It is a fact that Workfare stops job creation because there is a massive pool of forced voluntary workers that dodgy or tight employers can use.

Why employ someone when you can get workers for free.

Quote:
This is one such consensus, and this is one such moment. Unfortunately those elected to lead the Labour movement in parliament appear too timid, too risk averse, and too disengaged from those whom they might wish to shift, to even attempt such a thing. Back to business as usual, in all of its horror.

1. For fifteen years we have been unable to put a razor blade between Tories and New Labour. Had Blair/Brown been in power I have no confidence that the situation would be any different.
2.Maybe, they simply couldn’t care less, they are completely divorced from their one time core voters.
3, Nobody takes any notice of ‘two jags’, he’s a cartoon caricature of Old Labour but devoid of morals or principles, pretty much like the rest of Westminster.

I certainly am no longer surprised when we have a new agency worker at the lab where I work who leaves before the end of the day and won’t come back. It is no longer unusual to see over half a workforce in the local factories coming from Eastern Europe. Our indigenous population don’t want to work in our factories and, it seems, don’t have to. When you pay 16% of your income (NMW) in taxes to support these people, it can be a little galling!

Checkout Morrisons with 40% of workforce converted to ‘apprenticeship’ status.
This would allow them to avoid minimum wage and only pay the apprenticeship rate of £2.50 per hour.
The new rate will apply to those apprentices who are under 19 or are aged 19 and over but ‘in the first year of their apprenticeship’.

The whole scheme sucks.

Shorter JC -

It’s all the dastardly foreigners fault innit?!

Grow up.

Originally it is a Labour policy, brought in by luminaries like James Purnell.

The coalition simply found it to be of such benefit to the private sector, and private sector workfare companies, that they sped up the implementation.

Nobody is going to stand up for ‘scroungers’ who can’t be bothered to find work in the biggest economic downturn since WWII.

Chris Grayling recently said 500,000 jobs are advertised in job centres each week. Apart from a minor error in that announcement (adding an extra zero), and that jobs paying the apprentice wage of £2.60 an hour or JSA only are included in that figure, it means that for the 2 1/2 million people claiming JSA potentially one in fifty of them could find a job, if they have the right skills and experience, educational certificates, can travel far enough, are healthy enough, and are prepared to work for literally nothing.

So anyone who doesn’t find a job is a scrounger and needs to be punished.

Its a Labour policy. They’ll take a stand when they call for the scrapping of ESA and ATOS, when they champion civil liberties, and when they put Tony Blair behind bars.

So not in our life times.

It is a disgrace. What’s the point of Labour party if they have nothing to say about exploited labour?

They give credibility to it. If people are able to say, look, even the Labour leadership don’t think this is a problem, it’s only the mad loony-left making a fuss about it, then it helps their case.

All it means is that there is a debate about whether the working class should be paid for their labour.

Could retail and menial jobs be turned into a form of community service that people do in return for job seekers allowance?

A lot of people on the right think that it could, and this policy is simply giving it a try. The Labour party originated the scheme, first applying it to charities. The Tories have taken it a step further, opening it up to for profit private companies and for charities to act as middlemen to place unemployed people in roles at private companies.

It’s about whether low skill work should count as work at all, and people be paid for it, or whether such jobs should be ‘dewaged’ and performed by the socially undesirable, such as the unemployed, former prisoners, the disabled, sex offenders, etc as a way of them paying back the debt they owe to decent people.

It’s an ongoing process, and while it has cost the taxpayer £7 billion so far, a lot of politicians think it is worth it because it is making the scum suffer, and suddenly them getting jobs leads to no improvement in their circumstances, keeping them in their place.

“The sheer popularity of the measure – a function of widespread public hostility to the unemployed – made it tricky to oppose”

This needn’t have been so, and it would have put clear blue water between Miliband’s leadership and New Labour had they come out against it. If something is wrong then someone has to make a stand, one day I’d like it to be the party I used to support without question.

When large scale Commonwealth immigration occurred in the fifties and sixties, the immigrants faced open hostility, as did homosexuals. Much of the hostility both groups faced came from the working class communities.

Racism and homophobia was widespread and very popular up to the seventies. In fact there was at least one branch of the Labour Party that passed a motion banning black people from joining.

However, the Labour Party (and the Left in general) campaigned against such discrimination. Fought tooth and nail, challenging stereotypes, racist behaviour homophobic attacks and bullying. Their activist being spat at (or worse) on doorsteps of their natural supporters for defending ‘Pakis and poofs’. Some of us are old enough to remember ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour’ posters.

Yet they didn’t budge an inch, losing votes and seats in the process. Thirty years later those few openly homophobic people left in the Country are seen as dinosaurs or seen as too old to change. No one defends racism. England’s black players may or may not suffer the type of abuse that John Barnes suffered every game, but it will stand out through being a complete anachronism.

So Labour’s campaigning worked eventually. Otherwise decent people, who thought nothing of using terms like ‘nig nog’ or ‘darkie’ were shamed into silence and eventually acceptance. Openly Gay people join the Tories without a backward glance.

Just because something is popular now does make it either right or eternal. However, it takes guts to stand up and be counted. It takes courage to withstand the abuse, the verbal and physical attacks, being shunned at work, being told you must ‘like it up the arse’ or to be a ‘race traitor’. It takes guts to be the only black woman sitting at the ‘wrong’ end of a bus.

Blair Peach died at the hands of the police campaigning for people who he shared very little with, now we have politicians on the Left who baulk at being booed on any questions. I fucking well weep for what is left of this Country that I am increasingly becoming alienated from.

This Country is being dragged into a Right Wing hell hole and the ‘best’ Milliband can do is talk about ‘Englishness’. What the fuck is so god about a Country were the unemployed are used to undercut the lowest paid in the Country and not one fucking person of conscience is willing to stand up.

From what I can tell, the labour leadership sees obtaining power as the end goal, rather than just being the means to its ends, and as such has become a craven and crawling worm snuffling at every opportunity yet terrified of growing a backbone.

The Labour Party and the Conservative party pretend to be adversaries. Their designated roles in this sham democracy are good cop bad cop. They are both establishment parties who serve the same master.

The Labour good cop party laid the groundwork for and started the savage and depraved attack on the sick and disabled, the privatisation of the NHS and the slave labour “Work Programme” and now the Conservative bad cop party have come in to finish the job. They are a team working together. Labour are like those men during the riots who pretended they were helping that injured Malaysian student when their real intention was to rob him.

The Tories come in and they plunge the knife into the people’s back 9 inches then Labour comes in and they pull the knife out 6 inches and people call it progress, but the knife is still in their back causing them to bleed.

@11 Jim

Well said.

Vote Labour: The Party of the Non-Working Class.

The other problem, that is still poorly understood, is that the unemployed are always competing for the same pool of jobs.

So if 100 people are competing for 20 available jobs, you could try to pull of a miracle by giving the bottom 10 people such vastly good training and experience that that they move from the lowest 10 to become the top 10 most suitable candidates.

All that happens is that they displace 10 people who would otherwise have got those jobs, and the number unemployed does not change.

You then create an arms race of people having to engage in more and more pointless training and work experience, which benefit only the private interests involved.

OP: “The policy is objectively a failure.”

Final sentence of DWP report that OP links to:

“Overall, the impact over the first 21 weeks equated to referrals being not in payment of benefit for an average of about 8 days more than had they not been referred.”

Can we have some analysis rather than propaganda?

@17 Tone

The scheme has cost £7 billion pounds.

This being the only measured benefit of the scheme probably doesn’t justify the investment expended.

Would labour state that the WCA of the welfare reforms was wrong of course not, after all labour went crawling to the Tories to ensure it got through.

Cameron and Miliband Blair and Brown, the difference not a lot really in fact nothing