This is a report from a new JSA claimants’ induction meeting I recently attended.

When people sign on in this part of London, their first meeting at the jobcentre is held in a group with ten or so other new claimants. They don’t start with a private, one-to-one session with a jobcentre adviser. They’re flung into a group for induction. There’s no privacy. At all. People hate it. The guy I went with to the meeting below didn’t even know his first meeting would be held in a group. People are told it happens because staff don’t have time now to cover everything in the one-to-one meetings that come at a later date.

I also wonder if these group meetings are done to totally discourage people from continuing with their JSA claim at all. This one I went to was a classic of screaming dysfunction:

It is late on recent Thursday morning at one of the north west London jobcentres and I’m sitting in a new JSA claimants’ group meeting, watching the jobcentre adviser in charge of the session totally lose it with one of the new claimants (there are about 12 new claimants and an adviser crammed into a very small and rather dark side room). The jobcentre adviser and the new claimant bloke are having a full-on shrieking-match, which they’ve been working towards since the session started. I’m guessing that the louder parts of it are now reverberating around the jobcentre.

The new claimant guy – let’s call him Mark – obviously can’t take being patronised, or tolerate bullshit in any form, and has decided to come out swinging (metaphorically on this occasion). And fair enough, too. I know for a fact that if I was siging on, there’s absolutely no way in this world I could put up with the high-handed, JSA-claimants-are-on-the-make-and-must-be-kept-in-line presentation that we’re stuck in front of today. If I had just lost my job, this thinly-masked institutional hauteur would be needling me to the brink. It is anyway. The adviser’s address is full of You Lot Better Pull Finger directives such as: “If you have no commitments… we’d expect a lot more effort from you. And to be honest, you should expect a lot more effort from yourself.” The adviser chucks in plenty of poorly-disguised sanctions threats, too (even though nobody’s actually signed on yet): “The less effort we feel that you’re putting in [to find work], the more chance there is of your jobseekers’ allowance being affected,” and “the more vague your information, the more chance that your jobseekers’ allowance may be affected,” etc, etc. This pitch starts to work on your brain like nails down a chalkboard: “Your Jobseekers’ Allowance May Be Affected.” On and on it goes and my word, it grates. Without a doubt, the assumption from the get-go is that people sign on to sponge. Continue reading →

I spent several hours today with a group of people who are just about to finish their first six-month stint on 30-hour-a-week workfare Community Work Placements (CWP). CWP began last year as part of George Osborne’s pointless, punitive Help To Work scheme. With CWP, people on JSA are forced to work for 30 hours a week for six months in charities and local organisations. They have no choice. Refuse to work for free – you’ll be sanctioned.

The people I spoke with today have spent the last six months at Haringey charity Embrace UK where they have worked on – among other things – data sorting and entry, administration, sexual health advice for young people (no DBS/CRB checks – I wrote about that here), youth development schemes (ditto), presentations for new arrivals and homeless groups, marketing support, IT development and radio production. This is a huge range of jobs for which people should be properly paid. The fact that so many tasks are now being done by people who are made to do those tasks on workfare schemes ought to be of concern for everyone. I’ve said it before: paid work as a concept is under real threat as people who are forced to work for nothing carry out more and more jobs. As one of the men on CWP at Embrace UK said to me when we spoke late last year – people in so-called white-collar work may not be particularly aware that “their” kind of job is being done now for nothing. “They’ll have doctors and lawyers on workfare soon,” he said. You laugh, but you wonder as well. As I’ve said before as well, I think people who aren’t yet affected by these things have a vague (and snobbish) idea that workfare means a bit of weeding in public parks (a job that also should be properly paid, by the way). I don’t think everyone grasps the reach that workfare increasingly has.

Anyway. The people I spoke with this morning had one big question. They wanted to know what would happen to them when this first six-month placement ended. Nobody I spoke to had a paid job to go to (CWP = another winning government welfare-to-work scheme. Not). Their concern was that their nasty workfare-placement company Urban Futures would shove them into a new placement with another charity. They worried that the next place would be extremely unpleasant – that the work would be filthy and hard (which is no joke, particularly when you’re in your 50s) and the management cruel. There is reason to fear, if you ask me. I’ve spoken with people on CWP workfare at Haringey charities who are sent into the streets to do bucket collections. They must stand outside in all weathers with buckets and collect money. “I did a couple of days charity bucket collection down out the front of the shops,” a guy called Graham told me outside Urban Futures just before Christmas.

Another person I spoke to today had spent time on CWP at the Marie Curie charity shop at Highbury and Islington (Marie Curie, as we know, supposedly pulled out of workfare in 2012, but seems now to take people on CWP by – erm, accident. Marie Curie no longer answers my questions about this. Ahem. They’ll keep. More on them soon). That person (aged in their 50s) had to “steam clothes and stand on the shop floor putting clothes out. You were on your feet all day, with the manager pushing us to work harder and harder.” Continue reading →

Hmm…

I was talking very recently with a group of people who are on a 30-hour-a-week workfare Community Work Placement (CWP) at at Haringey charity. Their workfare provider is the G4S subcontractor Urban Futures, finder of these 30-hour-a-week placements on which people must work or lose their benefits.

Anyway – one member of the group made a startling revelation as we spoke. This person said that until late December 2014, they’d been on a CWP workfare placement in the Marie Curie charity shop in Highbury and Islington.

The thing with that is – Marie Curie supposedly abandoned participation in forced workfare schemes a couple of years ago as a result of successful Boycott Workfare campaigns (shoutout to the Void here who reminded me MC had left).

So I rang Marie Curie and sent through some questions asking how somebody on CWP had ended up on a workfare placement in one of their shops when Marie Curie didn’t participate in workfare schemes, or take people on workfare placements.

The answer I got was intriguing.

Marie Curie’s media guy told me yesterday that Marie Curie does not support work placement schemes where people will lose their benefits if they do not participate – but that sometimes they ended up taking people on such schemes by… accident.

Right.

This bloke said that these accidents come about because disingenuous organisations and work programme providers come to Marie Curie and ask if the charity will take volunteers in its shops without telling Marie Curie that the “volunteers” are actually on forced workfare placements. He talked about the Highbury and Islington case in such a context. “We do try wherever possible to check if we are approached by companies or organisations that are offering us volunteers… but [if] they’re not quite honest with us….and if we do find that this is the case, we do end the relationship with that organisation… We will in many cases offer that volunteer a chance to volunteer with us, but under the deal that they won’t lose any benefits if it is not for them.”

He also said that sometimes, Marie Curie was “not made aware until after the volunteer has left that they were on one of these programmes.”

Intriguing, as I say. I must say that I struggled to imagine a scenario where a lot of people wouldn’t know immediately that someone was on a forced placement, because a) people on such a placement would talk about it and b) they’d be getting someone at the charity to regularly sign their attendance timesheets so that travel costs could be claimed, but it could be that I don’t have much imagination. It does all make you wonder, though. It has, for example, made me wonder how often these sorts of accidents happen and how many people turn up and stay on in workfare placements at organisations that have supposedly pulled out of workfare. At the very least, it makes me wonder how well organisations that have pulled out of workfare police their own anti-workfare policies and exactly how they do it. I think I’ll set aside some time on the weekend to do more wondering about all of this.

I’ve also rung Urban Futures to ask how a CWP provider like themselves – just as an example – would view the sort of placement accident described by Marie Curie. It certainly would be interesting to know Urban Futures’ view of unscrupulous work programme providers who aren always entirely honest about placement motives. I don’t always have much (any) luck when I try to get hold of people at Urban Futures, but you never know. This could be the big moment. I’ll let you know if anything comes through.

In the meantime, stay on alert for any more – err, workfare placement accidents.

Update: Sunday 18 Jan: Urban Futures sadly didn’t return my Friday call, so we’ll have another go this week.

As we gear up for 2015 and an election that will be at least in part about abusing people who claim benefits and are out of work…

We went back to the infamous North Kensington jobcentre yesterday where people were complaining again about a jobcentre adviser there who they say abuses power. “Got some sort of vendetta against claimants…” one woman told me. “They [jobcentre advisers] don’t understand how we have to live – not pay our rent some days, or take from our gas money some days, only to be thinking to ourselves “do we have a roof over our heads? They are drawing money, so they don’t understand how we have to go through hardship.”

This woman, who has been unemployed now for some years and is getting older and worried about it, was especially angry about the daily JSA signon regime at North Kensington. She must travel to the jobcentre every day to sign on for her JSA and she must do this for three months.

Like most people I speak with, she says that being forced to travel to the jobcentre daily to sign on is ruining any chance she has of finding a job. Like most people too, she felt that the jobcentre was pretty much going out of its way to prevent her from finding employment. I have to say I agree with this line of thinking a lot of the time now. I certainly agreed with it on this occasion. There’s something very strange about the way these places are operating – if operating is the word. At its simplest – if the point of jobcentres was to find people jobs, there’d be a lot more action along those lines, rather than endless obstacles. There’d be phones that people could use to call employers (so many jobcentres have got rid of onsite phones. People have to call employers themselves, with phone credit they do not have). Signon sessions with jobcentre advisers would last more than five minutes and there’d be dedicated support for people who wanted it. There is not. Jobcentre advisers would ring employers on behalf of claimants and set up job interviews then and there. They don’t. I’ve seen none of that sort of thing at the signons I’ve attended with people. It all makes you wonder. It certainly makes me wonder. One thing I’ve started to wonder in particular is if jobcentres like to keep a group of people unemployed for the long-term so that they can channel those people to work programme providers and into useless work skills courses, and keep the lolly flowing in that direction. Those are big businesses, after all, and they need bums on seats.

This woman must attend the jobcentre every day at a different time. Nobody lifts a finger to help her find work while she’s there. And more than that – in her case, the daily signon regime seems actively to have separated her from a drop-in centre where she used a computer, worked on her jobsearch and seemed to get a bit of help. “I haven’t been able to go to my drop-in centre [since I started daily signon]. My drop-in centre is so helpful. I had use of the computer and advisers there. They are a world of good to me, but coming here [to daily signon] means that I cannot get there, because my drop-in centre is [open] from 9 to 12… [For daily signon], I have to come in every single day and I don’t know from one to another what time it is. Today, I came in at ten o’clock. Tomorrow, I’m in at 11.05am. The day after, I might go back to 9am or 3.30pm. I don’t know.”

My first thought was – why not excuse her from daily signon? Why not call the drop-in centre and set something constructive up? As it happens, I know the answer to these questions. Everyone does. People tell me that the point of daily signon is destroy any chances people have of organising cash-in-hand jobs and earning a few quid on the side. Can’t have someone on the bones of their arse finding an extra tenner here and there, and feeling a little less desperate. People might forget that grovelling is supposed to be their main job when they’re out of work. The truth is that daily signon affixes people to JSA and their jobcentre in a very twisted way. They can’t plan anything else. Any other activity has to be organised around that signon appointment and at the last minute. By definition, daily signon can’t improve people’s chances of getting out, because it locks people in. I think the same of the 30-hour-a-week community work placements that I’ll be posting on shortly (have been spending time recently with people on those workfare placements). The overriding impression I get is that these things are designed to keep people who’ve been out of work for a while exactly where they are. Continue reading →

A few thoughts as we kick into the year. Interviews from people who’ve been sanctioned at the end of the post:

As you’ll no doubt have read, the work and pensions select committee meets this coming week to hear evidence about benefit sanctions, with sanctioning connected to crime and depression.

Okay. I suppose that hearing will at least draw attention to the sanctions problem and the extent of it. It’s the What Next part that I wonder about. A lot of people know how things are. I spent many hours speaking to JSA claimants at jobcentres in 2014 (have posted some of those interviews below) and at least some of those people had complained to their MPs about sanctions and their treatment at jobcentres. Like many people, I can tell you now that there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that stopping jobseekers’ allowance – already a meagre amount of money – to people who have nothing leads to crime and depression. You don’t have to look too closely to understand that that is the whole point of the sanctions/jobcentre/work programme exercise: to push anyone who struggles for work to the edge in one way or another and to terrorise everyone else into tolerating rotten pay and treatment just to keep a job. There’s very little mainstream opposition to that idea. I certainly don’t count this.

Three points of note from 2014:

1) Nobody I met ever got a job or even a job interview through their jobcentre. Not a single person. Everyone I met who found work did so through their own networks, applications and contacts. Jobcentres exist to administer goverment benefits policy and to channel people to the work programme and so-called skills courses, in my view. Wonder when jobcentres will be wholly outsourced.

2) Quite a few of the people I met who were signing on were actually employed for some of the time – on zero hours contracts, or short-term contracts, or on such low and irregular pay that they needed hardship loans and some JSA support. This is one of the many reasons why I find Labour’s ongoing justification of sanctions regimes in some form or other utterly misguided (I have other words, but am keeping it clean for the New Year). Pisstaking JSA claimants aren’t the problem. Pisstaking employers are the problem. That’s where the entire political emphasis should be. People I spoke to weren’t signing on for the lulz, believe me. They were signing on because it wasn’t possible for them to support themselves in an ongoing way at current rates and means of pay. Or they were stuck in workfare “jobs” that should have been paid and paid properly. Tinkering with sanctions policy hardly addresses the fact that sanctions in any form are about terrorising people into insecure, low-paid work and keeping them there. Let’s stop pretending that sanctions are about “mutual obligation” and other long-dated bollocks. Continue reading →

My word.

I unearthed this nugget as I went through emails on my glorious post-Christmas return:

You’ll remember that I’ve been trying to get information from the DWP about the ridiculous “work skills” and “employability” courses that JSA claimants must attend – you know, the courses where people have to roll marbles down a tube at a meaningful angle, or tear a piece of paper up and reassemble it with the help of other people to learn teamwork and so on. Some people even report being threatened when they complained about the (non) standards on this “training” to their course providers.

I’ve sent a number of FOIs about the costs and point of these exercises.

One question I asked was whether or not attendance on these so-called “work skills” courses was mandatory and if people had recourse if they wanted to refuse to attend. People regularly tell me that they’re forced to attend courses that have absolutely nothing to do with their line of work – or anyone’s line of work, come to think of it. Others say that they’re forced to attend courses that are very similar to courses that they’ve attended before. Often, these courses were completely useless the first time around. People wonder why they must return. They suspect the main lesson they’re learning is that when you’re unemployed, officials can humiliate you – often in repeat fashion – however they like.

Anyway. Interesting answer from the DWP on the compulsory nature of this. Basically, the department told me that people could refuse to attend these useless courses, as long as they were happy to be sanctioned for refusing. If people wanted to say that the course proposed for them was pointless and a waste of everyone’s time and money, or that they’d been on a near-identical course with no result – they could do this while appealing their sanction.

Brilliant. What could be fairer:

“A claimant may refuse to attend a course for the reasons you mention, but the consequence of doing so is that they may be subject to a benefit sanction. Claimants have recourse if their benefit claim is sanctioned. They can lodge an appeal against the decision. As part of consideration by a DWP labour market decision maker, claimants are given the opportunity to provide details of why they refused to attend and within this they could include their view on the relevance of the course in improving their prospects of employment.”

Pretty sure that this is a long way of saying “people must attend these useless courses, or we’ll cut their fucking money off.”

This part of the response suggested the same thing:

“Where it is identified by the DWP work coach that a work skills or employability course is best suited to addressing the JSA claimant’s main barrier to employment, then attendance on the course is mandatory.”

So. You’re out of work and your jobcentre tells you to attend a “work skills” course. You tell the jobcentre that you’d rather not travel across town several times a week to roll marbles around, a) because you’re an adult and b) because you’d prefer to do something useful – for example, to look for a job using your own contacts because the jobcentre and your useless work programme provider have never once got you a single job interview. Your jobcentre adviser says “that’s absolutely fascinating” and then cuts off your benefit money. Who says this process is unequal?

Bet the companies that provide these courses at god knows what cost think the system is brilliantly fair. They get bums on seats (££££) and a group of captive, cowed “students” who they can threaten with sanctions – and more – if anyone in the group dares to complain about standards. Trebles all round there, comrades. It’ll be a Happy New Year for that lot.