Single parenet benefits proposed to end when youngest child is 11 rahter than 16

[uwila]

Oh this will be popular round here.

here

I do agree she's baiting though.

And I don't know why I'm bothering to rise...

caligula, i copied you about the baiting,i think you mentioned it on the thread about a mile down

But can you show me a country where anything other than capitalism has ever worked, mt? Cuba? May be. North Korea? Not really, no food. Zimbabwe - grotesque giving management of farms to people who don't know how to manage them. - well they get famine and eat dead bodies there so that hasn't really worked. Even China is not exactly hard core left wing these days. Isn't human nature just so dreadful there is no hope for anything more collaborative? Perhaps the answer is to rid the planet of men - then you might manage better.

Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" (the coming computers etc) was going to free workers from long hours. It never happened. In the UK in particular men and women at work often want the long hours, don't want to be home more, like the escape in a sense from their home life and families.

I don't however think we have a trend of more people choosing not to work at all. In fact we've more people in work I think than ever. I don't think there's a particularly big problem at the moment, not like when the dole queues were enormous and many people who wanted to work couldn't get jobs.

b, why would I look down my nose at anyone? I find it hard to understand why some parents enjoy domestic work and childcare but that doesn't mean I despise them for that.

We've had this conversation before, Xenia. There are different forms of capitalism and there are many countries where more socially responsible models work.

The communist bogey is meaningless in the context we are talking. I'm not advocating "commuinusm" instead of "capitalism" just pointing out socially responsible systems, fairer systems do exist and do work - some more tested than others.

'I find it hard to understand why some parents enjoy domestic work and childcare but that doesn't mean I despise them for that. '

So that's why you call them things like glorified prostitutes, then.

It always puzzles me why instead of all the public funding put into coaching the poor into dead end jobs, they don't just either give them the money, or give them a grant of say 10k to start their own business.

Absolutely Cloudhopper. I think I've mentioned this before, but at one point a few months ago, I was receiving more money in tax credits from the government, than I was receiving from my employers.

And more than if I'd been on Income Support. The government are so rabidly keen to get me to work for cash, that they are prepared to spend more taxpayer's money doing that, than they would have to spend if they left me alone to clean my house, write my book and look after my children.

It is madness isn;t it. That some people can make a modest living looking after your children, but you cannot.

But it's only useful productive work if someone else does it, Monkey.

i think you can get grants for things like that...there are lots of incentives available,its just so demoralising walking into a jobcentre and having somebody who's probably got far less qualifications than you look down their nose at you and speak to you in the same way they speak to druggies who have no intention of ever working,that you end up thinking 'oh screw oyu you patronising cow just give me my handouts and let me get the hell out of here'.well,thats how i always found it to be.

anyway,i wanted to work when i was a single mother(and i did voluntary work for a while)but it was so awful going for those lone parent interviews where they'd say things like'you can do a free learndirect course to go towards your maths and english gcse'(ok....but why do i need to do my gcse's again when i got perfectly good grades the first time??!).

LOL divastrop, it's also those ridiculous forms where they tell you you have to phone up 4 employers a day or whatever it is.

"Er... all the employers in the industry I am thinking of returning to, know who I am and I have a reputation as a competent professional, not as some kind of nutty stalker who wastes their time by phoning them unnecessarily. That's not the best way to get a job in my industry".

One size fits all. Treat everyone as if they're 17 and illiterate, and make sure that the only job anyone will ever get from the job centre, is one which is designed for an illiterate 17 year old.

oi! i work for jobcentreplus! admittedly i don't do adviser or jobsearch (i work on benefits. see my post below i have a head full of rather complex social security legislation and an encyclopedic knowledge of commisionners decisions0 I'm curremtly doing double my work load while my counterpart trains some new staff and I'm absolutely worn to a frazzle. even our cleaners have benchmarks (use jif on those, they'll shine up just dandy!) I try to do the best for everyone i speak to because i know that for some people having to claim welfare benefits is the absolute end. and i may not have too many formal educational qualifications (my mum was a single parent who couldn't afford to support me through uni) but i maintain that I'm well-read, interested and up to date on current affairs and work a shitty job that, yes does include some 'druggies' in order to provide for my three children as i believe passionately in public service.

sorry if you believe that jobs outside your field are beneath you. some people have no choice but to work for minimum wage (including, yes, some jobcentre staff) and some people will do jobs that they don't necessarily enjoy ( Probably because of some members of the public's attitudes towards their jobs...) to keep a roof over their childrens heads.

Oh I know and I don't blame job centre staff, it's just the whole stupid system. It tends to be geared towards the workshy, when most unemployed people are not workshy, they just happen to have lost their job. What I found, is that the jobcentre was a time wasting nuisance that wasted my time phoning silly employers for silly jobs, when I could have been getting on with finding a proper job within the industry in which I had a proper career - they impeded my jobseeking efforts FGS!

And I haven't said that jobs outside my own field (as it was then) were "beneath" me. On the contrary, like many people who need to prioritise family responsibilities, I moved outside my field, downshifted, and took a job way below my skills level so that I could function as a mother, as well as as a worker. But FGS, it is not unreasonable to expect that somone who has spent years building up a career and investing in training etc., has the expectation of finding a job which uses their skills and experience, rather than one for which they would have been overqualified twenty years before. That might take a couple of months longer than finding a crap job, but that's how people live - they plan for the long term, not just the next couple of weeks.

There's not much point in sending unemployed people with skills, professional experience and academic qualifications to apply for jobs that demand none of these things - the employers won't give them the jobs unless all other applicants have been violent or shat on the floor during the interview. Ethical, responsible employers don't want hugely overqualified staff as they know such staff will leave the second they get another job and/or will be so bored and resentful that they won't be a lot of use; bent, exploitative or simply uncaring employers don't want overqualified, well-educated staff as anyone with a helping of self-respect might ask awkward questions and infect other staff with enough self-respect to query things like unsafe work practices and illegal deductions from pay.

It may just depend on which bit of the country ou are in then but my sister found no difficulty in getting cleaning jobs with private households despite a degree from Oxford. I don't think the people she worked for minded whether she was over qualified or not as long as she could get the cleaning done.

Well whoopee do, what a brilliant use of resources.

This is just getting silly now. I wonder if we can keep this idiotic thread going until Easter?

actually i apologise, i see your point. we're targets daft because it's drummed into us. and someone over qualified is taking a job from someone barely qualified for it..but a lot of the jobcentreplus ethos is based on reducing unemployment figures with no regard for how well suited someone may be for a job, as long as you place them in a job.

genuine question though - if you were looking for employment in a particular area. how long would you wait until you broadened your jobsearch - before being nudged in that direction by us lot..?

I'd say 3 - 6 months.

And if I hadn't got a job by 9 months, I'd take the hint and be looking for a new industry.

Although it's highly unlikely that you'd get a job after just 3 months, there's no harm in looking wider. But also, if you're in a genuine career, you do have to be careful about not taking the wrong job. I know that sounds poncey, but for example in the charity industry (where I now work) there are certain sectors I wouldn't want to work for, because if I did, it would preclude me from working for other sectors in the future. And the same in my old industry - there were certain companies where you couldn't take a job without burning your bridges elsewhere.

Out of interest, how would that time scale fit in with DWP guidelines?

i don't work in the job broking side, but it seems to me that most training courses/new dealS etc start after 26 weeks, so 6 months would probably be about right. We're really not all total monsters and apologies if you feel you've been talked 'down' to in the past. we tend to go for lowest common denominator and I personally think that the 'better' jobs are found online/newspapers rather than lowest common denominator jobs advertised in JCP - hell, let's face it, I got my job from an advertisement in a jobcentre.

Please, Xenia, now you're just taking the mick if you expect us to believe your Oxford-educated sister cleaned houses.

Why didn't you let her camp out on your floor so she could get a better job?

Why didn't you loan her some of your fortune to help her get back on her feet?

Are you suggesting there's something wrong with cleaning? We all clean. It's good for the soul. I don't rule out a convent in my latter years.....

Yes, she was between jobs for a bit for various reasons. It certainly wasn't a time when I had any spare money. It's good flexible work if you want to be free to do other things. I think it was in North London she was doing it and also in the evenings computer cleaning in offices. Some people are prepared to do cleaning work and it tides them over and then they move on to other things. Of course some lazy benefit claimants would think it beneath them but people just have different views. I thnk cleaning is great because often you're your own boss, you can do it whislt children are at school, you come and go as you please, choose your own hours and build up your own business.

persephone-i was refering to the staff at my local JCP.i have found that the attitude of the staff varies from place to place.the local JC where i grew up was more like a recruitment agancy-there was very little unemployment there and cos employers were unlikely to get time-wasters going for interviews,alot of decent employers advertised their vacancies there.the staff would simply advise on how to apply for the jobs you were interested in.

where i live now,many of the people on benefits dont want to work,and only go for job interviews so they dont get sanctioned.as a result only really crap jobs get advertised there,and when a genuine person comes along who really wants a new job,the staff just treat them the same as all the others.

xenia-its the same thing again,isnt it?if i'd got a cleaning job when i was a single mum,i would have had to get tax credits and childcare paid for.wtf is the point in the government/tax payers paying for somebody to clean somebody elses house,and pay somebody else to look after their children?why not just give them the money and let them clean their own house and look after their own children at the same time??

No, Xenia, I'm suggesting you're being economical with the truth in order to prove a very invalid and increasingly tiresome point.