So the idea here is that everyone has to work all the time, but only some people get paid for it. Never mind the living wage, never mind the minimum wage – if you lose your job you have to keep right on working, except that now you don’t get paid. It should barely need saying that all the normal arguments against workfare still apply: 1. When are people being forced to work without pay for 30-40 hours a week supposed to find the time and energy to go and look for real jobs? 2. Why would companies participating in workfare schemes bother to employ anyone if they can rely on a steady stream of state conscripts who’ll have to do it for nothing? 3. Any job category incorporated into workfare schemes will sooner or later vanish. If people are made to sweep the streets for benefits, full-time street-sweepers will be fired and not replaced, particularly if it can be done under the guise of outsourcing council services to the private sector to save money. Companies will bid impossibly low for the contract, everyone will be sacked and invited to reapply for new jobs (quite possibly on zero-hours terms), and the gaps will be plugged by the forced-labour battalions, leaving fat profits to be made. 4. The notion of poverty as a crime is entrenched. Workfare is essentially indistinguishable in concept from community-service sentences for criminals, and anyone finding themselves unemployed, ill or disabled becomes immediately stigmatised and cast into a vicious spiral making the prospect of finding paid work less and less likely. 5. As huge amounts of money are sucked out of the public sector (diverted to private-sector shareholder profits), the economy stagnates, because poor people have even less money to spend. Growth is choked, providing the excuse for more austerity and ever-tighter restrictions on benefits, with more and more workfare, and we go back to step (2) and repeat. The poor are squeezed until the pips squeak, again and again, and the wealthy get wealthier. We’re watching, before our eyes, the creation of a new serf class. In the space of less than a generation (essentially in the 21 years since the 1992 general election), Labour have undertaken the journey in this article’s headline, sending Britain hurtling back towards the Middle Ages. It’s terrifying to watch. Enjoy your weekend.
Posted on: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 09:46:51 +0000
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