I recently went to one of the Stockport universal credit caseworker strike pickets. Not a bad morning, all told – picked up a few learnings re: the reasons why people still find the universal credit system a washout.
Certainly, a lot of things fell into place when 2 striking caseworkers told me that at any one time, caseworkers at the Stockport centre have 400+ universal credit cases each. Actually, they have about 1400 each, but estimated that generally, about 35% of them are live.
“WHAT?” I yelled, unsuitably. “You can’t keep on top of that.”
Obviously, the strikers knew that they couldn’t keep on top of that. That was why they were on strike. Too many cases, too few staff and every day on the job spent trying, and often failing, to keep on top of the sorts of numbers that you’d need half a morning just to count up to.
“We work too hard for too little money…they [the DWP] are not replacing any staff when people leave, retire, or when they move on.”
Sounded about right. It’ll be news to nobody who has been following nursing and paramedic strikes, and endless other walkouts, that this government does not invest in public sector workers, or their wages, or their health, for that matter. Think the cabinet is a bit short of members who know what it is like to work past the point of exhaustion.
The striking caseworkers described the average day to me. They fire up their PCs and open their case manager dashboards. They go through new claims – new applications for universal credit that have to be checked and started. They deal with the cases about payment problems – a big part of the day, I imagine, given the number of people I meet at jobcentres, or talk with on whatsapp who say they’ve been paid the wrong amount, or can’t pay their bills after the DWP has hoiked money out for debt repayments and so on. Then, there are the blocked cases – the applications, or investigations, that are on hold while missing paperwork, or medical notes, or responses from other authorities, or whatever it is, are sorted out.
“Then, if we’ve got time, we can get to our journal messages,” one of the strikers said.
“Invariably, we don’t get to the journal messages,” the other striker said.
