In 1997 Polly Toynbee said The Tories were right: workfare really works Natuarlly I agree with her remarks in 1997.
Like Gavin Maclure, I also agree with Polly Toynbee’s latest remarks that Gavin mentions here
The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee writes:
“Workfare is transparently unfair to most people, substituting slave labour for big companies. Michael Heseltine’s scheme that was dubbed workfare had three vitally different ingredients. He paid jobseeker’s allowance recipients extra for working, he ensured the work was for charities or community projects – no risk of job substitution – and the job market was rising. Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling breached all those, absurdly calling objectors “job snobs”. The protesters gave them the bloody nose they deserve.” [Gavin's highlighting]
Like Gavin, I am the biggest fan of Iain Duncan Smith’s Welfare Reform but there is no way that any government should be subsidising private companies with free labour.
As Gavin Maclure also said here
As I’ve written before, despite being a believer in capitalism and the free market I side with Wilberforce when it comes to slave labour. Employing a man or woman in a charity shop to get their JSA is one thing but helping to increase the profits of a FTSE 100 company without being rewarded by that company is out of order.
Here Channel Four says
Mr Grayling insists the scheme is “entirely voluntary”.
That’s technically true, on the face of it, but it comes with two heavy qualifications.
Firstly, you do run the risk of having your benefits stopped if you agree to do a placement, then change your mind after a “cooling-off” period of one week.
So much like the French Foreign Legion, the scheme is “entirely voluntary” to enter, but there may be an element of compulsion later on if you decide to leave.
And there have been unproven allegations that Jobcentre staff are misleading claimants into believing that the work experience scheme is in fact mandatory.
Cait Reilly, the unemployed graduate who is taking the government to the high court over workfare, says she was told her benefit payments could be stopped if she refused to work at Poundland, and wasn’t told about the cooling-off period.
Mr Grayling said the government disputes the facts of Ms Reilly’s case, and we’ll have to wait for the judge’s ruling before we know what the rights and wrongs of it are.
And for once I agree with something you write. I don’t know what the government thinks its doing by providing almost free labour to very large and very profitable companies.
Its good that people are now seeing that the opposition to workfare is not some Leftist conspiracy as some minsters were trying to portray it.there are genuine and justified concerns about the programme in its current format.
So are you going to put your defence of the permanent lie in a centre piece of your appeal to hard working voters of Stoke Park ? Didn’t think so.
From here.
So as Labour started putting unemployed people in unpaid work in the first place, those in the Labour party need to apologise for bringing it in before they can say how unjust it is.
As somebody who went on new deal, I am fully aware of how rubbish the thing was/is.
I observed how certain staff of a provider would select a ‘client’ to bully and would constantly bully them until they left and then the staff in question would select another victim. I saw this happen three times and then they made the mistake of selecting me. Obviously I wasn’t going to have any of it. Letter’s by me being sent to varous people persuaded them it wasn’t a good idea attempt to pick on me.
So if I’m honest, I’d rather stack shelves at Tesco for nothing than have dealings with certain ‘providers’
There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed like useless ‘providers’ taking money off the government and the incompetantance of staff at Job Centre plus.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106158/The-minister-hacked-emails-protest-group-thats-hard-left-agitators.html
So much for the specious denials on this thread – the far Left have “left” their fingerprints all over these right-to-skive protests.
Chris Grayling has since backtracked on his claims he was hacked,
…………. and the hypocrisy of organisations like the Guardian, protesting at this, yet advertising their own unpaid posts. Curiouser and curiouser ……………
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Chris Grayling’s e-mail was “harvested” and used to send an e-mail he didn’t know about – whether that amounts to “hacking” or not is a matter of semantics but it is an illegal act. These far Left right-to-skive “activists” have been found out for their persistent mendacity – their denials, here and elsewhere ring hollow.
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