I try to be patient about these things, but have run out on this one.

Am sure people have seen this (last week’s standout No Shit Sherlock headline):

“Sanctions ineffective, jobcentre staff say.”

A PCS survey showed that “jobcentre staff do not believe stopping people’s benefits encourages them to look for work.”

Right. We know that sanctions are punitive and pointless, but it is useful to have confirmation of this from the people who implement them:

“Echoing the government’s own research, in a survey of our members who work as jobcentre advisors, 70% of respondents said sanctions had no positive impact.”

And

“In the survey, 23% said they had been given an explicit target for making sanction referrals and 81% said there was an ‘expectation’ level.

Almost two thirds said they had experienced pressure to refer claimants for a sanction inappropriately.

More than one third stated they had been placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP) for not making “enough” referrals and 10% had gone as far as formal performance procedures.

The performance system can lead to dismissal so this kind of pressure is a thinly veiled threat to people’s jobs.”

There we are.

My question: What next, Mark?

The PCS needs to pull finger, fast. I say that as a friend. I think.

You don’t have to be a great analyst to understand that the government’s unachievable Help To Work scheme will increase the pressure on jobcentre staff in a terminal way. We’re seeing pretty bad scenes as it is. As readers of this site will know, I’ve spent a lot of time at jobcentres lately, talking to JSA claimants about their experiences in those centres. They already report a poisonous atmosphere as staff and claimants fight each other over sanctions and jobsearch requirements. I’ve certainly heard about confrontations to which the police have been called.

The PCS seems to get this:

“The stricter regime has led to an increase in violence and threats, with 72% of respondents reporting an increase in verbal abuse and 37% seeing an increase in physical abuse.”

Can’t see those numbers changing in a way that will help staff, I have to say. What I can see is the entire jobcentre “function” being handed over to G4S, or A4e, or whoever. That will be a nightmare. Privatisation inevitably is and those companies are, as we all know, as dodgy as they are voracious. The great irony is that a privatised setup will probably prove easier to fight. That is – amazingly – the point that we’re at. Activists can target a private company and turn the brand toxic – witness the impressive campaign against Atos. By comparison, fighting this era’s government departments without serious public sector union action (ie lengthy strikes and an ongoing refusal to follow government orders) is yielding very thin results.

Hope the PCS announces strike plans soon. There’ll be nothing left if it doesn’t. This government is not big on negotiation. Union leaders are taking a seriously long time to get that. I mean – it’s been four years. I do wonder how long do these people plan to wait. I also wonder what they are waiting for, exactly. More death?

Longer article at Open Democracy with interviews from people on jobseekers’ allowance around the country. They talk about sanctions, the utter uselessness of the work programme and the reasons why jobcentres are in no position to make Osborne’s ridiculous Help To Work Scheme happen:

“After barely five minutes the jobcentre doors open and a young man bursts out, raging. He is as furious as hell. He is screaming ‘Wankers’ and ‘Fucking Cunts’, and spitting as he shouts. We all stand still and watch him – the unemployed workers’ group members, me, people walking to and from the jobcentre and people standing at the bus-stop across the road on Cambridge Avenue. We’re all half-waiting for a punch-up and for a moment, it seems that we’ll get it.

“I’ve just been sanctioned for 13 fucking weeks!” the young man screams as he stamps down the jobcentre ramp. “Thirteen weeks! I’m going to come back here with a fucking hammer!” I wonder if he will. Thirteen weeks is a very long time to go without any income. I know that I couldn’t afford three months without money coming in and I’m not on JSA. Clarence, who has a relaxed manner and an ability to put people at ease, steps forward to say something. The unemployed workers’ group helps local people with problems like sanctions. Maybe this guy could come along to the weekly meeting? I step forward and ask the young man if he wants to talk about the sanction. He absolutely does not. A jobcentre adviser has just told him that he’ll get no money for three months. “Why the fuck would I want to talk about it?” he shrieks as he disappears towards the high street. “I’m coming back here with a fucking hammer!””

People leave jobcentres with problems, not solutions. I don’t think I’ve seen a shambles to beat it, and I’ve been around. Person after person reels out of these jobcentres, often with folders full of official paper – unsigned letters demanding attendance at we’re-not-telling-you-what-this-is-about meetings, sheets instructing people to attend work programme classes in one part of London and to drop jobsearch sheets off in another (it’s basically ‘taking pieces of paper for an outing’, JSA claimant Angela Smith told me just this week), numbers to call to chase sanctioned benefits, or to switch to ESA, numbers to call that are literally never answered, forms to fill in for emergency loans with no suggestion that they’ll be granted, pointless instructions to apply for as many as 20 jobs a week, often using the notoriously useless Universal Jobmatch, and so on. I have yet to meet a single person who has found a job through their jobcentre. Everyone I meet who finds work finds it themselves, through ads and contacts. Adding Help To Work’s daily signings-on and workfare obligations to this mess will be a stretch. I can’t imagine that jobcentres will be able to keep on top of it.

Read the rest here.

I went back to the jobcentre last week with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group – just a few days before George Osborne’s already-discredited Help To Work scheme is rolled out. Thought I’d ask JSA claimants what they thought of the scheme. Only one person I spoke to had heard of it and she said she’d refuse to participate in it.

Help To Work looks like a shambles to beat all the others, including the work programme. A lot of people doubt that Help To Work will even get off the ground. You can read more about the government’s failure to find “partners” for the scheme’s workfare component here. With Help To Work, people who’ve been unemployed for the long term will apparently “take part in community work placements, such as clearing up litter and graffiti,” (that’s workfare), attend “daily signings at the jobcentre,” or find themselves in receipt of “intensive support to address their problems,” whatever that means. The DWP’s recent pilot study on Help To Work yielded extremely thin results, even by the DWP’s standards. “Here’s what happened,” the Guardian said last week. “Exactly the same number in the control group – 18% – found themselves jobs as those doing the forced community work. Just 1% more found jobs from the group with jobcentre support. In other words, workfare didn’t work.”

Brilliant.

I’ve got a longer article coming out on all this later this week (it covers the utter failure of workfare schemes around the world), so more on that soon. For now – I’ve posted below two transcripts from long interviews with JSA claimants I did at the Kilburn jobcentre last week. I’ve been collecting these interviews with JSA claimants for the past three months (there are links to the others at the end of this post). I’m posting these latest ones to show again how utterly dysfunctional the jobcentre system is for people who use it. These places are a nightmare. They are certainly a nightmare as far as administration goes. I can’t imagine how they’ll cope with Help To Work’s mass daily signings-on and workfare-attendance coordination. JSA claimants already show me all sorts of pointless paperwork they receive but don’t quite get: jobcentre letters demanding attendance at we’re-not-telling-you-what-this-is-about meetings, sheets instructing people to attend work programme classes that they can’t afford the fares to, lists of numbers to call to chase sanctioned benefits, numbers to call that are never answered (I’ve stood with people for ages while they’ve rung).

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Another week and another pile of crap from Esther McVey on JSA claimant conditions. This week – hopeless guff about newly-unemployed people having to prepare CVs (most of the many newly-unemployed people I’ve talked to at jobcentres have one, because they’re stuck in the low-pay, insecure work cycle and are always looking for jobs), set up an email address and register on the notoriously useless Universal Jobmatch website – the one that people at jobcentres describe to me as “a waste of time. Most of the jobs in there – they don’t bother to check the computer to see if the jobs in there are already filled. Every two weeks I go there, the same old jobs are in there. It’s just rubbish.”

Doesn’t stop McVey, though. Rubbish is her thing. “This is about treating people like adults and setting out clearly what is expected of them so they can hit the ground running,” she blathers. Bollocks. It’s about nothing of the kind. It’s about introducing a few more steps for already-under-resourced, dysfunctional jobcentres to fail to administer properly, which will make it more difficult for people to get their first, much-needed benefit payment and could lead to sanctions as McVey’s own press release happily notes. All these things will do is keep people off the benefit books. People won’t show up in benefit stats. That’s what this garbage is about. People already have to leap through hoops to get their crappy £71 a week and they are already perfectly aware that there are expectations, thanks. They already have to participate in absurd form-filling exercises which take god knows how long and never lead to work. I’ve spoken with people who have to show that they’ve searched for 25 jobs a week – with at least some of these jobs being roles that are advertised on Universal Jobmatch, which of course leads nowhere. I’ve spoken to people who’ve gone on work programme-type courses which have involved ripping sheets of paper up and putting them back together again to learn about teamwork.

Here are some of the people I’ve spoken with in the last two months – about their struggles with JSA and the experiences they’ve had trying to deal with a system that is designed to push people off benefits and nothing else. This system is certainly not about getting people into jobs, let me tell you. It’s about putting the fear of god into everyone about unemployment. In my experience, people have to sort the getting jobs part out themselves. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has found work through their jobcentre. Absolutely everyone I’ve spoken to so far who has found work has done so off their own bat, through their own contacts. I’ve got more of these interviews to upload as well. You’ll get the point from these ones, though – this is a system that already sets people up to fail. McVey simply adds further conditions and further options for failure and sanction.

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Back to the Kilburn jobcentre with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group. Have been doing this for a month or two now (links to earlier posts at the end of this one). We’ve been to Kilburn, Neasden and Marylebone. The sessions involve me talking with people on JSA about sanctions, jobcentres, the work programme and the whole dysfunctional Jobcentre Plus system, and the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group talking with people about all those things and handing out leaflets about the group’s weekly support meeting.

That weekly support meeting is growing in size. This is definitely worth a mention. The group is made up of people who are either affected by the government’s so-called “welfare reforms”, or have been affected by those reforms and/or who know a great deal about benefit forms, jobsearch and benefits. They also know a lot about the way that bureaucrats on power trips can operate. The group’s catchphrase, if you like, is “Never Attend Anywhere Official Alone” – wise advice that is catching on if recent meeting numbers are anything to go by. More and more of the people who the group talks to at the jobcentre leafleting sessions turn up to the weekly meeting for advice, and to find someone to accompany them to meetings with jobcentre staff and a wide range of advisers and officials. As far as I can see, self-organised groups like this one are taking on the work that jobcentres should be doing, rather than creating – they’re solving people’s problems, explaining appeals processes, helping people make some sort of sense of the nonsensical paperwork and instructions they’re given and so on. Accompanying people to their benefits interviews and meetings is an important part of making sure that officialdom stays in line.

God only knows I wouldn’t go to a jobcentre meeting alone. The more time I spend talking to people about their jobcentre experiences, the more I see how completely screwed the whole thing is. And okay, we all knew that – but seeing it in action, if action is the word, is still something else. I stand outside of these places and watch person after person reel out – they’re baffled by sanctions, confused by letters which call them to meetings with no explanation, bewildered by extreme jobsearch requirements, frustrated by a (hopefully doomed) Jobmatch “technology” which serves up the same jobs week after week, not at all sure of their benefit entitlements generally, and wondering why being unemployed deserves such punishment. I suppose we all know that is the point of the exercise – to reduce jobcentres to the point of non-function and/or to a stage where a political “justification” can be made for outsourcing. Part of that plan is also to make the thought of unemployment and signing on utterly terrifying to everyone else. The interesting thing is that the majority of people I’ve spoken to are actually employed a lot of the time. They’re just employed in low-paid, insecure jobs which end as suddenly as they start and pay so badly that people can’t save for lean times. Or for anything, for that matter.

Anyway. Here are some of the people I’ve spoken with at the last two sessions.

Ravi, aged 22. Trying to sort out a sanction.

Ravi said he last worked in January. He works in sectors like retail and banking. He wants something permanent, but is struggling to find permanent work. As of Monday, he was still trying to sort out a sanction – he was waiting to go into the jobcentre for a meeting where he hoped things would be worked out. Continue reading →