All Work and No Pay

It's good to see Tesco franticly back-tracking in response to protests over its participation in the government's welfare-to-work programme. The campaign against workfare has widespread support and other high street retailers, fearing similar negative publicity, are under pressure to follow suit. Although the issue hit the headlines this week, it's been going on for years – ever since the previous Labour administration introduced Mandatory Work Related Activity as part of its New Deal. That's what's going on in the WH Smith store pictured below.

According to the Fair Pay Network, the average hourly rate for supermarket workers is £6.83, whilst the 'living wage' outside London is £7.20, and in London, £8.30. Low pay is bad enough. No pay is a step too far.

Dole not Coal

I first went to South Yorkshire during the big wave of pit closures of the early 1990s, and I’ve been back a few times since. The miners fought the closures and lost. “Coal not Dole” was their rallying cry, but the collieries were bulldozed back into green fields. Now, in their place, stand tin shed-style warehouses and call centres offering small numbers of jobs at the minimum wage. In the intervening years some new, high tech, manufacturing has established itself, but nothing providing the large-scale employment required to make up for the huge job losses of the last 30 years.

Successive governments have made only token gestures. One in four young people in Barnsley and Doncaster are NEETs (not in employment, education or training), one of the highest rates in the country. Last week I visited three inventive social enterprises providing training and apprenticeships (picture below). Even they have been hit by cuts in Education Maintenance Allowance and abolition of the Future Jobs Fund. And in these austere times, employability is no guarantee of employment. Life was hard in the former coalfields long before the current recession – and it’s likely to get worse. This set of images - work in progress – is a partial record of some of the changes.

Benefit Cuts: a case study (Part Two)

Following a trial programme of medical re-assessments begun earlier this month, the Department of Work and Pensions has stated that three-quarters of Incapacity Benefit (IB) claimants are well enough to work. Currently, 2.6 million people claim IB, while unemployment stands at 2.5 million.

In Rochdale’s Spotland and Falinge ward (pictured), 42.9% of working age residents claim IB, the highest rate in the UK. The distribution of IB claimants nationally roughly corresponds to the areas worst affected by 1980s de-industrialisation, and it is often claimed that the benefit, which replaced previous disability payment schemes in 1995, has been used by successive governments to disguise the unemployment figures.

The coalition government aim is to return 500,000 IB claimants to the job-seekers’ register. Where are they all going to work?

Benefit Cuts: a case study (Part One)

The results of the Autumn Spending Review, announced last week, included major cuts to welfare benefits as part of the government’s deficit reduction policy. An estimated 500,000 public sector jobs are also being cut, and a similar number in the private sector are expected to follow. With the inevitable fall in the tax take, how is that going to add up?

I went to Rochdale to find out. A New Labour welfare-to-work programme is still running in the town, staffed by a dedicated team at the national charity Groundwork, funded by the local authority via a sub-contract with Serco. Under the current system, after 72 weeks of unemployment, claimants of Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) must undertake 4 weeks of ‘Mandatory Work Related Activity’. This may take the form of an unpaid work placement, and can also include employability training. On the day I visited, a group was nearing the end of one such course. What was striking was just how employable some of them were: they included an articulate IT support worker with 10 years experience, and a clearly capable shop assistant made redundant when the local branch of M&S closed down.

According to Lisa Brown, who manages Groundwork’s Middleton office, all that is available in the Rochdale and Oldham area are ‘entry level’ (minimum wage) jobs in warehousing, private care and retailing. But in the massive Stakehill Industrial Estate, built close to a major motorway network, half the warehouses stand empty. Many of the national brands (Woolworths, B&Q and others) that had used them as their distribution centres for the north-west have either gone bankrupt or moved elsewhere. Employability isn’t much use if there aren’t any jobs. The only thing this adds up to is a worsening of the living standards of claimants already struggling at or below the poverty line. More pictures here.