The quotes below are from a transcript of a recording made at a jobseeker’s signon meeting at a London jobcentre in early October. The JSA claimant is a man in his early 50s who has learning and literacy difficulties. He has been out of work for about six years. I often attend jobcentre meetings with him.
The adviser is a man we see regularly. He’s always well turned out: he wears a nice suit and usually has a designer label displayed on one cuff. The man I attend with inevitably mentions the label and the suit afterwards – and not in an appreciative way:
“Him in that suit. He’s got a job. I should have a job.”
So, there’s that.
Another thing about this adviser is that he occasionally bad-mouths other JSA claimants. Some advisers do this. At this meeting, the adviser tells the man I am with that his attitude towards finding work is much better than every other claimant’s – that other people are the layabouts and the scroungers:
“You are one of the few people who come here who have something to tell me.”
“People come here and say nothing. They just want their money and go and come back next time. “
“They don’t understand that I’m here just to help. I can’t give them a job. They have to do 99% of the job themselves, but they don’t want that.”
This line always interests me. I hear it from time to time. Then, I think about it on the way home. It seems to me that freely dumping on a client group in front of strangers says a lot about a person’s ease with their own disdain for that group. I suspect that it says a lot about the DWP’s disdain for its client group as well. Jobcentres don’t always strike me as places where general professional courtesies apply.
Anyway. I wonder what advisers say about us when we’re not there. Most of the time, the guy I attend with can’t wait to get out, either (“they just want their money and go…”) He never wants to extend his stay. I can’t imagine why anybody would. Some advisers at jobcentres are agreeable enough (to your face), but the general atmosphere isn’t. Jobcentres are full of unsmiling security guards and people who are wondering if they’re about to be sanctioned. It’s always a relief to leave. The guy I attend with says that being at the jobcentre “makes me sick to my stomach.” Indeed.
At least this man has your guidance and support Kate, many have no-one.
You see so much of this in my local jobcentre, the less able, the confused, the easily misled.
In the current system they might as well fix a target on themselves before they go in to sign-on.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some perfectly decent advisors, who are under considerable pressure from management to achieve ‘expectations’, as to how quickly they clear their own customer list from the unemployment register.
I volunteered some time ago in a charity with an ex-DWP employee, who had resigned in disgust when the current system came in.
So I heard all about the dreaded Personal Improvement Plan, monthly meetings with a superior, and the eternal ‘stats’ question. It is a highly micro-managed job, backed up by a relentless barrage of DWP training, and what is little more than thinly-disguised propaganda about the unemployed and their various ‘attitudes’.
In some cases this inevitably leads to a lack of civility that would not be tolerated for a moment in any other area of society. But this is now what we have come to.
“In some cases this inevitably leads to a lack of civility that would not be tolerated for a moment in any other area of society.” That’s it. I always think that ultimately, people who work in these places and say these sorts of things are channelling the prevailing rhetoric of the day. Sure, these people can deal with difficult people. I go to these places all the time. I’m under no illusions. Some people who sign on are difficult and have a lot of problems. Others are not difficult. Like everything, there’s a mix. But that’s not the point. The point is that advisers are there to provide a service, not to lord it or to pass judgement in public (and doubtless in private). It’s the sort of contempt that you think about when you read of the workhouse spikes etc.