CommonSpace columnist Fraser Stewart recalls why he left the "best job" he'd ever had in a UK job centre
I WORKED in the job centre, in a previous life.
To this day I maintain it was the best job I've ever had, as short-lived as it was. After just 18 months, I handed in my notice and left a workplace that had, until that point, felt like home.
I left for one reason and one reason alone – the coalition government taking office in 2010. In a matter of what seemed like seconds my role had changed from getting people into work, to cutting the welfare bill by any means: from merciful to mercenary; helping hand to hired gun.
As orders began to trickle down from the new regime we were given a series of targets, one of which I couldn't swallow with any amount of sugar. I was told I had to sanction a certain number of benefit claimants per month. Sanction. Not "get in to work". Sanction.
I handed in my notice immediately and the following week was my last. This was never supposed to be a badge of honour. I do not write this out of indulgence or self-righteousness, but as a person with experience on both sides of the desk.
Quitting my job was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do because people should not be treated as targets - nor should they be unjustly tarred as lazy and subjected to universal and indiscriminate suspicion.
There are remarkably few people in this country who don't want to work. My own claimants ranged from joiners and cleaners to neurobiologists and architects and beyond: of the thousands of people I met within various capacities in the job centre, not one struck me as being proactively idle.
To label such a diverse group of individuals as parasites is to dehumanise millions of our own citizens with a repulsive ignorance. Of course, anecdotal evidence will only take any argument so far.
There exists no coherent evidence to support a "culture of worklessness". Collating research carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and TUC, The Guardian reported that roughly 80 per cent of JSA claimants are off benefits and into work before becoming "long-term" unemployed.
Less than one per cent of all UK households had two generations of the same family who had never worked.
This contrived notion of "Benefits Britain", then, is founded on a series of hyperbolic falsehoods, forced relentlessly at us by a seedy and sensationalist media intent on demonising out of context those who cannot reasonably fight back.
commonspace.scot/articles/1887/fraser-stewart-what-my-job-in-a-uk-job-centre-told-me-about-today-s-benefits-system