The politics of the workhouse
Well stripe me pink. In the face of all the odds, Margaret Hodge answered one of my questions in her Webchat on the proposed Incapacity Benefit reforms.
Margaret, you plan to take one million people off incapacity benefits. Where, do you think, will those jobs come from?
Now unfortunately, her answer wasn’t as thoroughgoing as the one provided by Unity…
Actually a million off incap in 10 years is perfectly achieveable.
Remember these are government targets and therefore not quite what they appear.
Around 850,000 will come of incapacity benefit in the next 10 years without the government doing anything - that’s the number due to retire over that period, most of whom are people, men in particular, whose working life ended when Thatcher rips the guts out of British manufacturing.
That leaves 150,000 to find, give or take the mortality rate - some of theme are genuinely sick y’know.
Thw real squeeze will be on keeping new claimants off long-term incap to begin with - once someone’s been on there for more than two years they’re next to unemployable anyway. A sweep will pick up a few lazy twats along the way, but the real push will be on people in those first two years, especially those with ’soft’ illnesses like depression.
To be honest, I’m not sure what I was expecting. The slim, naive hope that to have one of my questions answered would push out an astroturfer proved vain. I got the “aren’t we great” answer an astroturfer would have expected:
Margaret replies: We have been very successful in our stewardship of the economy and have enjoyed consistent and steady growth since 1997. There are now 2.3 million more people in work today than there were in 1997. I’m always talking to economists and other experts about the prospects for jobs and most people are very confident that we will continue to grow jobs in Britain. That doesn’t mean that people have a job for life today as they were used to in the past. Some of the old industrial jobs have gone but new markets, new businesses and new jobs are always emerging. So today we see more jobs in the service industries and in places like health and education.
The translation is either “I don’t know” or “I could tell you but you’re not going to like it”. “Service industries” sounds like call centres, shelf stacking and McJobs to me. Piano tuning for the blind. I’d also be interested to know what jobs she has in mind in the health and education sectors. I may be being overly cynical but I doubt they’ll be on the fulfilling end of the scale.
That’s why I’d never make it as a politician. I’m too romantic, too utopianist, too naive. When I say I want people to be empowered I mean I want them to be happy and fulfilled. I spent years in a job that made me at first miserable and in the end unwell. I’d spare others from that if I could.
I was struck by what Chris Williams said in Jamie Kenny’s comments, that, with this Government, we are dealing with…
[t]he self-made (wo)man can never quite understand why the rest of us didn’t make it up the greasy pole.
When Tony Blair says he want to empower people you suspect he means making sure their hamster wheels fits just right. You suspect he’s never enjoyed the thrill of an illicit sickie and is suspicious of those who have.
It’s the same with Charles Clarke. When, as Education Secretary, he said he thought medieval history was “ornamental” and learning for its own sake as “a bit dodgy” he managed to sum up the New Labour ethos in one contemptible, misanthropic gobbet. A man of his narrow, unimaginative outlook couldn’t square those activities with the overriding “modern” concept “human capital”.
Anybody with an ounce of romance in their soul or interest in the human race and how it ticks (ie, anybody outside the New Labour project) should have been horrified. That’s New Labour for you. They’re done with history. They’ve put it behind them. But as the old adage goes, those who do not learn from history are like the dog with nothing more on its mind than wanting to hump your leg: doomed to repeat themselves until somebody hits them.
Now, even I’m not that naive that I can’t see that we simply must have someone on the end of the phone when we need to check our bank balances at two in the morning, just as I know there will be blood on the streets if we’re prevented from being able to buy a carton of milk at midnight. I know we need people to do the mundane. I also know that initiatives like Pathways to Work are nothing to do with empowerment and allowing people to “liberate their talents“.
Isn’t there an interest in a more contented working population with all the attendant benefits to business of lower staff turnover and higher staff morale (and higher revenues for the Treasury) as well as being able to strike people off the list marked “Dosser” and putting them on the list marked “Drone”? Or am I being utopianist again? Or Chauncey Gardiner?
I know from experience that the welfare system isn’t geared to helping people with aspirations beyond menial jobs. It’s barely geared to helping people full stop. When my IT career ran into the sand and I fell into the clutches of the Department of Work and Pensions, desperate for advice and guidance, I beat my head against institutionalised apathy and ignorance. I didn’t see one adviser for six months - she was off sick - and there was nobody else with her knowledge to help or so I was told. Another adviser told me that he wasn’t in a position to explain the tax credit system to me because, although he’d been on the training course, “it was boring and I can’t remember any of it”. (I was also told that newspaper are classed as a luxury. And they wonder why the poor are disenfranchised - but that’s a story for another time.)
When I finally decided I would embark upon a new career and go back to school to study journalism, you should have seen the glazed expressions I met from the civil service’s finest. They wouldn’t have been any more befuddled if I’d announced that I’d hit upon exposing myself to children as a brilliant money making scheme. Those with career aspirations, those who set their sights a little bit higher, are regarded as freaks.
The system breaks down. The benefits couldn’t be transferred to my partner while she took care of the kids and I studied (the course was more than sixteen hours a week which, while it didn’t class as work, didn’t class as job-seeking either and that meant I was no longer entitled to benefits) because I, and only I, was the “client”. Help with course fees and materials was a no as well. We scraped and begged and borrowed instead.
I would say many people who are unemployed or on IB want a career, to stretch themselves, to go home happy that they haven’t wasted the quality hours of their lives doing a job they hate. To my mind, however, those who want to escape their circumstances while realising their aspirations are best served cutting out the middle man and doing it under their own steam.
That’s if they’re educated, wilful and resourceful enough and determined not to be brought low by a system that doesn’t give a shit. I’d suggest that many on Incapacity Benefit (and indeed, Jobseeker’s Allowance) won’t have those resources to draw on.
Much is said of New Labour’s doctrine that divides the poor into the Deserving and the Undeserving. The Undeserving should get nothing we’re told. As someone who’s been at the sharp end let me tell you, under this lot, the Deserving don’t get much more other than badly designed, incompetently implemented and cruelly-apathetically operated sops to middle class consciences and are told they should be grateful for it.
I’m white, middle-class, educated and earned a considerable salary in the year before I was made unemployed. It only takes a couple of twists for you to find yourself at rock bottom and it’s a long, soul-destroying climb back. I’m surprised, given the way our system works, more people don’t fall through the cracks completely. People with contempt, either implicit or explicit, for the poor would do well to remember that. The unemployed aren’t all sitting in the park with bottles of cider or watching Richard & Judy, and many of them don’t want to settle for minimum wage drudgery.
You’ll be surprised to hear I don’t share Margaret Hodges’ optimism. I hope anybody on Incapacity Benefit with dreams of more than shelf stacking won’t either.
Posted on February 3rd, 2006 at 11:35 am
| See also • Webchats: the new sliced bread • Good morning, job seekers! • Coalition of the willing |
• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe |
|
• Filed under New Labour, UK politics |
• |
Good post, Justin.
I think part of the issue is possibly that the Department of Work and Pensions frontline is a terrible place to work. It’s almost a McJob itself for quite a few of the staff, who therefore are not actually trained to help anyone who might have their own aspirations, let alone encourage their clients to develop them.
I worked for a while somewhere that was a charity aimed at getting people who were long term unemployed back to work - ie, they’d been out of work for longer than twelve months. I was responsible for IT training and helping them with their ‘jobsearch’. The whole set-up was aimed at getting them in to some sort of permanent employment at the end of their twelve months. It didn’t matter what it was, so long as a tick could go in the ‘this person has gone on to employment and/or training’ box and the charity could therefore draw down the appropriate funding. It also didn’t matter how long they stayed in the job afterwards.
There was no focus on getting them in to employment they could sustain, nothing to encourage them to aspire to anything. I felt I was fighting a losing battle and hated it so much I eventually got sick and left.
Personally, I would literally rather starve than sign on and be subjected to that kind of humiliating treatment. Which is presumably why they *make* it so humiliating. Odd how there is actual DWP policy that states “We aim to make people feel so demoralised and unclean by the signing on process that they all go away and leave us alone”.
Good post. It resonated with me :).
You sya watching Richard & Judy like it’s a bad thing.
That was a fantastic and moving post. Watching mt father have to reapply for a job at 55 he knew he would never get (but one that he had done for years) profoundly changed me.
I have been reading your blog for a while but I don’t know this: Are you working as a journalist now? Was the sacrifice worth it? I hope so.
My favourite Job Centre story (from a while ago, admittedly): I go in and do the interview or whatever, and the interviewer asks if I’ve looked for any jobs yet. I tell them that I was going to look in the paper (Media Guardian section, Mondays). No, they tell me; they meant on the board behind me. I’m thinking: there won’t be anything there for my interests and qualifications, and I more or less say so. But they insist, so in the end I had to stand in front of the board, count to 10 or whatever, move, count to ten, and move again - and then go home, having actively looked for work.
Justin, you have my sympathy and agreement. New Labour are clearly (a) building on the Tory legacy of cutting benefit entitlement to lower the figures; (b) moving towards a system where moral worth, and not economic circumstances, will determine welfare paymnents. The shit will really hit the fan if ever there’s a recession.
What redpesto says - my Job Centre experience was along very similar lines. But then they started telling me I should go on training courses (”An introduction to Windows 95″ and the like) to make myself “more employable”. At which point I handed them a copy of my CV, explained what an “MA” was, explained what “with Distinction” means, and told them fairly flatly that it was only a matter of time. They shut up after that and stopped bothering me. Sounds like I was lucky…
Having been made redundant from my nursing job in the NHS (!) I went to the Jobcentre to ask what I should do now as I had been in employment without even a day’s break for 31 yrs. I did not know what I should be doing. My experience was v similar to yours.
When I asked whether I was entitled to any unemployment pay they said - did I have a husband in work? (Yes) Well tell him he has to keep you till you get a job. Never mind that I had paid full Nat Ins for all that time. Sexist as well as incompetent.
Just had to get out of there - felt humiliated and dirty. Company policy clearly.
Sad to say I’m seeing nothing here I haven’t heard a hundred times before.
To add to the anecdotes I can throw in a couple of good ones.
One was my mom’s next-door neighbour who pulled in for a restart interview - this is few years back - and got talking to another guy in the same position while he waiting.
We he got to see the advisor, what he was told was that he should go on a training course to become a bricklayer, if fact that was all the advisor could talk about until he stopped him, pointed to the guy he;d talking to while he was waiting and suggest that the advisor tell him that brickies were is such high demand and he’d been a brickie for twenty years and couldn’t a job.
The other one, which I saw first hand, was two guys who went in to sign on and make a first claim.
All was going well until the grunt behind the desk got to the bit about asking them where they’d be prepared to work and how much they’d work for, at which point the guy who’d gone first happily announced that he’d work anywhere in the world but wanted £3,000 a week.
Of course, that was it for the Jobcentre grunt - as far he was concerned this guy was being unreasonable and pricing himself out of getting a job, so he wasn’t going to be entitled to anything…
Anyway, I’d been down there with client dealing with a different matter (once spent six months doing wlefare benefits advice) and so went over to see what the problem was - listened to the grunt harp on about this guy being unreasonable and not genuinely looking for work, took the guy to one side and asked him a couple of questions.
Then I told the grunt to shut-up and fetch me a manager, spoke to them and, voila, claim accepted no questions asked and no problem over the business of wanting £3,000 a week.
As it turned out, these two guys were tunnellers who’s been working the Channel Tunnel contract. When that finished, they took some off and lived off what they’d made on from that job until the next contract came up.
By the time they came to sign on as they were starting to run short of cash, they already had a new job lined up in somewhere like Malaysia and the going rate with hazard pay was £3,000 a week - they were only looking to sign on for a month to tide them over until they flew out.
So in their case, £3k a week was a perfectly reasonable rate for what they did - case closed…
…but yet more evidence of the jobcentre’s inability to deal with anything out of the ordinary.
I have given you a link from my blog http://razzamatazz.wordpress.com and also from my website http://www.topcomedy.co.uk I would appreciate if you could give me a link from your site to either or both of my sites if you feel you can manage it
Regards
Terry Ravenscroft
I agree with the sentiments of this post, and can’t help but see this as the fundemental failing of the new service industry - boosted by politicians who see the lower classes as nothing but a resource for the rich to exploit.
I graduated back in 2003 with a decent degree in English and have since struggled severely to get any kind of satisfying job - or even bearable job. I have never claimed any benefits, and in the end spent some savings before selling my soul to the call centre industry. I have now spent two years in an industry which is the most horrific abuse of staff, causing numerous cases of stress, depression and sheer mental strain.
I currently work in HM Revenue & Customs, and their approach to staff is ‘if you don’t like it you can fuck off and someone else will be grateful for your job’. I will be leaving September to go to Cardiff Uni for a one year PGCE course in further education, to become an A-level teacher. This is with a mortgage, and the Welsh Assembly have not even decided if they will be offering a bursary this year for the course, plus the government have now brought in fees for the course, fees of over £1500 to try and get a job to help Tony meet his ‘education, education, education’ promise.
I’m an ordinary person who now has £12,000 student loan to pay back because I attended university, have now decided to go into teaching and am looking at the prospect of upping the loan to cover the fees and cost of living whilst training, and all for a starting salary of just £19,000 - only £7000 more than what it cost to go to university.
Education is not affordable for the average person, otherwise I would have already completed an MA. Aspirations are not encouraged, certainly as a civil servant you are judged purely on meaningless statistics, rather than ability, intelligence or common sense. Questioning in the civil service (and the absolute farce of merging the Inland Revenue with Customs & Excise)is seen as dissent, and they mock you as crazy, or they claim that work is just a game to be played, and that we should all just play along.
But work, like life, isn’t a fucking game, and spending a large part of the best years of your life in a depressing job is reality for the majority of people in the world.
Call centres are HELL.
Game my ass. (Holden Caulfield)
I have been on IB for 3 years now. I am desperate to get back to work and be productive again. The problem is in my field I now have to have accreditation. To get that it will cost me £475. So I asked for a grant from the DWP as £77 IB is all get and nothing else comes into the household. They are not sure if I can or can not have it but what I need to do is get the accreditation and then submit a claim. If I had £475 at the moment I would but I don’t and no prospect of it. in the first month of employment I would pay more than £475 in Tax let alone Tax and NI. Surely giving a grant like that is a no-brainer.
However if I want numeracy training or literacy training at a cost of £1000 per week (that’s what the local provider charges) I can join 15 others some only there because if they doesn’t they lose benefit and are disruptive or uninterested. I have a degree in mathematics and A grade English A level (from 1977 when it meant something beyond paraphrasing Janet and John). Teaching unfortunately is not an option.
Joined up government the minister said - more liked gummed up government
Is Margaret Hodge a really clever writer — or totally dense?
I’m always talking to economists and other experts about the prospects for jobs and most people are very confident that we will continue to grow jobs in Britain.
But Margaret, most people aren’t economists and other experts [in what?]. What *do* the experts think? As Justin says, best to keep quiet about that …
Redpesto: My favourite Job Centre story (from a while ago, admittedly): I go in and do the interview or whatever, and the interviewer asks if I’ve looked for any jobs yet. I tell them that I was going to look in the paper (Media Guardian section, Mondays). No, they tell me; they meant on the board behind me. I’m thinking: there won’t be anything there for my interests and qualifications, and I more or less say so. But they insist, so in the end I had to stand in front of the board, count to 10 or whatever, move, count to ten, and move again - and then go home, having actively looked for work.
The current job I am doing (its new media related - although the precise firm and details shall remain vauge) for now is not bringing enough money in and is a bit lonely (I work from home). The solution, I thought, was to go to the jobcentreplus website (once they had re-engineered it for firefox linux users like myself) and look for part time temporary work.
Anyway, I applied for around 4 or 5 vacancies in the retail sector. I heard back from only two, both of whom refused me an interview. I have two years experience of working in a cinema and have done crappy shop jobs all my life. I thought “its christmas, they’ll be crying out for people”. My ass.
I now think that my honesty in stating my degree, which is regrettably a first, probably struck a nerve somewhere. Either they thought they’d have to pay me more, didn’t want degree level staff, balked at my age (they’d have to pay me more than 17 year old college kids), didn’t like the sound of me, or thought I would leave early. Which I would - hence me applying for temporary work.
After that experience, and a stint at a cinema in Birmingham where admitting to my degree result seemed to be the equivilant of taking a dump in the lobby, I’ll never bother with jobcenterplus and shitty jobs again. God knows what will happen if I end up signing on…
Ah yes, the old “temporary to permanent” lark. Yes, I’m looking for a temporary job. Oh, we’re sorry, it’s temp-to-perm - we’ll hire someone as a temp who’s lookin g for a permanent job and keep them as a no-rights peon for as long as humanly possible.
All right then, I’m looking for a permanent job. Oh, we’re sorry…you’re not going to be staying here for three years or more now are you?
Re: slef-made (wo)man
Ferdinand Mount, cousin to David Cameron’s mother but not too much of a fuckwit despite
sharing the genes, has written this book called ‘mind the gap’ where he argues that the single greatest evil of a meritocracy is that those who make it don’t see why everybody else can’t and those who haven’t feel like personal failures because they couldn’t succeed.
Katie, I’m with Nick Cohen on this. The trouble with a meritocracy is it becomes an aristocracy within a generation. Case for the prosection? Euan Blair being asked to present a Bafta.
Seems like most of you are on the same page as me - I have seen this all too many times.
Personally, I’ve been unemployed for several months, having completed by education in 2005. I’m having to pay a huge amount for professional training (£3700) because few IT companies want to take on “newbies” without industry experience - never mind that I’ve been building PCsnetworks for years on my own (I’m 19, by the way). However, there is a light on the horizon - EDS (a multinational firm) are interviewing me soon…
he thought medieval history was “ornamental” and learning for its own sake as “a bit dodgy”
Hgna hgna: remember Mr Blair’s “We need an education system that will produce the kind of people the economy needs”?
I was thinking that it would be useful to extend British degrees to five years, and for folk to study plumbing or something at the same time as music (my waster degree) or ancient Persian or whatever. Then we’d have some sensible way of funding a master’s . . .