Category Archives: Carework

The benefits system actually causes serious mental health problems

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In my latest podcast episode, we take more piss out of Liz Kendall and Keir Starmer’s barely-watered-down plans to cut PIP and disability benefits.

We talk about the fact that one of the reasons that people claim PIP for mental health problems is that life is so difficult for so many people. Wages are low and rents are impossibly high, and people can’t cope. Hardly a surprise, is it.

Why don’t Kendall and Starmer focus on that?

 

We also talk about the fact that a lot of people can’t work because the support they need doesn’t exist.

I talk to Megi in the podcast. Megi is the mother of a profoundly disabled autistic 8-year-old. This girl is bladder and bowel incontinent, non verbal and has violent meltdowns every single day. She barely sleeps.

She is dangerous to herself and others. She can’t be left alone for a second, including through the night. Megi had to leave a good job to become her daughter’s fulltime carer. She now gets a measly £300-ish a month in carer’s allowance. Great.

Liz Kendall will protect disabled people who are “most” in need from benefit cuts? Do me a favour.

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My latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut disability benefits and support money:

“Forget Kendall’s bollocks about protecting disabled people who are “most” in need (whatever that means) from her vicious benefits cuts.

Because the truth is that governments actively go after people who are most in need.

 

I would also like say that it is my considerable experience that when you cut support money for sick and disabled people, a lot of them just get sicker and often, you know, die – as opposed to rushing out and enthusiastically looking more work or whatever it is that Liz feels greater poverty motivates sick and disabled people to do.”

#Disability benefits have already been destroyed, Liz friggn Kendall

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As a person who has been campaigning for benefits and decent housing for all for more than 20 years, I have to ask – does Liz Kendall not realise that the job of destroying disability benefits and disabled people has already been TOTALLY done? 14 years of Tories mate.

It is already very, VERY hard to get PIP thanks Liz. How about you try it. And it is also very difficult to get benefits which don’t require you to work when you cannot, or to regularly attend useless jobcentre ‘courses’ on putting a CV together for the 1,00000000th time. Give me strength.

Here’s me ranting about that. Enjoy and please rant yourself.

And in case anyone who knows eff all turns up here to say that disabled people who really need support still get it – do me a favour. People who are most in need are the people whose support is targeted most aggressively, because the government feeling is that those people can’t fight back.

If you want a good example, let’s take a moment to remember the Tories’ slaughtering of the independent living fund not so long ago. That fund paid for 24/7 care support for profoundly disabled people who required that support to live their lives. The government went after them anyway.

So – time to piss off, Liz. You’re playing an old tune which was garbage in the first place.

And if Liz actually wants to hear from a real person, here’s Niki, a mother of a disabled son, talking about the absolute farce that has been trying to get benefits and support for her disabled son. She explains that getting this support is actually now her full time job. She also says that most people she knows give up trying to get benefits and housing help because it’s just impossible.

Nurses and NHS workers will protest for pay on 8 August. They should be rewarded with money as well as clapping…

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This Saturday (8 August), NHS staff will hold protests for pay – as well they might. They were excluded from Rishi Sunak’s recent public sector pay rise deal.

I sat in on a call with NHS workers and protest organisers last Saturday. There’s a lot of anger around, which is hardly surprising. Hundreds of health workers have died from coronavirus this year – a toll we may well not have seen had Boris Johnson got around to lockdowns and making sure people had adequate PPE.

This weekend’s (socially-distanced) protests are largely being generated and organised by staff themselves. According to staff on last Saturday’s call, one reason for that is that unions have been too slow to move on the issue. People decided to take things into their own hands. How often have we heard that?

Anyway. Can’t wait to see Boris Johnson out clapping for protesting NHS workers on the 8th. Here’s a list of protest events.

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Download a pdf copy of my book

My 2020 book “Abusing Power” is a collection of interviews with people who needed benefits and housing help in austerity.

You can access a pdf of the book here.

The book goes behind the scenes to jobcentre & homelessness meetings and shows how people’s experiences of the austerity state shaped their politics and thinking.

Thanks to Aditya Chakrabortty for the shoutout on the book in today’s Guardian.

It’s time to pay careworkers proper sick pay. Stop trying to paper over the f*cking cracks

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Here’s another covid-19 clusterf*ck to add to the pile – this one is about careworkers and Statutory Sick Pay:

Someone recently showed me facebook posts in which a ridiculous carehome manager said that they wouldn’t use the government-issued Infection Control Fund to fund full pay for careworkers who were off work and isolating with covid symptoms. As many of you will know, a lot of careworkers are only entitled to Statutory Sick Pay when they’re off sick – SSP being a paltry £95 a week that absolutely nobody can live on. Careworkers certainly can’t live on it and so they go to work when they’re sick. They take illnesses into work with them.

The Infection Control Fund is a £600m whack that Boris Johnson’s dozy government belatedly set aside in May for councils to distribute to carehomes in their boroughs – Matt Hancock or some other Einstein having finally cottoned onto the fact that careworkers with covid-19 symptoms who were only entitled to SSP’s £95 a week would continue to attend work and spread coronavirus, because they couldn’t afford not to.

The idea was that carehomes could use the ICF to (among other infection control measures) pay full wages to careworkers who were off work and isolating with covid symptoms. A far better idea, of course, would be to admit that SSP of £95 a week is an absolute disgrace and to always pay everyone full wages when they’re off sick – with covid or otherwise – but nobody important wants to admit or address that. Elites and employers the world over live in fear that if sick leave pays enough for people to live on, the serfs will simply pretend that they’re ill and groove away on one long beano. This fear is particularly prevalent among care home brass for some reason. They seem to think that inside every careworker is a goof-off just waiting to take the piss and party. Carehomes have been cutting “too generous” sick pay packages for careworkers to the statutory minimum for years.

Thus, the Infection Control Fund – a thin paper to stretch over another yawning central crack. Needless to say, at the local level, interpretations of the use of the ICF have been intriguing – ie absolutely random and often a circus. This ALWAYS happens when government attempts to address a major structural problem (such as Statutory Sick Pay) in a crisis (such as covid-19’s razing through carehomes) by lobbing a handful of cash at it and hoping for the best.

The problem is that you don’t always get the best, no matter how much government hopes for it. The social media screenshots I received of a conversation about the ICF with a carehome manager were certainly an eye-opener. The manager in that dialogue said that they wouldn’t use ICF money to pay full wages for careworkers who were off work with covid symptoms, because it wouldn’t be fair to careworkers who were off sick with illnesses other than covid (the ICF is aimed at careworkers with covid symptoms, or who’ve had a positive test, etc). That manager in that post said the choice was a “moral” one – ie that it would be unfair to pay full wages to one group of sick careworkers, but not to another.

As someone who has written about cuts to careworker conditions for more years than I care to recall, I am confident that this argument is a pile. Over a  decade on the scene has taught me that finance, as opposed to morals, tends to be the motivation for management actions at carehomes. Let’s think about this for a bit. If careworkers were allowed to isolate at home on full pay for 2 weeks, a carehome would have to find and pay replacement staff. Some councils are apparently helping some carehomes cover some of those costs during covid, but they can hardly all be doing that everywhere (I’ve been checking through council ICF plans to try and understand who is doing what and with what). Then, there’s that ever-present carehome terror of setting dangerous precedents by paying careworkers decent sick pay. If careworkers get to experience decent sick pay once, they might get cocky and ask for it again. They might even demand that all staff receive their full wages when sick, all of the time. Continue reading →

Question: How did carework end up in such dire straits? Answer: outsourcing

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I’m back. I’ve finished my book on austerity – more on getting a copy at the end of this article.

This article is about careworkers. Careworkers’ dreadful pay and working conditions won fleeting attention earlier this year when the coronavirus started wiping out carehome staff and residents, but alas – big media has moved onto new thrills. That can’t be the end of the story, though. Things have to change. Careworkers and carehome residents have been treated like garbage for years:

There is a problem with writing about attacks on careworker wages and working conditions over the past decades or so: I have too many examples to choose from.

Every carehome worker I met in the last decade was on a picket line in that first instance, fighting to protect already-meagre careworker wages from attacks and cutbacks. For as long as I’ve been writing, careworker wages and conditions have been targeted by a particularly witless brand of neoliberal: local councillors (of all political stripes), MPs (ditto) and the boards/trustees of private and third sector care companies who’ve been united by two of our era’s more perverted beliefs: 1) that care can be provided on the cheap and 2) if you achieve this cheapness by slashing careworker wages and standards, care can turn a profit.

Spawned in this manure, the stories are always, always the same. It all starts when care services, in one form or another, are outsourced from councils, or the NHS, to private or third sector companies. In the following months and years, managers of these companies cut careworker wages and sick-and-annual leave allowances, and direct that money elsewhere. Careworker contracts that were based on public sector wages and conditions – wages and conditions that private care companies swear they will protect – are, needless to say, quickly trashed. New carework starters begin on much-reduced wages and leave provisions – the bar set so low that it more or less disappears.

This model is so standard that you can cut and paste examples straight into it. Take the Fremantle careworkers in Barnet – a group of carerworkers who I first met on a picket line in 2007 and at plenty of strikes in the years after that. These long-time Barnet carehome workers (most were women) went home one day to find a letter from the Fremantle Trust, the company to which Barnet council had outsourced carehomes and the careworkers’ jobs.

That letter did not bring good news. The Trust told the the careworkers that their pay would be frozen and their all-important weekend enhancement pay rates removed. Many of the careworkers relied on that after-hours enhancement pay to meet their bills and mortgages. They hardly earned a fortune even with that money. Losing it was a catastrophe. The sums were simple enough – careworkers’ jobs no longer paid the bills:

“Some people are down three or four hundred (pounds) a month,” Fremantle careworker Carmel Reynolds told me at that time. Reynolds been in the job for 23 years at that point. “People organise their families around [that money].”

There was more, of course. There always is. The Fremantle Trust told the careworkers that it would also cut their annual leave allowances and slash their sick leave to the statutory minimum – the very same first-3-days-without-pay statutory sick leave “package” that many are convinced helped to fuel covid-19’s blaze through carehomes in 2020. Careworkers can’t afford to take 3 days’ sick leave unpaid, so they go to work when they’re ill. Fremantle careworkers were pointing that out even in 2007.

True to pompous form, Fremantle management told the shocked careworkers that they could either sign the new contract, or leave. Then, management rubbed the careworkers’ noses in it a little harder – managers told careworkers that if they were really worried about money, they could try and make their stolen wages back by working extra shifts. More work for less money – Fremantle Trust management seemed to reason that careworkers would be grateful for such a gig. No matter that many of the careworkers had children at home and would suddenly have childcare costs that they couldn’t cover. No matter either that the destruction of careworker wages and working conditions was grossly unfair:

“I said [to Fremantle managers] – how do you expect us to be able to cope…?” careworker Lango Gamanga told me. “They [Fremantle managers] said we could do more hours to make up the money… but what about the quality of our life – our daily life?”

Of course – careworkers’ quality of life is rarely a concern in these scenarios. Concern about workers’ quality of life was certainly nowhere to be seen in another battle I’ve picked from my list: the 2014 Care UK support workers dispute in Doncaster. That was the year that Doncaster Care UK workers took weeks-long strike action in protest at – you guessed it – wage cuts in the form of the removal of enhanced weekend and night rates, new-starter pay cut to £7 an hour and – again – cuts to sick leave.

As ever, this shambles started with privatisation. The Doncaster workers – they worked with people with learning difficulties – had their jobs transferred from the NHS to Care UK when the service was outsourced to Care UK. It didn’t take Care UK long to target their new employees. Implying that the careworkers had been spoiled by their NHS wages and working conditions – “annual holiday… for some people is close to 7 weeks on top of public holidays,” groused Care UK learning disability service boss Chris Hindle with the faux outrage that these people specialise in – Care UK proposed wage cuts that saw the Doncaster workers facing losses of £300 and £400 a month – just like the Fremantle workers

At one strike action, careworker Mags Dalton told me the wage cuts were so severe that she’d have to leave her flat and her job, and move back in with her parents in Newcastle while she found another job and saved up for the deposit on another flat. The Care UK cuts meant that she’d lose about £400 a month. Her rent was £465 a month. She couldn’t afford to keep paying:

“I made a life for myself in Doncaster with friends that I love and a job that I love. I only signed up for the house a year ago. I moved in on the 26th of June last year and the 25th of June this year, I moved out. How did that happen?”

It happened for the same reason that it always happens: when services are outsourced, money is re-routed from frontline staff. At Doncaster, Care UK executives tried to argue the usual toss – that cuts to workers’ wages were necessary if the rest of the business was to stay afloat financially. Curiously, senior staff and executive incomes appeared to be exempt from this do-or-die belt-tightening. Bridgepoint Capital, the private equity firm that owned Care UK, had managed to find around £14m for bonuses to senior staff while careworkers were facing pay cuts of £400 a month. Care UK was also reportedly expecting to make a profit of around 6% for the Doncaster contract. Careworker wages were obviously key to this windfall.

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