THE CON-DEMS’ FAVOURITE neo-slavery plans – Workfare – were dealt a nasty blow on Tuesday 12th, with the Court of Appeal’s decision with Cait Reilly that unpaid schemes were legally flawed. Definitions are blurry on exactly what this all means, and the government are eager to deny that Workfare will be overturned, and are themselves talking about overturning the Court of Appeal decision, blah blah blah.
So in real terms: it looks like there is an opportunity for people now who have been sanctioned in various ways by the Department for Work and Pensions to look for reparations – financially speaking – if they have been told schemes are ‘compulsory’ when they’re not, or if they have been sanctioned for unnecessarily long times, or they might be able to reclaim benefits that were wrongfully withheld. It’s a lot of maybes. But this may be the time to have a word with a friendly lawyer or Citizens Advice Bureau to check out your rights. At the very least, when you’re at your next sign on, your adviser will probably be more reluctant to bring up the idea.
What does this mean to activists opposing the scheme? It now seems that the Workfare (and similar copy-cat) scheme(s) is also facing challenge from the legal side of things, offering us another potential angle of attack. But we can also use this as a fresh chance to hit out with propaganda, to take advantage of this latest media spotlight on what is essentially a rich man’s wet dream. Remember, some companies have rapidly backed out of the scheme and the associated slur on their names, with Holland and Barrett being a good example. We need to drive home the point that Workfare is a modern dressing-up of slavery, and is helps neither the claimant or the taxpayer; it is more than anything a good old Tory social policy to attempt to put the poor in ‘their place’, and Duncan Smith’s friends in Big Business are merely sniffing around it as a convenient tool to cut their staffing costs.
Whilst there is no surprise that a lot of people see benefits claimants as good-for-nothing scroungers, and might see these schemes as a way of dealing with this problem, the reality is that it does not. What merely happens is that the beneficiary of the taxpayers’ wages that would normally end up in the claimant’s hands, is now finding its way into the pockets of the shareholders and companies who use the opportunity to save on wages – with politicians’ tacit complicity. The ‘free ride for scroungers’ is anything but over; the faces of the scroungers only change.
Perhaps a new tactic for campaigners would be to not only call for the D.W.P. to pay back wrongfully-withheld benefits for Jobseekers, but also demands to be made to the companies who have benefited from these schemes to pay out, as well, the sum of any differences between their newfound slaves’ benefits and the standard wages they should have been paid. A pipe dream, maybe, but we need to do everything we can to dissuade these parasites from lobbying for similar schemes in the future.
According to the Socialist Party website: “The fight for decent jobs continues. 2.5 million people are unemployed, including one million young workers… There are less than 500,000 job vacancies – many are not even real jobs. Millions more are under-employed or in the growing ‘precariat’ – low-paid workers in insecure jobs with bosses that don’t allow even basic rights such as guaranteed hours.“
If we really want people to work, and the work exists for these people, then it’s time to pay your workers. Simple as that.
STOP THE PRESS:
According to Boycott Workfare: “(i)t didn’t take long for the humiliated government to get forced unpaid work back on the road again. Last night, promising a “short sharp shock”, it rushed through regulations which mean that from today these schemes may be mandatory. We say may because the DWP doesn’t exactly have a good track record of following the law; the new regulations were rushed out in 24 hours and may not respect the judges’ ruling.
The new regulations haven’t yet been put in the public domain, so once again people are in a limbo where we have no way of knowing our rights.“
