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. :-( :-( :-(

[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.

[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.

[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.