schemes to get cash out of desperate people. It's depressing really.