Unemployed used as unpaid staff at Jubilee event and expected to sleep outside

[HRHEightiesChick]

This story about unpaid workers doing the security at the flotilla event yesterday is bad. They were misled about not being paid, and had to sleep out in tents or actually outside 'under London bridge' was suggested to them. This is Workfare in action again, I believe.

I don't really understand what is going on here.

A private company offered people an unpaid trial, from what I understand, which they chose to take. Then a coach driver dropped one busload of people off 90 minutes early, and as a result we are subjected to days of hysteria?

And now we are told that someone connected with the firm has a criminal conviction, which is legally spent, based on something that person wrote herself, in some sort of 'tales from the security industry book'? And that is obviously all proof that the Tories are intent on turning poor people into glue, based on, er, um, well.

And Workfare is clearly evil, even though this wasn't a Workfare scheme, just an unpaid trial for a couple of dozen people out of several thousand. Obviously those people should have been told to fuck off, the job was only for people with experience.

Any more I've missed?

Blackout -

I wonder what other PR masterstrokes Max is going to pull? Molly auditioning for the X Factor? Molly get her own reality series? Molly to appear falling out of a London nightclub? Some haunted looking young man selling his story about "My night with Molly"?

Some haunted looking young man selling his story about "My night with Molly"?

Shit. Workfare's worse than I thought.

Ltd

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jun/09/work-programme-welfare-jobs-private-sector

The link (above) lists some of the companies involved in workfare and what the contracts are worth.

Big, big money.

Any links to who runs these companies - something is telling me that all of these will be run by big Tory donors/those with close links to Tory party.

Or am I just being overly cynical?

DWP release information saying that mandatory work activity does not work while pumping £5m more into it and expanding the scheme. Guardian link. DWP press release. Early impact study (PDF)

Interesting conclusion from notthetreasuryview.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/dwp-analysis-shows-mandatory-work.htmlNIESR (the body that did the research)

MWA is essentially a tool for advisers to use on those they think are not playing the game: blatantly failing to look for work, or perhaps even doing something else on the side. The hope is not so much that participants will be encouraged to get a "real" job, but that they will find the experience of mandatory work so unpleasant (and/or incompatible with other activities they'd rather be doing..) that they will sign off benefit one way or the other.

Sorry, fucked up the last link

NIESR