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Do your hearts bleed for them?


mint
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Spongers deserve no sympathy. Everyone who is capable should work or try to and those who genuinely can't should be given appropriate and decent support. Handouts without responsibility are evil and debilitating, besides being an insult to tax payers.

And there is pleanty of work to do, from clearing canals to helping ouyt in small companies that simply can't afford to employ staff.

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Another ill thought out idea , they are coming thick and fast aren't they? How does this t****r remain in favour with the Con party after all the electorate didn't want him when he was party leader.

Compulsory work placements.

Working for a £1 an hour for 30 hours a week according to another paper,( which is well below the minimum wage and another issue in itself) . So in addition to their benefits the tax payer couldl now have to stump up millions extra every week and I thought the idea was to cut the welfare budget?

Assuming that there will be many people who refuse to do this, the answer is to cut their benefits for 3 months. So what will they do then for their money, turn to crime most probably.

There are people who probably don't want to work and many of them are probably now unemployable. But there are also a lot less jobs and more people chasing them. Trying to get people into work in a recession when the work isn't there doesn't make sense. Give them training, education, skills so that when things do pick up they can get and hold down a job. More carrot and less stick but that isn't the Tory way.
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[quote user="Braco"]Smoke and mirrors. Almost every government has promised similar actions without delivering.[/quote]

Although it pains me to say so, the Thatcher Government had a good go at this.  I was a manager for an Agency that managed a previous project of this type (MSC as was based) to get people off unemplyment benefit and into work.  Two problems, getting them to even come to work and then finding them a job afterwards.

Although there were a good number of 'positive outcomes' for the people on the projects when many became paid work projects in themselves, the problem was the administration.  There was a huge bureaucracy involved, the agencies got paid by the number of people they took on for the various charities involved (the agencies organised the projects and managed them for charities, which were in the main too small to do that for themselves) and then to keep the people involved, effectively on their books.  There was a huge financial incentive to be a management agency, massive monitoring systems in place and the bottom line was that for every person you took on and kep on the books, you got paid.

My biggest problem was actually getting people to come to work.  A good number were very motivated and did some great work.  Many (this was based in Hackney in East London and covered the whole of London, 200 people worked for me) however, had never worked and trying to motivate a person of 23 who had never had a job was a nightmare, no work ethos or discipline and all sorts of disruptions to the working day.  Ended up within a few weeks of people being told be in by 8.30 or don't come in and when that happened they were docked a day's benefit.

But the real incentive was not to get rid of people because the project funding per se was so poor that the per capita the agency earned was hit for every vacancy so if we sacked somebody or had a vacancy, the projects themselves had no money to function with and therefore the participants wouldn't have any work to do - vicious circle.

But, these projects worked and we managed to place a good number - from memory, 40% of the participants, into full-time work when they finished their 6 months on the project.

Current government says 1 month - no chance of working, you need at least that time to get the long-term unemployed people's heads where they need to be, a generalisation I know, but true, even the better outcomes still needed a period of adjustment.  And I'd like to see the cost benefit on this brainwave, how will people be monitored, outcomes measured etc and with the current HMG conceding that there are 5 applicants for every job on the governmen work agency's books, how do they expect people with little or no work ethic to achieve what's needed in just a month.

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Government make work schemes will always fail. If you want to compete with low cost producers then stop competing with your own manufactures by offering the alternative of unemployment.

If you don’t want to compete then all that is left is to allow the service industries to flourish. This can only happen if people are left with significant amounts of disposable income.
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[quote user="Russethouse"]Give them training, education, skills so that when things do pick up they can get and hold down a job. More carrot and less stick but that isn't the Tory way. [/quote]

How many graduates are currently unemployed, some horrendous number according to HMG?  My grandson was unemployed after he graduated for a year, applied for over 250 jobs, finally got a job on a government funded project and one of the first things the new UK government did was ........

stop the funding to this job creation scheme, even tho it was seen to be working.

Luckily they are honouring the contracts in place so not only will he see out his 6 months on the project, the County Council he is working for has offered him a full-time contract now.

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[quote user="Russethouse"]Give them training, education, skills so that when things do pick up they can get and hold down a job. More carrot and less stick but that isn't the Tory way.

 Do you honestly think that all unemployed people are without training or education then ?

If so you are way behind the times.
[/quote]

In answer to your question, not all no. I do think for the section of the unemployed that IDS hopes to target (if my impression from the terminology used in some of tabloids is correct) are largely without a good standard of education and life and work skills, they need assistance to go from becoming not only unemployed but unemployable to developing a work ethic, interpersonal skills etc.

If people do turn to crime as a means to survive if they have their benefit cut, of course they could be sent to already over crowded prisons and make them less employable and  then there there are the costs, far more expensive to spend a week in prison than the 65 quid  a week dole money.

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No doubt an over simplification, but it begs the question, if the unemployment benefit was switched as funding available to agencies that already exist, like Manpower and used to subsidise temporary jobs on offer, then the unemployed switched to these agencies could at least earn a minimum wage. Surely more employers might offer more vacancies when they see a benefit in subsidised labour?

 

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[quote user="Tony F Dordogne"]

[quote user="Russethouse"]Give them training, education, skills so that when things do pick up they can get and hold down a job. More carrot and less stick but that isn't the Tory way. [/quote]

How many graduates are currently unemployed, some horrendous number according to HMG?  My grandson was unemployed after he graduated for a year, applied for over 250 jobs, finally got a job on a government funded project and one of the first things the new UK government did was ........

stop the funding to this job creation scheme, even tho it was seen to be working.

Luckily they are honouring the contracts in place so not only will he see out his 6 months on the project, the County Council he is working for has offered him a full-time contract now.

[/quote]

This is my point, graduates are struggling to get and hold onto any job let alone the type of jobs that graduates could have walked into 20 years ago. How on earth can those unemployed who are the bottom of the pile with regards to education etc compete against these? 

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A list of a few jobs that are brilliantly filled by guest workers:

Bus drivers in Nottingham = Poles

Plasters, electricians, plumbers, builders = Eastern Europeans

Crop pickers = Eastern Europeans

Civil Engineers = World wide.

Health service = World wide.

There are probably at least a million public sector jobs that entail little more than passing bits of paper (now e-mails) to each other. The drain on the economy of this indulgence as well as the subsidised leisure industry has lead to the point where our political masters will finally be forced to contemplate actions that they should have taken half a century ago. Unfortunately I have no doubt that they will choose the path of least resistance and the steady decline will continue.
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Another way of looking at it:

If a minimum wage is set at a level above the maximum benefit income available, more people would be tempted to take a low-paid job.

I think governments have been frightened off this idea because of the difficulty of enforcing a higher minimum wage. They don't want to antagonise employers.

They are also frightened  of taking on landlords to reduce rents to conform to the new cap on housing benefits.

It's easier to put the blame on the inarticulate people at the lower end of the social scale.

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