Thought I’d spend a few pre-budget days rolling out more transcripts from interviews with people on the rubbish end of Tory austerity.
This one is yet another story about jobcentres and useless back-to-work activities (the transcript is at the end):
I went to one of the northwest London jobcentres last week to hand out leaflets with the Kilburn unemployed workers’ group … and I spent a long time talking to an older bloke (he was 54) who said he’d been in the jobcentre for an hour writing his CV with an adviser.
We’ll call this guy Keith. Keith was in the Work Related Activity Group for Employment and Support Allowance. He told me that he’d worked for much of his life in engineering as a fitter, but that all came to an end after a bad car accident about a decade ago. “Now I can’t do it. It’s physically impossible, because I’ll be in and around machines and all. That [accident] was the end of my engineering days. That finished me for a while and then I was really down.”
I give you this work history, because Keith reported it. I personally couldn’t care less whether people have worked or not, or what their histories are. As time goes on, I care less and less. If people are 50+, disabled and at a jobcentre, they’re a) usually in need at that moment in time, b) unlikely to get work because they’re on the scrapheap as far as employers are concerned and c) going to be written off as scroungers whether they worked all their lives or not. Those are the only relevant facts these days. Nothing else that people have or haven’t been or done counts.
Anyway, I ramble… Atos had, of course, found Keith fit for work, in a relatively recent assessment. Keith had managed to get that decision overturned on appeal. He was placed in the WRAG group for ESA. WRAG is the ESA group that the DWP wants to get rid of – their latest move in what is a none-too-subtle campaign to eliminate disability benefits altogether, along with the concept that some people just can’t work. Because he’s in that Work Related Activity Group, Keith must turn out to the jobcentre every few weeks and engage in completely pointless “work-related” activities.
I say “completely pointless” because that is exactly what those activities are. They’re not about getting people into work. They’re about making sure that older, disabled people like Keith are constantly prodded. Nothing else. They’re just prodded. They’re not helped into decent, decently-paid work, or anything as romantic as that. They’re prodded and needled and nudged and got at, and that’s about that. Keith told me that his adviser happily conceded that the CV-writing was not about getting a job, but just an exercise to complete to meet government requirements. “[The adviser] said – “well, you done your CV and you’re covered. As far as the government is concerned, you’ve done your thing. Just do it” Keith said that he must return to the jobcentre in a few weeks’ time to participate in another “activity.” There’ll be more after that. I imagine Keith is being lined up as fodder for this or that privately-provided work course, or similar purposeless bollocks. On and on it goes.
I’m not telling you this because I want to tell you a sob story. As I said, I don’t know enough about Keith to know whether his story is sad or not, or what he has or hasn’t done in his life, or who he is, or what his attitude to life or work is. None of that is relevant. I am also perfectly aware that no amount of Sad or Tragic or even Likely To Die will see the political class conceding that Keith or anyone else deserves a benefit, so we’ll park that one there. I am talking about systems – absurd, aimless systems. I’m telling you this story to show you again the jobsearch and work-related and workfare activities so cherished by modern governments like ours are so often an absolute charade.
I really have met a great many people at jobcentres over the last few years who’ve said something to me like “I’m here [at the jobcentre] today because they’re going to send me on a work course/work programme/workfare job/fuck knows what and I have to go.” A few months later, we see each other again and they say pretty much the same thing. From time to time, someone gets a job through their own efforts. The really “lucky” ones end up in a short-term, low-paid job or workfare thing somewhere or other and are told to be grateful for it, because everyone who enters the world of work is saved forever and will be granted a great life from that point (even when the work is so badly paid that people can’t meet their bills with it. The whole thing is complete shit).
The rest just turn up to their jobcentres to take part in pointless activities because they have to. I’ve attended jobcentre and work programme meetings myself where advisers have cheerfully admitted that the work-related activity they’re proposing has nothing to do with finding employment. The activity is a futile exercise that must be gone through so that the JSA or ESA claimant can get another measly benefit payment while being made to grovel for it. Sometimes, advisers don’t even seem to care if people are conscious for the activity. That might sound a bit cute, but it’s actually true – earlier this year, I attended a work-related interview at a jobcentre with a man who was on ESA (in WRAG) and so exhausted and up to his eyeballs with the meds he takes that he went to sleep during the interview. The jobcentre adviser didn’t seem to care at all. The point was to make this guy attend the session, not to achieve anything during it. I got the feeling that the adviser welcomed the down time – a quiet interview being easier to deal with than a confrontational one, etc.
Anyway. I suppose Keith might ultimately find a job, but at best, it’ll be something low paid and difficult. I know we’re all meant to be grateful for the chance to grind it out in a hard job for £6 an hour into our 50s and 60s, and probably 70s and 80s at this rate, and maybe some people are grateful for that, but – yeah. I’m getting on in years myself and I seriously hope that the home straight doesn’t line up like that for me.
Keith, 54:
“They’re driving me nuts in there. I just started to do a CV. I’ve been in there an hour, I’d say. I’ve never had a CV in my life, but it’s just something that they said I have to do. I don’t know what they want to do with it. They said I have to have an email [address], because that’s what the government tells them that I have to have.
“I had to go to this Atos thing. I’m in the group now that they’re helping me back to work. I got ESA and I’ve got to come in for all this. I keep telling them – well I can’t do this and I can’t do this, but they said – well, you still have to go through all this.
“I appealed that decision [Atos found Keith fit for work a couple of years ago]. My appeal was granted [and I was put in the Work Related Activity Group], but they put down on my appeal that I shouldn’t be seen by anyone for three years. But now that I am in this WRAG, I do have see them.
“I have to see the bloke downstairs now in three weeks’ time I think it is. They do my CV and put it into the computer. I said I don’t have a computer and they said “Oh well, you’ll need an email address” and all this. I told them I don’t have an email address. I do now.
“It’s unbelievable what they put people through to be honest with you. I’m 54. I had a bad accident. I was hit by a car and it broke my legs and ligaments as well, on the road. I was four months in hospital. It was a nightmare thing to go to this tribunal and in front of the judge. When they said “your appeal has been successful,” they said that I didn’t have to go outside or anything and I thought I’d be all right for a while.
“Atos found me fit for work, so that’s what I appealed. Since this Atos thing I’ve been through – I know that an awful lot more of people have been put through that. It is random, because you’re seeing someone who has really got no qualifications and Atos gave me nothing. Everything was fine [they said] there was nothing wrong with me at all. Then when I saw the tribunal I got the points, so who is deciding?
“There would be other ones that just couldn’t put themselves through it. I was worried about going through this appeal thing and I’m strong, but I reckon there would be a good few people who said “No, not for me.” Now, I got to do my CV for them. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next time. The bloke I see downstairs, he was all right, actually. He said “well, you done your CV and you’re covered. As far as the government is concerned, you’ve done your thing. Just do it.”
“I was in engineering. I was a fitter. I served my time as a fitter, so it was all engineering. Now I can’t do it. It’s physically impossible, because I’ll be in and around machines and all and I can’t do it. That [accident] was the end of my engineering days. That finished me for a while and then I was really down. I had a good job at a maintenance engineer and then that was the end of it.”
Good blog here by Joan Grant at the Kilburn Group about the upcoming Osborne budget. (h-t Alan in the comments).
Thanks for this, Kate.
Joan Grant of KUWG has written a speculative piece about this week’s Budget for the Kilburn Unemployed blog. I have uploaded that under the title A Budget to eliminate the safety net?.
In a comment attached to that blog piece, I argue that what we really need to focus on is what the Government’s ‘end game’ is and who has been ‘advising’ them. An incisive phrase related to all that, which I don’t use in the comment, is from researcher Paul Treloar. He spoke at a South & East Region TUC workshop in about 2008 when David Freud was Labour’s ‘welfare reform guru’, of ‘policy-based evidence gathering’ but was referring, as I recall, to the Gregg Report that followed the Freud Report.
I reckon that the phrase ‘policy-based evidence gathering’ is very incisive, don’t you? And I’m also reminded of a 1980”s badge statement, “If Maggie is the answer, it must have been a very silly question.”
End game on this one for me – a government (and opposition) intent on eliminating disability benefits altogether and on eliminating the idea that some people can’t work. Thus the forcing of people in the Support Group to work focused interviews, etc. Nobody will be considered deserving when this lot is done. I suppose the closing of the ILF already proves that this government thinks that even severely disabled people are not deserving. Can’t imagine who is.
Have added a link in the post to Joan’s piece – that’s good.
Arguably, as evidenced by the career of Labour’s 2008 Work & Pensions Secretary James Purnell MP since he left Parliament, perhaps part of the ‘end game’ for Labour politicians is to gain a position with a global consultancy firm after they leave Parliament?
And another ex-Labour minister who did not ‘let the facts get in the way of a good story’ was 2004 Health Minister Lord Warner. He surely helped to discredit Disability Living Allowance, no matter the fact that he did admit to having put out an erroneous statement as this Community Care piece from early 2004 reveals: Minister cuts the fat from figures.
Amazingly there are many people who seem not to care if the welfare system is destroyed before their very eyes. Just as long as the so-called scroungers get what’s coming to them.
The undeserving unemployed and the not-really-all-that-disabled.
I wonder how long it will be before disability payments are reduced across the board to the same level as Jobseekers Allowance ?
After all, in a world where everyone can apparently work, no matter how sick or disabled,
Then surely they must all be jobseekers as well ?
It seems we are getting to the point where people claiming benefits ‘have nothing left to lose’, and as we know, people without hope are a dangerous thing. That said, it feels as if many have fallen into a ‘learned helplessness’ that is so beyond apathy, that they’ll just accept whatever is thrown at them.
Being in the support group myself, and having had my transport cut from my care package, having to go regularly to work focused interviews will wipe me out financially, let alone the physical cost. Just going to see my mum for a couple of hours a fortnight – and she only lives 20 minutes away – and I become ill before I’ve even got there most of the time. I did absolutely nothing at home yesterday, I’ve slept for 12 hours, yet I feel more sick than ever before. The thought then of having to be hours away from home with a workfare provider, then paying the price for that physically, weighs heavy upon me.
I hadn’t had severe panic attacks for years until recently. All weekend I’ve been trying to make them subside. What I am going to try to do is not to fear anymore. I may lose everything, but I will still have myself.
How I’ve prayed to be able to work; I love working, and although a professional, I wouldn’t think it was below me to do any menial work at all. The thing is that I cannot work, and like many others, I just want to get on with trying to cope with the severity of my illness, not to have to constantly worry what will become of me.
I have a lovely home and a really beautiful garden. 30 years of loving care to make a pleasant environment to live in. It’s the only thing that’s kept me going since I was forced to give up work. It’s the strangest experience though, living here and not knowing whether I will continue here; It doesn’t feel like mine anymore.
I sympathise deeply with anyone who is put through the JSA/ESA mill continually. It’s all so pointless and demeaning. I remember a time when Job Centres were places where you’d get real support. When I went back to work part time after my first bout of illness, I remember my disability adviser – who filled in the disability credits form – being so happy for me to have come off income support (I couldn’t get IB or DLA), and wishing me all of the best. Even just a couple of months after the coalition took power, when I had to finish work, the interviews that I had at the DWP were pleasant. They were kind to me and really helped me. I’m sure some of those people still exist, but they are few and far between.
Well it’s not going to change any time soon. One can only hope – like what happened eventually after thatcher’s cuts when housing benefit was restored to low paid workers/poll tax scrapped – that the outcry at such devastating cuts will make the cons think again.
I just got back from a CBT session where the therapist had zero political insight. I said to him I am quite worried about this cutting of WRAG from ESA claimants as I stand to lose a lot of income, his response “Why worry ?” my response “Errr well, I could subsequently lose my flat, and don’t think that having this therapy protects me from being sanctioned either” His response “But aren’t people like yourself with mental health problems protected ?” Me: “Have you any idea what is going on out there ? I think it’s about time you lot gained more political awareness” He admitted he hadn’t got a clue about sanctions, or the fact that even having an appointment with him, if it fell on the same day as a DWP visit would have to go by the wayside as it was not a good enough reason not to attend. His response to me losing my flat, if it came to that (which I said to him is a very real worry) “Well, you could live in a homeless hostel…..”
I give up.
The writing of a CV seems to be a particular obsession with Jobcentre advisors. Mine knows I have a CV, not that a CV is any earthly use to me as all the jobs I apply for specifically state that CVs are unacceptable. Not happy with the fact that I have a CV, my advisor now wants me to revise it and re-write it in another form – even though I’ve said, on many occasions when asked about it, that a CV is useless to me. It’s not as if I’ve signed up to UJM or anything, I’m not, as I’ve point blank refused to have anything to do with that site since it’s inception.
I do get asked to interviews, but I’m sure that’s because I no longer have to give an indication of how old I am on application forms, but I don’t get the jobs… I’m 58 and look as if I’m 58!
I’m really not sure where these idiots in government and their advisors get their ideas from, because none of them are based on anything approaching lived experience. Hannah Titley of the right-wing think-tank Reform talks some garbage about reducing ESA for the WRAG group to the same level as JSA as that is somehow a ‘fairer’ way of doing things, and comes out with inanities such as “It is well-evidenced that being in work has a strong positive impact on an individual’s health and wellbeing”. In some situations, that may be true, but that will only be in the kind of work that is enjoyable, where the individual is valued, and is paid a decent enough wage to enjoy a comfortable life. For everyone else that kind of statement smacks of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. She waffles on about how moving people closer to work is somehow the goal, completely disregarding the fact that with circa 5 million people unemployed people, and countless people in work also chasing some 750,000 vacancies it stands to reason that most of those now unemployed will remain unemployed. If there were plenty of jobs, then there would be fewer unemployed. As far as getting disabled people into work, that has always been a challenge, dependent on the level of disability, and the actual disability itself. Hannah Titley however, seems to think that it’s merely a case of ensuring that there is sufficient support for disabled people to work. Hells teeth! As if the scabby employers that fund organisations like Reform and the Tory party are going to invest in putting the required support in place so that they can employ a person with a disablity? Hardly likely when they can get a conscript from IDS’s Reicharbeitsdienst (look it up on Wikipedia!) for free.
I do wonder at the idiots we have in government, and also their advisors. I don’t know much about Hannah Titley apart from her brief bio, but going to Oxford, then getting a Masters and also having spent time as a teacher hardly qualifies her to know jack shit about the real lived experiences of millions of ordinary people. Just before the general election there was a political discussion programme on BBC Wales, where one of the invited tame academics came out with a pearler – she regurgitated that well researched finding, (well, it was in the Daily Mail) that there are some places where there are three generations of the same family where no-one has worked. Now, I’ve worked around academic institutions enough to know that a fair proportion of university level students these days should have been sent back to primary school, but when people who have supposedly been awarded a PhD come out with utter garbage like that I begin to wonder.
I live in hope that one day one of these shiny bright young experts will come to the conclusion that the only human and rational way forward in all this is to establish a Universal Unconditional Basic Income scheme – either that, or face revolution. However, I agree with Sasson above that so many seem to have fallen into a state of learned helplessness which only the removal of all financial support will remedy. Already one person in Cardiff has found an alternative when his benefits were stopped:
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk/man-jailed-robbing-bank-having-benefits-stopped/story-26827287-detail/story.html
Not that I could recommend such a course of action, but the comments below seem largely understanding.
I think everyone who is big on the idea of cutting benefits should have to live on an equivalent “income” for a few years first. And do jobsearch while they’re at it. See how they like it.
And not just jobsearch, but also ‘Continuing Professional Development’ as stipulated for teachers and would-be-teachers of adults, say.
A problem in my jobsearch when I was a jobseeker was that I was too easily manipulated into being too flexible about the types of jobs I was looking for, and being non-too-choosy about the projects I volunteered for. In 2008 I attempted to use an Information Communication Technology (Basic Windows Computing) as Basic Skills volunteering post at an Age Concern day centre as my ‘work placement’ for designing a training programme for my own qualification in teaching adults.
That placement was arranged for me with support from an adults with mental health problems career development charity before my Employment Support Adviser from that charity was made redundant due to budget cuts. So I lost mentoring support in that volunteering role.
I then got onto a substandard adult teaching qualification course that accepted my day centre placement where better courses would not. And I was also sentenced to attend ‘New Deal Intensive Activity Programme’ (NDIAP) at A4e — having signed on for more than two years.
The most important thing I learned in that period was that Ingeus was less stingey in allocating its government-funding to ‘particpants’ than A4e was. My teaching course peers who signed on at jobcentres in City of Westminster, LB Hammersmith & Fulham or Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea got free mobile phones and passports with Ingeus on NDIAP. Ingeus’ rationale was that a passport was proof of ID and the mobile phone helped ensure prospective employers could contact the jobseeking participant. A4e’s approach was that such ‘freebies’ were allocated much more selectively on the basis of how many job applications had been submitted to win a competition.
That was 2008, when I had already been advised in 2007 by my mental health charity Employment Support Adviser and the jobcentre to apply for Incapacity Benefit — but lost the initiative to make the change when I lost ESA support. And I gave up both the teaching course that I had paid my own money to get onto and the day centre volunteering when my one-to-one teaching/coaching was placed in the same unpartitioned room with the bingo that would not tolerate any ‘noise pollution’ from the activity that I tried to run!
In Secrets of Successful Interviews: Tactics and strategies for getting the job you really want, management consultant Dorothy Leeds advises, “Believe in the value of your own product — YOU — or no-one else will believe enough to buy.”
Decades of attempted career building as a jobseeker with a learning difficulty taught me that no government has ever been willing to invest sufficiently in my development to help make my services truly ‘marketable’, no matter what I did to honour my jobsearch commitments. So I now claim ESA in the Support Group at 61, claiming that my own slowness in learning basic skills is too great for any prospective employer to tolerate.
And my conscience is pretty clean.
PS: Joan Grant’s previous Kilburn Unemployed blog post: Benefits for people in work cost 6 times as much as for people out of work
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