More stories from the jobcentre:

To Clacton now – and a long conversation outside the jobcentre with Paul, who is 56. There is a transcript from that conversation below. Paul has mental health problems. He has been in and out of street homelessness for some years, in different parts of the country. “I’ve been travelling for about 35 years,” he says. His face is seamed and his teeth are broken. He says that he was sanctioned for six weeks about 18 months ago when he was homeless in Manchester. He was born and raised in Newcastle.

Now living in Clacton, he must sign on every day at the jobcentre. This daily-signon setup is utterly pointless. It won’t lead to work. It can’t. Nothing goes into it, or comes out of it. It’s a process for the hell of it. Paul says he goes into the jobcentre each day and waits around until jobcentre staff “check all that out and say “I’ll see you tomorrow” and tell me a time to come in tomorrow and that is it. It’s a pain in the arse. It’s pointless.” Indeed. So many of these jobcentre exercises now are meaningless: exercises to be gone through to meet a criteria, not a useful result. I’ll be posting more on this next week. “I don’t know what I got to come up every day for. I just say thank you very much and then go.”

During our discussion, Paul – like so many people I speak with now – says that Britain has reached a crisis point. He thinks that Britain has become weak. More specifically, he says the problem is that Britain is filled with immigrants who think that Britain is easy. So. I hear people say this sort of thing more and more now. It’s important to keep pointing this out – the extent to which this dislike of immigrants has taken hold. I used to hear it every now and then. These days, I hear it all the time. I hear it in plenty of places other than Clacton, too. I hear it in places where there’s not enough to go around – at jobcentres and from people who can’t find work, or housing. And it is hard to see how things will improve while a terrified political class devotes itself to keeping stride with Ukip, rather than, say, to addressing the housing crisis in a genuine way.

“Enoch Powell was right, you know,” Paul tells me. “It will spread like a cancer. He should have been prime minister. But lots of people are worried about it [immigration]. They are taking our things off us. We get in trouble for having our things – for having crucifixes in our rooms. [But they] are walking up the street with their face covered with a mask. [When you have a face veil on], I don’t know who you are or what you’re going to do. And they moan about people wearing crucifixes.”

So.

Says Paul:

“I have to sign on five days a week. Every day, I’m here at a different time and all. It’s twenty to two today and then I’ve got to go upstairs. They took me off the sick and all. I can move and all that, but my mind is sick. I got mental problems. They took me off the sick and said “you can work.” I can move about. I can have a conversation probably.

“I was on the sick because of the depression. I went for the medical and they took me off. That was in 2010 and they knocked me appeal out. So, I’ve got to come up here and jump through their hoops, which makes my depression worse. But if I don’t, they will stop my money. I have been sanctioned before for not getting [applying for] five jobs a week and I was on the streets at the time and all. I was living in a nightshelter – this was in Manchester. They sanctioned me, because I wasn’t applying for five jobs a week. My priority then was getting something to eat and somewhere to live. You know, instead of jobhunting. It’s somewhere to live, innit. I’m all right [for somewhere to live] at the moment. Continue reading →

I’d be keen to hear back from anyone who has experience of this:

I spent a couple of hours today talking with someone who is a new JSA claimant in North London. This man started his JSA claim a couple of weeks ago. It’s the first claim he’s made. He filled in an application form online and then was sent a text by the DWP some days later which called him to a meeting at a London jobcentre in the first week of August.

He assumed that the meeting would be one-to-one with a jobcentre advisor – a meeting where an advisor goes through the application in detail with the claimant and jobsearch requirements are set – but instead found that the meeting was a group session with about ten other new claimants and one G4S security guard who sat in the room the whole time. This man was shocked to find that this first meeting wasn’t private. He found the experience confusing and worrying, and wasn’t sure what he agreed to in it.

He said that he was certainly concerned about asking questions and sharing personal details and financial information in front of a group of strangers. He wasn’t the only one. He said that “a couple of the people there looked very nervous and anxious at the prospect of a group meeting,” and that people were worried about confidentiality.

He also said that the two jobcentre staff who ran the meeting “said that the new claimant meetings were now ‘unfortunately’ group meetings rather than individual meetings.” He has another meeting coming up soon and thinks the new meeting is a one-to-one, so he wasn’t sure if the group session was a direct replacement for a new claimant one-to-one. He was hoping that his claim would be finalised at the upcoming meeting. He was concerned about papers that he signed at the group session though. He was worried that he may have agreed to a claimant commitment without properly talking about it, or having time to think things through. He wasn’t sure if that had happened and hoped to find out at the upcoming one-to-one. He didn’t want to make a fuss and not sign papers at the group session. He also didn’t want to ask many questions or reveal his financial situation in a room full of strangers.

I’ve put a transcript of our discussion below. I’ve found some evidence of these new claimant group meetings online and a woman I know told me today that she’d accompanied someone to another London jobcentre where new claimant group meetings were held. The woman she was with was excused from that group meeting, because she didn’t speak English well. She was given a one-to-one session with an advisor instead that day.

The man I spoke to today said:

“Beyond the complete lack of confidentiality and privacy in a group meeting, it proved highly impractical and inefficient to address questions of ten different claimants. New claimants obviously have very different and unique cases. I can’t imagine how anyone would want to talk about sensitive or difficult issues in that environment.”

People were also told to put their identifying documents and bank statements into a box for photocopying and had their names read out for all to hear when the documents were returned.

I’ve asked the DWP for more on this and I’d be interested to hear from anyone who knows about these meetings. You can contact me here. People I’ve spoken to about this have real concerns about confidentiality and also about the appropriateness of a group environment for people who need to discuss sensitive personal information. I’m also interested to know why these meetings are held at all and why a G4S security guard gets to sit in listening to people’s personal stories. Continue reading →

Posting this because I can.

Here’s Iain Duncan Smith’s weekend place, which was occupied last year by UK Uncut and Disabled People Against Cuts in a protest against the bedroom tax. It’s a very nice pile indeed. It comes with a tennis court, the sort of lake that Mr Darcy might emerge from in clinging pants, happy lambs and a very large house. Very. If you must lie around somewhere thinking of ways to piss the rest of the exchequer away on Universal Credit, then this is the place to do it:

Compare this if you will with the tiny one-room Kilburn flat which I visited on I visited on Monday.

No lakes or tennis courts here, alas. This flat is occupied by a 51-year-old man who is out of work at the moment and must sign on at the local jobcentre. He has been sent on the work programme. He has mild learning difficulties. He has not found a job through the jobentre, even though he has a good work history.

He was very depressed about the flat and it was easy to see why. The room was so small that it was difficult for the four of us who were there to fit into all at once. There was a bed, a broken fridge, a small fridge in the middle of the room that this man had bought to keep his diabetes medication in, and a broken oven. There was a second, smaller oven with two hotplates sitting on top of the broken oven.

There were no windows as such in this room – just a door area that led to a path. The man had complained to his landlord about the mice and cockroaches that live under the broken oven, but nothing had been done.

I’d say We’re All In It Together, except that is getting old. Even as irony it’s getting pretty old.

And so to Hammersmith jobcentre this week as part of the ongoing leafleting sessions I’m taking part in with the Kilburn unemployed workers’ group. We went to Hammersmith to talk with people there who are on JSA and who are dealing with sanctions, to see how things were going at jobcentres outside of Kilburn.

We were also there to see if we could find anyone who was long-term unemployed and participating in the government’s rubbish Help To Work scheme – George Osborne’s “you must sign on daily at the jobcentre and/or take workfare jobs,” concept that was announced to such fanfare a few weeks ago. We’re not seeing much evidence that Help to Work is underway if I’m honest. That’s no bad thing, given that the whole idea is bollocks – it is based on the widely-discredited notion that workfare leads to work. We certainly found people who were long-term unemployed at Hammersmith as you will read below, but we didn’t find anyone who was on the Help to Work scheme. We haven’t been able to find anyone who is on Help to Work up Kilburn way either. The fact that so many organisations refuse to participate in workfare could certainly be one of the reasons for this. Long may these shambolic workfare schemes fail.

Anyway – to long-term unemployment. This first interview transcript goes out to the Labour party – especially members of that party who think the best way to beat Ukip is to quasi-endorse anti-immigration rhetoric. You’ll see what I mean when you read the article below. I hope members of the Labour party note that the man quoted in this transcript made a couple of anti-immigrant remarks, and comments about drug and alcohol users. Members of the unemployed workers’ group I was with simply responded by saying “don’t let the government and MPs turn us against each other,” and “if someone is on benefits, I don’t judge them in any way,” and the guy we were talking with seemed to take those points on board. I have no idea what he said or did after that, but the point is that he was prepared to have the conversation at the time.

So. My point to Labour worthies, like they care, is that this is a conversation worth having with people. There are alternatives to jumping on the anti-immigration bandwagon when people turn on immigrants. One very good alternative – this one certainly appeals to me – is to remind people that they should loathe a ruling elite that lines its own pockets at everyone else’s expense. Labour won’t do that, of course, because its own elite is part of the ruling elite that is implicated in the kind of larceny that makes the rest of us hate the ruling elite – but you see my point. It’s possible to have different conversations with people. There are alternatives to rolling over for fascism.

Anyway.

Here is:

Daniel, Hammersmith. Has been signing on for six years. Said he was still trying to get JSA money refunded after winning an appeal against a sanction. He was confused about the amount of money he’d been repaid after his sanction and about the amounts of money he now received.

He said:

“Some of them [in the jobcentre] are the nicest people in the world, but some of them are the biggest arseholes in the world. There are women in there who would help you literally until you are blue in the face, but there are some people who will turn their nose up at you as soon as you walk in. Just because they get wages, they think they can look down at me, innit. It’s a joke.

“They got me one of them already – a sanction. I had to appeal against it. You might be able to answer me this question. When I got sanctioned, they sanctioned me for three months, I appealed against it this year and I won my appeal, but they only paid me back with hardship pay. They didn’t give me my actual benefit money. If I won my appeal, I should get my jobcentre money, not hardship money? It was basically half the money that jobcentre would pay you. When they told me about the sanction, because I actually done it with a manager in there, they told me that I am not entitled to hardship pay and I got to go for it [see out the sanction] with no money at all. So, I appealed against it, because it wasn’t my fault. They had made a cockup with the whole system. It worked out that I only got £395 back after three months. So, they owe me money innit, but no matter what I do, I basically can’t get that money back off them. No one in there is willing to help me all. They’re telling me – you got paid didn’t you? Continue reading →

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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