Not content with ignoring the outrage of homelessness charities and threatening to throw under 25s without stable family homes on the street, (Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves apparently considered it too), and threatening to hound or even sanction people in involuntary part time work of any age who can’t increase their hours, Cameron has continued his party’s policy to treat the next generation – who he presumably expect to care for him in his old age unless we have robots for that – like vermin with thinly veiled contempt.
This time he has elaborated on his workfare policies, and brought in forced labour for 18-21s unemployed for 6 months. Even though under 25s may also face either forced labour or often useless privatised courses after 6 months already.
“The claimant will be expected typically to undertake at least 30 hours’ community work a week and 10 hours’ looking for jobs.”
That’s £1.91 an hour (plus Housing Benefit if applicable and not abolished) by the way and will – like present workfare programmes for and unpaid internships – surely end up replacing minimum wage work, leading to more unemployment. There’s already been cases of people being made redundant then ordered back to the same firm as workfare.
If there is thousands of 30 hours’ a week community work vacancies that needs doing/can be conjured out of thin air, maybe the state should pay at least minimum wage and offer them as actual jobs instead of using virtual slave labour backed up with threats destitution and homelessness, and treating the unemployed like criminals on community service.
Indeed that’s more hours a week than criminals have to do often.
Although as the Claimant Commitment at present claims that jobseekers should spend something like 35 hours a week seeing work when on the dole (ludicrous in much of the country where it doesn’t always take that long to advertise to all feasible advertised vacancies available), the policy directly contradicts that too.
As a comment I saw posted on Facebook stated:
“If you love your children, demand more for their future. Do not let the state turn them into slaves.”
Occasional thoughts of an English Politics graduate 