Government 'to make claimants earn their benefits'

[loki]

By Gavin Cordon, PA
Sunday, 7 December 2008

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell issued a warning that virtually all welfare claimants will have to do some form of work or prepare for a job if they are to carry on receiving state benefits.

Mr Purnell is due to set out his plans for reform of the welfare state in white paper to be published this week.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said: "Virtually everyone will be doing something in return for their benefits."

The measures in the white paper, which builds on last summer's green paper, include proposals to reform housing benefit to prevent jobless claimants living in large houses at the taxpayer's expense.

Single mothers of children as young as one will be required compelled to go on training courses and work experience or face a cut in benefits while incapacity benefit claimants will have to undergo medical tests.

Companies will be allowed to bid for contracts to place the long-term unemployed in work and US-style "workfare" schemes will be introduced forcing claimants who turn down jobs to work in return for benefits.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...s-1056036.html

"How does working for your benefits fit in with the minimum working wage?" - loki

[Nostalgia]

That will mean that in the next year or two a few million people will be working for next to nothing.

[Nostalgia]

MINISTERS should rethink or delay plans to force lone parents, disabled people and the long-term jobless to seek work, a senior government adviser has warned.
But James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has over-ruled the findings of a report that said the boot camp approach to forcing single parents and those on incapacity benefit back to work would backfire in a recession.


Under the welfare to work programme, benefits would be cut if recipients could not prove they were doing all they could to find jobs.

The plans will put pressure on single parents who have children aged 12 and over to get back to work. At present lone parents can claim benefits until their youngest child is 16 but under the new rules they will only be able to claim Jobseekers Allowance if they are actively looking for work.

While their total income will remain broadly the same, they face benefit cuts of up to 40 per cent if they do not show they are trying to find work.

Sir Richard Tilt, chairman of the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC), said ministers should reconsider the plans which risked "falling into disrepute".

He said the reforms could push people "much closer to poverty" and that there was a lack of affordable child care to meet the needs of lone parents.

"Of course, the child will suffer, but it's not the child that has fallen foul of the system," he said.

Putting pressure on lone parents to go back to work could "be harmful and lead to further behavioural problems" for their children, he said.

Unemployment is expected to rise to three million by 2010, and unions and disability charities have urged the government to delay implementing the policy.

Mr Purnell rejected calls for a rethink and insisted the reforms would help people, not penalise them.

"I think it would be wrong, at a time when it may be harder for people to find work, to provide them with less help," he said. "We know that our help works. We know that the help they get from the voluntary sector, from providers and from JobCentre Plus works; it changes lives."

He said the long-term unemployed who had taken up the help had asked why he did not make them do this earlier.

He was backed by the Conservatives. Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said the changes were essential.

"It would be disastrous for Britain to do a U-turn on welfare reform," he said.

However the SNP's welfare spokesman, John Mason, said the proposals were ill thought out.

"The recession has only magnified this. While measures to support people getting back into work are welcome, these proposals are too draconian.

"It's time for the UK government to return to the drawing board," he said.

• A report by the Prince's Trust and University of Sheffield, released today, warns that young people will be hardest hit by unemployment.

Researchers predicted that at least two in five jobless people will be under the age of 25 if unemployment reaches three million, as business groups and analysts predict.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/...ead.4721188.jp

[ZingPao]

I know here in the US unemployed people on unemployment insurance have to demonstrate they are looking for work to receive benefits. Unemployment only last a few months at the most I think. I have no problem with people drawing unemployment benefits while they look for work. It seems fair and it offers good motivation.

People on welfare is a different matter. Handicapped people I have no problem with them being on welfare.

Now a lot of people on welfare are receiving benefits because they like it that way. They have no intention of ever working. I have seen these people first hand. They know every trick in the book to have assets secretly so they can draw welfare. These people don't want training, education or a job. These dead beats cost the taxpayers millions I'm sure.

I don't see anything wrong with requiring people to receive training or education in order to become employable. I constantly attend seminars and other training to keep my skills sharp so I can be competitive in the job market. I do this while employed so what would be wrong with doing it while you are unemployed?

If my profession ended tomorrow I would welcome training for a new profession while receiving government benefits. For someone to claim they need benefits because there are no jobs for say autoworkers that person needs to learn to do something else. It's the only way to deal with structural unemployment IMHO.

I would also like to see prisoners treated the same way. Rather than lock them up and let them do nothing I would rather see money spent to send them to school, vocational training and even college. Even let them work if they want on prison farms or whatever as long as they receive at least minimum pay. NO SLAVE LABOR EVER!

I guess I'm tring to say each person should carry their weight and be responsible. As for child care you have unemployed mothers. What is wrong with them working in day care some and attending school some? When I was in school us single parents helped each other out. It was covenient and low cost or no cost to us.

Studies have shown that the more educated a person is the less likely then end up in bad situations like being a single mom or thrown in prison.

I say educate everyone so they can contribute. My programs could be financed with legal taxes on legal marijuana.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Paradise for scroungers
(Tuesday 02 December 2008)

IT'S bloody hard to have a quiet holiday in scrounger-friendly Britain these days.

You can barely get onto the golden sands of the country's glorious resort beaches because they are full of unemployed people lounging around idly in the hot sun, sipping pina coladas and feeding their legions of children on endless supplies of ice cream.

And try getting a table at a top restaurant to enjoy a quiet meal with your City chums. You just can't book one because of all those wining and dining single parents spending their benefits on fillet steak and asparagus.


Such, at any rate, is the world according to Bristol University's Professor Paul Gregg and his mate, Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell.


These gentlemen appear to inhabit a parallel universe to the more mundane and chilly one occupied by the rest of us. In their world, the unemployed are a menacing, idle lot whose sole target in life is to extract the maximum benefits for the minimum of effort.


And single parents have chosen their lot in life to enable them to avoid honest toil, waving their brats around as spurious evidence of their inability to go off to work in the match factory for minimum wage, when they could easily engage a childminder or an au pair to enable them to become productive members of society.


Whereas, in our rather more sordid world, most people live in fear of unemployment and its consequences, such as losing your home, falling into arrears on your bills, losing the ability to take holidays or even feed and clothe the kids adequately.


And single parents eke out an existence on minimal levels of benefit, unable to afford childminding and trapped in the house by the poverty-level existence which is all that is offered them by a government that grudges them even the little that they do get.


The nonsense spouted by messrs Purnell and Gregg would be bad enough in a period of full employment.


In a period when thousands of jobs are vanishing every month and unemployment is projected to hit three million soon, even using the government's thoroughly massaged figures, it is, quite simply, vicious nonsense and a disgraceful slur on people who have no work and no chance of work through no fault of their own.


One wonders if Mr Purnell is contemplating making it a criminal offence for the unemployed to smile. It would certainly be in keeping with the rest of his attitudes.


As for Prof Gregg's description of "work equal" activities as being like a school detention, that really is beneath contempt.


And Mr Purnell's approach, that virtually everyone should be doing something in return for benefits, also seems to miss the point completely.
That is that benefits are not a privilege, a handout by some new Labour Lady Bountiful.


They are an entitlement, paid for out of people's taxes when they are in work to insure them against absolute penury in the event that they lose a job.


Mind you, the attitude of Mr Purnell and his toady professor is not unusual.

Tory twit and failed leader Iain Duncan Smith's patronising attack on council tenants and the estates that his own party was instrumental in marginalising positively reeks of the same condescension.


It is no coincidence that attacks on council tenants, the unemployed and single parents always emerge at times like the present.


They are simply designed to divert attention from the villainy of the thieves, swindlers and con artists of big business, banking and the City who, by their avarice and incompetence, made victims of those that they now attack so viciously.

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The truth is the Slime-ball politicians have been screwing over the counties and letting all the employment opportunities go to slave shop China and India.

At the same time they run a fractional reserve banking system which is a despicable pyramid scheme.


The Unemployed and Underemployed are just escape goats for the public to focus on while the real crooks rob the tax payer via the bailout Billions.


Instead of bailing out failed banks etc, why not have regeneration programs employing all those who are out of work?


Ahh but that is not the political adgender, it is designed to try and drive us to world war and any real honest investment program is not the plan.


The Conservative Social Democrat is with TMI on this one - fudge up make room for one more.

[ZingPao]

In essence I would say help those who help themselves. Government is not the answer, but less, much less, govenment would help. The dogs need voted out of office. Actually, that is offensive to dogs. Vote the jerks out

Businesses that out source jobs to other countries should be severly penalized with a fat unemployment tax. However, I think it is interesting that here in the US the automakers claim they have to export jobs to make money, but Japanese automakers open plants in the US and do just fine.

Businesses that out source jobs to other countries should be severly penalized....

Not very liberal!



For more than a century his death, it was almost impossible to make any rational judgement about Karl Marx. Slogans had practically taken the place of argument, with the result that most people had made their mind up what to think before they had read a word he had written. Those who resented the antics of the ruling class and felt solidarity with the workers automatically joined the ranks of the converts; those of a more fastidious temperament who disliked the idea of social upheaval just as automatically treated all Marxist theorising with derision. This indeed was an unenviable fate for any thinker- to arouse such feelings that supporters and opponents could only trade insults with each other.

For a few years, as communist systems around the world tottered and then collapsed, it seemed as though the final verdict had been delivered on Marx. The old ranter had always said that capitalism would self-destruct, but instead it could be seen striding over the entire globe. Meanwhile, once-proud Marxist states presented themselves meekly before the rulers of the world, asking for lessons in the art of making money. Surely the time had come to conclude that capitalism was, quite simply, the best possible system for promoting universal prosperity. Karl Marx was wrong, and his ideas should be ceremonially consigned to the scrapheap.

But this ideal of universal prosperity has something of a cracked ring to it when we look beyond our own small frame of reference. Those of us living in the rich and imperialist west may congratulate ourselves on the 'achievements' of liberal democracy, but there are signs that this is nothing but a fools paradise with a non-renewable lease. The truth that presses ever more insistently on us is that in order to cut costs and keep their commodities competitive the large corporations of western countries increasingly rely on low-wage production in the Third world, or on temporary, often illegal, labour imported from outside our borders. High profits still depend on precisely the same elements of the system that Marx so starkly outlined in the nineteenth century: long hours of work, with wages kept at rock bottom by creating a large pool of labour with no alternative employment.

In the west, Marx's proletariat has been dispersed or assimilated to the point where it has become little more than a folk memory. Most of us now, it could be argued, are part of the world's bourgeoisie. But conflicts of interest within capitalism are as sharp as ever, and Marx's brilliant but painstaking analysis remains so disturbingly relevant.

Essential Thinkers, introduction abridged by TMI.

[ZingPao]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Not very liberal!

US automakers, for example, send the job to say Mexico. A guy in the US loses his job making a decent wage. The guy in Mexico makes chump change for doing the same job. The US company saves money, but is too stupid to see that unemployed workers in the US cannot buy cars or anything else.

They did exactly the same thing before the first and second world war.

The whole thing is being manipulated.