Occupy Mumnset - Mumsnet, i know you are P(p)olitical. Seriously, can't you tell your advertisers to fuck off if they are workfaring?

[Tortington]

i got an e-mail telling me i had % of retailers that are involved in the workfare scheme and it occured to me that Mumsnet is usually on the side of good

oh staff of MN you know me well, whilst i was disappointed that the Maccy D advertising question was even asked, i wasn't arsed tbh. i've always shouted 'its a business not a charity' ...

but this is different - It is very very wrong, and you are perpetuating the wrongness by advertising them.

I havent got the figures to hand (Im getting ready for the hell that is a school trip), but I will find them later. I could be wrong, and thinking about disability/sickness benefits.

"cogito - also, can you not see there is a difference between your hard-working young man choosing to better himself, which I applaud, and a big company being paid by the tax payer to take on slaves,"

I'm sorry, I see no fundamental difference and I don't think work experience is slavery either. What I do see in the industry I'm in are big employers forced to bring in large numbers of overseas temporary staff, at considerable expense, because local unemployed people won't take on the physically demanding jobs or, if they do take on the job, they give up after a few days because it's 'easier' to sit home and take the JSA for doing nothing.

Don't really understand how this works. Is the state paying JSA and also paying companies on top i.e. is this an increased cost to the taxpayer?

Yes there is an increased cost to the taxpayer, because, for example, Tesco got about £1 000 000 worth of labour from the taxpayer that it would otherwise have paid for itself. And the resulting absence of £1 000 000 worth of work opportunity for people who would otherwise have been paid for that work means extra benefit claims somewhere along the line (as well as being £1000 000 less privately sourced money in the economy)

It doess seem to be helping private companies by using taxpayer money. It doesn't seem right. If people were working for teh benefit of the state (i.e. for all of us) then it would seem less bad. We need to create some state businesses and give people some real state jobs that help the entire community with the community's money.

(actually, that last, parenthetical bit, isn't true unless Tesco stashed its ill-gotten savings under a mattress. It just means £1000000 less private money in the wage economy, I suppose an absence that will be doing its bit for the growing gap between median wealth and the fortunes of those at the top.)

What's next? Getting the unemployed to clear weeds in the landed gentry's gardens (at under minimum wage) and calling it work experience?

Weren't they trying to get rid of these free internship programmes?

There was bad press about free internships/work experience when the Labour government introduced Workfare in 2009. There was much hand-wringing, but I don't remember ever seeing any proposals (from anyone) to change it.

'The firms backing the Clegg campaign will provide financial support to interns, such as expenses or accommodation, or treat internships as a job covered by the national minimum wage. The Government is sending out new guidance saying interns who do "real jobs" must receive at least the legal minimum.'

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/clegg-recruits-big-business-to-fight-culture-of-unpaid-interns-6288349.html?origin=internalSearch

Thanks! I'd missed that.

I hope it will also stop the excesses of eg the NSPCC auctioning internships.

Yes, EdithWeston. It looks like it is only about "guidelines" and "pledges".

MN has always had political objectives. They have principles they apply when making advertising decisions and they run great campaigns that lobby on behalf of parents. It is part of the reason why I'm such a fan - a social conscience is important.

I would be very happy if Justine et al would think about how they participate in the scheme via advertising.

Yes, I think these internships are not right.

Angry feet life is political. Vetoing these companies is the right thing to do.

Oh and I don't care who started the Workfare schemes. I just want them gone. They don't fit with the Capitalist, free-market or small state objectives of the right and they don't fit with the "fair day's work for a fair day's pay" objective of the left.

The state has no business sponsoring big business.

Organised, short term work experience that is well managed with clear, achievable objectives and evidence of a positive impact on return to work rates = good.

Voluntary work that is not conscripted and does not replace jobs (eg is "nice to haves" rather than essential work) like teaching children football skills, hospital visiting, doing admin for local branch of charity with zero state or regular funding, repainting classrooms at local school, running a support group etc etc = good and valuable to society.

Sadly Workfare is neither of those two things.

If an employer saw ,on a c.v. a prospective employee had been "forced" by leaverage of benefit sanctions to engage in such a scheme, maybe he/she might think ,well... dunno , it may be a difficult one to call ?

'What I do see in the industry I'm in are big employers forced to bring in large numbers of overseas temporary staff, at considerable expense, because local unemployed people won't take on the physically demanding jobs or, if they do take on the job, they give up after a few days because it's 'easier' to sit home and take the JSA for doing nothing.'

What do they pay these overseas temporary staff? Is it just the equivalent of JSA or do they pay the legal minimum wage?

I don't believe that our young people are a load of lazy shirkers. All young people want to earn decent money to pay for clothes, going out to pubs and clubs, buying drinks and for the scandalous extortionate car insurance that they have to pay. They can't do that on JSA money.

I want to know how I can get that email.

I think it is obviously better to have on a CV that you have done some work, whether on this scheme or not, because the prospective employer can then get a reference from an employer. But, surely there are better ways of doing it.

cogito - i am sympathetic to your point that people choose not to work and to live off welfare and that that choice is too easy. But I don't think forcing graduates to work in Poundland is the solution.

I think a return to a system of meaningful apprenticeships that people could do that would actually lead to long-term work would provide an incentive. Asking people to stack shelves all night in return for no pay is unlikely to encourage people to believe that work pays, or is at all desirable.

More to the point, given the country does not have unlimited funds, we as taxpayers should not be subsidising multi-billion pound companies like Tesco to take on unpaid workers AT THE COST OF REAL PAID JOBS which - as stated above - has the effect of actually increasing unemployment rather than decreasing it, long-term. All it does is transfer yet more taxpayer subsidy to big businesses that don't need it at all.

If we want to get the long-term unemployed to do work experience, it should either be paid at the going rate by Tesco etc, or better, be done in industries where there is a shortage of workers and where these people will have a real chance of a job at the end of it, so we do not ned to import people from abroad to do these jobs because of a shortage of skilled workers.

Plus we need to pay people a proper living wage so that working IS more attractive than benefits.

"they give up after a few days because it's 'easier' to sit home and take the JSA for doing nothing."

Minor point, but it won't be JSA if you voluntarily quit a job surely? Ditto if you turn down a certain number (2? 3?) of jobs offered to you. You get kicked off JSA.

I am all for work experience. I know quite a few graduates in the early 90's when graduate unemployment was very high who got work from being on work experience offered by the job centre. Charities and small businesses would take people on for 8 weeks. Lots of people got a start there, got taken on and then move on to something else- because they had some work on their cv that wasn't just working in a pub or bookies. However there were a couple of big charities who basically used it as free labour- they took on loads of people and then dumped them after 8 weeks- people couldn't even volunteer to continue as they had too many new ones coming in. People felt really used and pissed off as they had invested great hopes in being able to get a job.
That's one of the problems of workfare it makes people do unskilled jobs whether or not they need the experience and it just engenders a feeling that they are being used and people become more despondent. People go into these schemes with great hopes.

That's quite apart from the moral issue whether big profitable businesses should be using unpaid workers to do the most basic jobs when they could afford to employ them properly. What about Tesco taking on new workers and them paying 3 days wages and the government topping up with the other 2 days - rather than the government giving them what amounts to backhanded tax break.

It all seems to stem from some ridiculous notion that anyone who is unemployed is lazy and would rather lie on the sofa than get a job. Undoubtedly there are people like that but as there are more unemployed people than jobs even if you took these people out of the equation there still wouldn't be enough jobs for everyone who wanted one.

Big businesses are forced to bring in overseas staff in order to force down wages, because the majority of people in this country would like a better standard of living than the people from the overseas countries and would be willing to work for that if in return they got the means to have a genuinely better standard of living, rather than finding that they were working very hard for a pretty poor quality of life. Only those with enough nouse to get out of the lowest paid jobs as quickly as possible don't mind doing the lowest paid jobs for a while, because they understand that for them it is temporary. Those who, however hard they work, are not able to move up the scale (and we do need people doing the lowest paid jobs, because they are some of the most essential jobs, so we need people to stay in those jobs), will never get a good quality of life doing those jobs, despite their use to society. We are trapped in a system where the lazy, dysfunctional and feckless can be used as an excuse to flog those willing to work hard, in order to increase the profits of the wealthy. Unfortunately, that seems to result less in the lazy, feckless and dysfunctional being cured of their dysfunctionality and more in the hard working feeling as though they are being picked on.

Those at the top take what they want and pass down what they want, and those at the top do not want to pass an awful lot down - particularly when others at the top won't let them, because they want to maximise their personal profit via their shareholdings, not maximise gainful employment for everyone. Those at the bottom can work for less than minimum wage and be thankful for it. But there are still not enough people clearing playgrounds of disgarded needles, painting over grafitti, running scouting groups, visiting hospitals, etc. So nobody gets a feel-good feeling doing things this way.

The biggest issues for me with workfare are:

• Companies are able to use the free labour to avoid creating "real" jobs, and there is even a risk they will dump existing staff in order to replace them with free workers. I have read at least 3 different stories (at different companies, Tesco being one) of people being made redundant, and then eventually being sent back on workfare to work in their old jobs, but unpaid(!) at the same companies they were made redundant from. Also several companies that seem to have avoided creating their normal Christmas jobs, or giving extra shifts to existing employees, by relying on free labour instead. Surely this is achieving the opposite of what it's meant to, by making it even harder for people to get in or stay in actual jobs?

• And the plans to make the disabled complete unlimited periods of unpaid labour, even if they have been recognised as unfit for "real" work - read up on WRAG on the other threads if you haven't already, this is a total scandal.

There are other reasons I disagree with it too, but these are the things that make me especially