On workfare:

Am making my way through several hours of interview recordings that I took earlier this year with three people who were on a six-month forced workfare Community Work Placement (CWP) at a north London charity called Embrace UK. With CWP, these people on jobseekers’ allowance had to work for 30 hours a week for six months on workfare in local charities and organisations. These JSA claimants had no choice. If people refused, they risked benefit sanctions.

Anyway – I thought I’d post the letter below.

This is a letter that JSA claimants on that six-month CWP workfare placement at Embrace UK asked the charity’s managers to write for people to take to their jobcentres in January this year. In these letters, Embrace UK asked jobcentres to allow the letter-holders to stay on at the charity as volunteers when the six-month forced workfare placement ended:

The reason that people on workfare at Embrace UK asked the charity’s managers to produce these letters to take to jobcentres? – they wanted to stay on at Embrace UK because the charity’s managers were civil and the workfare work wasn’t brutal. Staff at Embrace UK treated people on forced workfare decently. Being treated decently as a workfare worker was considered a monumental bonus and something to try and hang on to. The six-month workfare placement at Embrace UK was about to end. People were very worried about being sent on a CWP workfare placement at another charity. They could not be sure that they’d be treated well at a new placement, because they were workfare workers.

None of these people were doormats – quite the reverse – but they knew the odds on this scene. Workfare workers have very little power. They certainly don’t have much by way of workplace protection in reality. These people could complain about bad treatment, or refuse to attend a difficult workfare workplace if they really wanted to, but that sort of response would put people at risk of sanctions. All three people I interviewed in this case had been sanctioned at one point or another for spurious reasons. People knew exactly what it was like to have their benefit money suddenly stopped. Nobody was keen to go through that again if they could help it. That’s why people put a great deal of energy and effort into organising the letters that might convince their jobcentres to let them stay at a charity where they were treated like human beings.

This is the big worry: that people on workfare must hope for – rather than expect – decent work and decent treatment on workfare placements. It’s luck of the draw stuff. I wonder who is meant to monitor these placements for standards, and if they do. On the circuit, stories certainly abound of people on mandatory workfare placements being sent to charities where the work is gruelling and the management nasty. Being sent out in all weathers on charity bucket collection is something people dread (god knows I would): “I’m going out fundraising as well – doing bucket collection. I did a couple of days bucket collection down out the front of the shops,” an older guy called Graham told me when we discussed his workfare placement at the end of last year. His work programme provider, the notoriously unpleasant Urban Futures, had sent him on a CWP stint at a charity where he “worked” as a security guard and also went outside on bucket collections (he had a criminal record, as it happened. He hadn’t been CRB-checked by the charity and thought both jobs were interesting choices for someone with his recent background). The weather was freezing at the time of his placement. I know I wouldn’t have enjoyed being shoved out into the cold with a bucket on a threat of a benefit sanction. Continue reading →

From Disabled People Against Cuts:

Plenty of action planned for Tory party conference next week as disabled campaigners prepare to protest against austerity cuts.

“Cameron will not get to deliver his litany of spite and lies in peace.”

Amen to that.

Get more details here.

I’m guessing years.

I attended a Maximus face-to-face assessment for Employment and Support Allowance with someone about five months ago. It seems that person still hasn’t had a decision about their claim.

Maybe their decision letter got lost in the mail. Maybe it hasn’t been sent. Who can really say. Like so many people I speak with, the person in this instance doesn’t want to raise issues with Maximus or the DWP, because this person is concerned that Maximus or the DWP will respond in a negative way.

People on the receiving end of the ESA application process do not feel that they have a lot of power in it. And they’re right. They don’t.

This is a page from a jobsearch sheet that belongs to a JSA claimant whose fortnightly JSA signon sessions I’ve attended on and off for about 18 months at two jobcentres.

I’m posting this to show you the pointlessness of some of these jobcentre signon sessions and of the DWP’s jobsearch regime in general:

The sheet shows evidence of some of the 14 jobsearch activities that this man must carry out each fortnight to continue to claim his jobseekers’ allowance – so, 14 job applications and CV-drops into shops and supermarkets, and that sort of thing. (I think it’s 14. Seems to vary a bit). This man has some literacy problems and copies words from one fortnight’s sheets to the next. He carries the same spelling mistakes and disordered text over in these records. Nobody’s ever pointed the spelling mistakes out, or said anything about the confusing text. You wonder if anyone ever reads any of it (I don’t wonder, really. I don’t think anybody does read the sheets and if they do, they clearly don’t think the details count).

The thing about the jobsearch activity in these sheets? – nothing ever seems to come of it. The DWP’s jobsearch and Claimant Commitment requirements mean that this guy must show this fortnightly evidence that he has looked for work – but that’s it. The jobsearch exercise ends there. This man must fill his sheets in, but nothing is done with the information that he writes. I’ve never seen an attempt made at a jobcentre to help this guy turn the listings in his sheets into actual work. No phone calls have ever been made on this man’s behalf to the employers he lists – at least, not at the signon appointments that I’ve attended. I’ve never seen an attempt to follow up on the applications that he records. Nobody asks from one signon appointment to the next if the job applications that he listed in previous weeks amounted to anything. Every two weeks, this guy takes his collection of sheets into the jobcentre for an adviser to look at. The adviser glances at the writing, asks how the jobsearch is going and sets another signon appointment for two weeks’ time. That really is about it.

We go in for these jobcentre appointments every fortnight. Some JSA claimants must go in every week. Others must go in every day if they’re at a jobcentre which insists on a daily signon regime. These really are trips to the jobcentre for no reason. Every six months or so, an adviser will try to push this guy into voluntary work or onto the Work Choice programme. He goes on some programmes and not on others. Either way, he’s back at the jobcentre when the work programme is done. We carry on with the fortnightly signons. This guy has whole booklets and sheets filled out exactly like this: pages and pages of poorly-spelled text about jobsearch activities that nobody pursues, or even reads a lot of the time.

Anyway. This is how long-term unemployment looks, at least as far as I can see – endless paper and endless trips to the jobcentre for the hell of it. Nothing changes, or shifts. We all just get older. I suppose that IDS .gets off on that. Or something.

Okay – this is a minor rant, but I’m having it.

I went to Plaistow jobcentre yesterday to accompany a young woman to her JSA signon appointment.

I couldn’t find the woman when I arrived, so I asked the G4S security guard if I could stick my head around the door on the first floor to see if she was already there.

“No,” he said.

“Could I just see if she’s there?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No,” he said.

That was the end of that.

These G4S people get on my nerves very badly. They can be obstructive in the extreme. I would like to know who they answer to. They seem to go a long way to make sure that JSA claimants are denied their right to accompaniment to meetings. Last time I attempted to accompany this young woman to an appointment at this jobcentre, I didn’t even make it as far as the ground floor entrance. The G4S guards parked me outside the jobcentre with the young woman’s bike. They wouldn’t let her leave the bike inside the jobcentre for five minutes when she signed on and she didn’t have a lock for the bike (she couldn’t afford one), so I ended up standing outside on bike-guarding duties.

I am pretty sure that the guards enjoyed sticking me outside with the bike. I am also pretty sure that the guards like saying No, because they can.

It’s the little things, you know.

Picture: Bike

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On the topic of Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP “helping” sick or disabled people into work:

I’ve posted below a recording of a jobcentre adviser shelving a diabetic JSA claimant’s concerns when he says that he is ill, that his blood sugar is high and that he needs to get to his GP. I want to show you how quickly some jobcentre advisers can bat talk of sickness away.

I think this is important. As you will know, there’s a great deal of discussion about Iain Duncan Smith’s plans to push more and more sick or disabled people into work. There’s also a great deal of It’s All Fine bollocks coming from government and the DWP about the sort of support that sick or disabled benefit claimants receive from the DWP as they look for work, or are pushed into work (“jobseekers now have access to dedicated Work Coaches, who are trained to provide tailored support specific to their individual needs,” the DWP waffled in an email to me when I recently asked the department about jobcentre support for disabled claimants).

I hope that the recording on this page demonstrates the realities of some of this “tailored support.” The truth is there are times when advisers seem pretty indifferent to a claimant’s problems, or to tailoring a jobcentre meeting to a person’s individual needs. (To be fair, I suspect that many advisers are too busy to find time for this “tailoring.” Advisers have told me as much: “I used to see about five people a day. Now I see about 15.”). I think that the DWP has one aim and one aim only: to push people into voluntary work, or onto work programme courses. Everything else comes second – including health, I suspect. That message came over loud and clear at the meeting I am talking about. The JSA claimant’s ill-health was canvassed (briefly), but he was absolutely not excused from the meeting until the adviser had made a very considerable effort to sign him up for voluntary work and courses.

The JSA claimant in this post is an older man (he’s 52) who has a learning difficulty and is diabetic, as I say. He injects insulin three times a day (I’ve been to his flat many times and seen his fridge full of insulin). As soon as we arrived at this jobcentre meeting, he told the adviser that he felt unwell because of his diabetes. He certainly seemed unwell: his face looked sweaty and greasy, and he was irritable. He had recently been sick with the flu. The adviser clearly had doubts about this story – or, at least, decided that this man’s ill-health wasn’t as big a priority as signing him up for voluntary work. This claimant had cut the previous week’s appointment with the same adviser short for a similar reason. He told me that he’d been ill for a while. (We went to his GP’s surgery to make an appointment after this jobcentre meeting). The adviser instructed the claimant to manage his food intake properly in future. Then, she got down to the real business of the meeting (and presumably of the DWP): to push this man into signing up for voluntary work, or the work programme:

Continue reading →

This is a transcript from a recording I made a couple of weeks ago with a guy in his 50s who signs on at a North London jobcentre. This man has been unemployed for more than five years. He talked about the reasons why he’s had trouble finding work in the last five years – in general and through the work programme.

One of his problems is literacy. He finds writing a particular challenge. He struggles to spell properly without help. His job application forms are messy and often incoherent because of that. The basic aptitude tests that a lot of companies put people through these days as part of an application for work are beyond him. He never had to sit those sorts of tests when he left school to work at 16.

I meet quite a few older people who are on jobseekers’ allowance and who say that they have trouble reading and writing. A number of times, people have asked me to fill in their forms, or help complete their Claimant Commitment paperwork (this guy, for example. I accompanied him to a group Claimant Commitment meeting at his jobcentre earlier this year. He left the room when it came time to fill in the Claimant Commitment forms. It became clear when he tried to fill in the forms that he just couldn’t spell). It took me a long while to work out that people wanted help because they weren’t able to read and understand the forms. I didn’t realise how widespread these literacy problems were until about 18 months ago, when I started to talk to a lot of people at jobcentres who’d been out of work for the long term. I have wondered sometimes how many people are eliminated from the chance of work that they want because they struggle to read and write. I also wonder what sort of effort work programme providers put into helping people navigate these problems.

One to think about.

The man in the transcript began by talking about the work programme (he’d been sent on the work programme four times):

“Basically, sod all they did. All they did was sit you down, try to help you use a computer – but they walked away. I did job search on the boards, looking for jobs, talked about silly classes. That’s it. They didn’t do an awful lot. It was rubbish.

“I went [for a job as a warehouse packer]. I thought it was like a warehouse, but they wanted you to do a massive test for hours just for packing plants in Cricklewood. Really, I should have got the job just packing the plants, but they were making life so difficult for simple things. I had to do an English and maths test – and nah, it’s not worth it, because you’ve got to sit down and at the end of the day, you’re not going to get the job anyway. You’re not going to get it. They want you to use the till. I just wanted the job like packing the plants in the warehouse. I could use a till, but you had to do it [know the names of the plants] with the plants… it was too hard. If it had been just doing the warehouse like packing, then that would have been all right. I would have been fine. It was just making life very difficult for a simple job.

“That was from [the work programme]. I went there. A couple of places I went to, but some places [potential employers] just mess you around. They never got back to me.

“I went to a nursing home in Enfield which I really should have got in there, because it was just a simple kitchen assistant job. I should have had that job in that nursing home. No – the reason they give me was Oh, there were some mistakes in the application form and the spelling and all that. But I really should have had that job in the nursing home. It was a very simple job. Enfield. It was not very far. I went there really early as well…I should have had a permanent job a long time. [It was just] a few mistakes in the application form. Basically, it was washing up, helping making the sandwiches, preparing the food – sort of job that I’ve done for years. That’s why I was very angry. I should take action. A couple of mistakes and they don’t give it to you just for that. You know – basically helping out with food for the elderly people. Their lunch and their breakfast, which I should be doing. I should be working there for a long time. It’s ridiculous.” Continue reading →