The unemployed can also levitate by simultaneously trampling one another

[danohu]

The coalition have apparently figured out the root cause of unemployment. It's not that there are more workers than jobs, or that a small army of victims of the cuts are now joining them on the dole. No, they're just lazy; a few weeks of forced labour will sharpen them up, render them employable and thus employed:

where advisers believe a jobseeker would benefit from experiencing the "habits and routines" of working life, an unemployed person will be told to take up "mandatory work activity" of at least 30 hours a week for a four-week period. If they refuse or fail to complete the programme their jobseeker's allowance payments, currently £50.95 a week for those under 25 and £64.30 for those over 25, could be stopped for at least three months.
...
"This is all about getting them back into a working routine which, in turn, makes them a much more appealing prospect for an employer looking to fill a vacancy, and more confident when they enter the workplace. The goal is to break into the habit of worklessness."

I can't do much better than refer them to The Onion:

With unemployment at its highest level in decades, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report Tuesday suggesting the crisis is primarily the result of millions of Americans just completely blowing their job interviews.

According to the findings, seven out of 10 Americans could have landed their dream job last month if they had known where they see themselves in five years, and the number of unemployed could be reduced from 14.6 million to 5 million if everyone simply greeted potential employers with firmer handshakes, maintained eye contact, and stopped fiddling with their hair and face so much.

"This economy will not recover until job candidates learn how to put their best foot forward," said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, warning that even a small increase in stuttering among applicants who are asked to describe their weaknesses could cause the entire labor market to collapse.

Comments

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

ARGH.

And people who aren't well enough to work 30+ hours a week doing anything the "advisors" fancy? (Because they would be on ESA if ESA wasn't failing, or because they, like a large number of people, are well enough to work, say, 17 hours a week but not more?)

There isn't enough "for fuck's sake" in the world. :-( :-( :-(

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Also, where's this mandatory work-like activity supposed to come from? Because if it's menial labour that is currently done by people getting paid for it, this scheme could well increase unemployment as *well* as everything else.

Fail.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Well, that's sort of the point. Lay off all the street cleaners and then threaten to take their Jobseekers' Allowance away unless they clean the streets for £1.50 an hour. It's the sort of thing cowboy builders have wet dreams about when they can't find any old women with cancer to take advantage of.

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Yeah. :-/

Every time I think I've become cynical enough to not be that shocked and horrified by this government, I find that I was wrong. I'm nowhere near cynical enough yet.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The moment you are cynical enough to stop ever being shocked is the moment you have begun to think just like them. I'm fairly sure you could never be cynical enough for that.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

My theory is that Cameron's lot are trying to create a huge psychology experiment to learn about learned helplessness in humans, and like people who have studied this in dogs, have decided they need to eliminate all inadvertent sources of self-esteem and hope in their group 3 subjects in order to do a proper quantitative study.

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Ha! Yes.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

It's annoying that this mad idea seems to keep popping up - it sounds similar to what Labour proposed in 2008 (which in turn followed earlier Tory plans for the idea).

It's already the case that people lose unemployment benefit if they refuse to take up a job after a certain length of time, so the question is how do such schemes differ. This confirms my suspicion that it would be a way of getting people to do work for less than the minimum wage. And if there's a shortage of work, this just displaces more people out of work, creating a new class of people who have no rights of employment but are required to work for low pay.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

The one reassuring thing about iot all is that it's an idea which comes up every few years or so and never gets anywhere. My hope is that this is because it is, as seems apparent, fundamentally unworkable.

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

yes, I'd like to believe that it's something they know is unworkable. So they talk it up, get the media praise for being brutal to the poor, and nobody will notice when it fails to go anywhere.

but...germany has something very similar with the "one euro jobs" system. [in fact it's even worse than the UK proposal. Not only are people forced to work for less money than they'd get from picking up beer bottles in the park, but the government then uses this as a reason to no longer count them as unemployed]

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Nothing new in Germany. It's how the Autobahn network was built in the mid/late 30s which doesn't help with the popularity of such schemes.

[jholloway.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but make-work schemes were all the rage worldwide during the Great Depression. There were similar projects in the USA.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Good point. I'm going to rely on hope that the Germans can do it because they're much better at organising large projects than we are, and put my faith in pointless optimism!

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

AFAICT these schemes already exist to an extent. Young people who have been unemployed for a year go on an "option," which is a "voluntary" work placement.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

4x30 = 120, in a 3 month period that's 120 hours for £835.90 or £6.96/hour. That doesn't seem obviously unreasonable, nor will the workers obviously displace other minimum wage type work.

There was an article in the economist recently (which I can't now find) which cited reasonably compelling evidence from some US states that forcing the unemployed to work is fairly effective at moving the long term unemployed back into work, in particular that a substantial number of those affected leave their compulsory job very quickly and move into a 'real' job.

[aldabra]

The BBC was reporting this at lunchtime as the unemployed losing their benefits if they didn't do voluntary work. I don't think that's what "voluntary" means.

Really, if this kind of scheme actually worked they could start by not making it compulsory and not making you wait until you've been unemployed for a year first, but offering it to anybody who wanted a leg-up into employment. Simply the fact that they're not doing that suggests it doesn't.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Really, if this kind of scheme actually worked they could start by not making it compulsory and not making you wait until you've been unemployed for a year first, but offering it to anybody who wanted a leg-up into employment. Simply the fact that they're not doing that suggests it doesn't.

That was my suspicion as well, yes. As a voluntary idea which is necessarily time-limited, it's not totally stpid. Forced labour is something else entirely.