Bob E's reads between the lines of the latest DWP-speak as reported in The Guardian:
A DWP spokeswoman said: "We are delighted, although not surprised, that the judge agrees our schemes are not forced labour. Comparing our initiatives to slave labour is not only ridiculous but insulting to people around the world facing real oppression.
Of course, had the claimants any other avenue to pursue then they wouldn't have been going down the article 4 route, but that doesn't stop IDS and Chris Grayling's DWP taking the opportunity to label the claimants ridiculous and suggest they were being insulting to etc etc.
But the best bit swiftly follows ....
"Thousands of young people across the country are taking part in our schemes and gaining the vital skills and experience needed to help them enter the world of work – it is making a real difference to people's lives. Those who oppose this process are actually opposed to hard work and they are harming the life chances of unemployed young people who are trying to get on."
In summary:
If you disagree with workfare and mandatory work activity, any aspect of it for any reason whatsoever, it means you are opposed to hard work and seek to harm the life chances of young people. That is official.
You mustn't even think that what is operating is in reality a taxpayer-provided free-labour-for-large-industry scheme wherein the taxpayer not only funds the labour but also the gang-masters who organise it and also promises to reward the gang-masters who have been given an official licence to bully and cajole people by threatening to have their benefits removed via gang-master decreed sanctions if they are not totally compliant.
No, you mustn't even dare to think it.
Monday 6 August 2012
"If you oppose the government, you oppose free markets"
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21 comments:
"Gaining vital skills".
I'd love to see what skills they're getting except for stacking shelves and pushing trolleys.
TS, stacking shelves requires more skill than you think, and it is quite hard (and thankless) work. I've nothing against shelf stackers.
The point is, surely, that employers need workers and (most) unemployed people want jobs. So surely, in the absence of govt meddling, the two would meet each other half way.
Why do we need the DWP to shuffle people towards certain low-skill jobs offered by very large companies?
Indeed.
My thinking was more that there might be some value if govt got people into jobs where they did gain skills which would open doors for them, where pushing trolleys doesn't. It's a job that Saturday kids did with about 10 minutes training.
I've nothing against people doing the job.
TS, true, trolley collecting you can learn in two or three minutes. Still valuable work though.
"The point is, surely, that employers need workers and (most) unemployed people want jobs. So surely, in the absence of govt meddling, the two would meet each other half way. "
That meddling is called the "minimum wage", or the compulsory unemployment level.
SB, yes, the Minimum Wage is one example, but the main ones are taxation of earned income (esp. Employer's NIC and VAT) and means testing of benefits.
I think the most valuable skill is getting up in the morning and arriving at work on time, day in day out. Lord knows I still haven't got the hang of it.
As far as the scheme is concerned, surely the best way to remunerate would have been for the employer to top up benefits to the minimum wage level. Everyone happy?
Betty, i agree on the whole "getting up in morning, wearing the right clothes, being on time" stuff, that's two-thirds of the battle in most jobs - the work itself is easy.
"If any man or woman, able to work, shall refuse to labour and shall live idly for 3 days, he or she shall be branded with a red-hot iron on the breast with the letter V, and be adjudged for 2 years the slave of any person who shall inform against such idler."
Here, lets have the whole thing:
All these expropriated labourers and their families were dealt with very
harshly, as though they themselves were responsible for their own oppression.
Here are some of the provisions of the Act against idleness and
vagabondry, passed under a Protestant King, 360 years ago: "If any man or woman, able to work, shall refuse to labour and shall live idly for 3 days, he or she shall be branded with a red-hot iron on the breast with the letter V, and be adjudged for 2 years the slave of any person who shall inform against
such idler." Masters were empowered to feed their slaves on bread and water, to beat and chain them, to sell, bequeath, or hire out, and to put a ring of iron about the neck, arm or leg for the more knowledge or better surety of keeping them. An escaped slave was to be branded on the cheek, and become a slave for life. On a second escape he "was to suffer pains of death, as other felons ought to do."
P, good stuff, but that was written up a while ago, so it's actually 450 years ago by now. Then Good Queen bess came along and reversed some of that, she was actually the first Georgist.
Pablo,
I was not aware of that. Links please?
L, it's from Cooperative Individualism which includes just about every Georgist article written ever.
As a general point this little exchange demonstrates the real power of the ineterweb - the quick dissemination of ideas and knowledge. I can honestly say that I have been able to learn much more, and crucially much more quickly, since the web really got going.
It must be a real headache for the nomenklaturer. Good.
Ofcourse a universal non-means tested benefit, AKA a CI, combined with a liberalised labour market, would largely sort out most of the issues with "jobs", and provide just enough bargaining power to make traineeships, trial-periods, lower entry-level wages a viable way of people not having jobs getting them. That being said, in the current scheme of things, I'm amazed at the UK govt being so unashamingly open about giving out handouts to their chums. Voluntary work placements with top-ups, or something of the sort, aren't all that bad, as current benefits goes, and have actually been known to enable some of the least employable to get in the job-market, however a costly way of doing it. But contracting out the entire scheme, and making it mandatory, that's not even trying to not look like a corporatist bastard...
Kj: >"Voluntary work placements with top-ups, or something of the sort, aren't all that bad"
Exactly. And that is what CI combined with scrapping the NMW would boil down to.
Yes, to some extent this allows employers to pay lower wages; but by taking the pressure off people to accept low wage jobs, the CI would also push up wages. So all in all, CI makes little or no difference to free market wage rates while providing a 'safety net'.
I especially agree with your last sentence :-(
Lola,
It's more than just speed of channels, it's also the breadth.
Libertarianism/classic liberalism was almost non-existent in the media until the internet came along. The political debate was framed as "labour" vs "conservative" as those were the views of political parties and the newspaper groups that backed them.
I suspect that the growth of the Tea Party* in America and UKIP here are linked to the internet.
*The Tea Party are often portrayed by the left as being a bunch of religious nutcases, but that's really just Palin who jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them are more your Gingrich/Goldwater small government liberals.
Actually Mark, I didn't get it from there but from the Internet Archive - but I'm glad it's available in more readily accessible form elsewhere - saves me the trouble! :-)
Lola, you may also be interested in:
Land Tenure and Unemployment by Frank Geary http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/Geary.djvu
and: How the English People Became Landless http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/landls.htm
"I'm amazed at the UK govt being so unashamingly open about giving out handouts to their chums."
I'm not. They are a minority government (effectively, the Limp Dems don't really count, they are a minority within the government) so the people who voted for them are down to a hard core who would probably vote for a monkey with a blue rosette. That gives them the opportunity to do what they like.
P, it's all good. About half my Google searches throw up a few links to Cooperative Individiualism.
B, I don't know about Kj but I for one am not in the least surprised about the Tories helping themselves and their chums to public money, that's what governments do nowadays, but I am surprised at how blatant they are.
Surely they could at least pretend that this is all somehow for the public's benefit but they hardly bother even pretending, which I find vaguely insulting. I mean, if they lied about it, at least we'd know that they in their hearts know that what they are doing is wrong - but they don't appear to realise that they are actually criminals, to them it's just normal, like in any tinpot dictatorship.
A little gem from A.J. Ogilvy:
People are so used to seeing the labourer toiling for a mere subsistence, and never rising above his condition, while the employer and the landlord share the produce of his toil between them, that they have come to look upon this as the order of Nature; they seem to think that those who have money have a right to the labour of those who have none; that the whole purpose of industry is to provide rent for landlords, interest for capital, and profits for employers, and that the wages of the labourer are an unfortunate necessity of the position, to be minimised as much as possible; in short, that Providence has evidently designed and ordained that the fruits of labour shall go not to him who produces them, but to somebody else who permits or employs him to produce them. The idea (which you will hear expressed any day in all directions) that wages should be kept down or the labourer forbidden to have access to the land because employers in such case could not make sufficient profit, means (put in plain terms) that A, who has little, should get less, in order that B, who has much, should get more; a proposition too absurd to be discussed, but which seems to be a fundamental article of belief with almost the whole class of employers.
- A Colonist's Plea For Land Nationalization
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