Work for Your Benefit: providers to sell workfare victims to private businesses?
Post Categories: DWP • Welfare Reform • human rights • jobcentre Plus • uk government • unemployment • workfare
Tags: forced labour, servitude, slavery, work for your benefit
The Government’s Work for Your Benefit (“workfare”) scheme has been uprated from Mild Servitude to Slavery.
Providers of the scheme are able to lease out their participants to private businesses in return for money.
Definitions
(With added alphanumeric references i.e. ” (i) ” and italic text)
Wikipedia definition of Slavery (1):
Slavery (also called thralldom) is a form of forced labour in which people are considered to be the property of others (a). Slaves can be held against their will (b) from the time of their capture (c), purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand wages (d).
Wikipedia definition of Forced Labour (“Unfree Labour”) (2):
Unfree labour (or unfree labor in American English) is a generic or collective term for those work relations, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution (a), detention, violence (including death), or other extreme hardship to themselves, or to members of their families (b).
The Forced labour article continues (3):
If payment occurs, it may be in one or more of the following forms:
- The payment does not exceed subsistence or barely exceeds it (a);
- The payment is in goods which are not desirable and/or cannot be exchanged or are difficult to exchange; or
- The payment wholly or mostly consists of cancellation of a debt or liability that was itself coerced, or belongs to someone else.
The “Questions and Answers” event snippet (4):
Ref: PL291209
Question: Can we (as Providers) charge employers for placements? (a)
Answer: That is a decision for individual providers to take when designing their solution (b)
Slavery
Is workfare really slavery? This is still to be decided:
- You are to be considered the property of the Workfare provider. The original New Deal you were under a Government scheme where providers delivered the course. Under Flexible New Deal the allocated participants are “owned” (to quote a Jobcentre Plus staff member) by the provider as its wholly subcontracted – although you still have to sign on, you are no longer a Jobcentre Plus customer. Work for Your Benefit scheme is set to be under the same concept/programme model.
Part (1)(a) of the definition of Slavery requires the persons who are providing forced labour (against their will) to be the property (asset etc.) of another. This is the case under the model of the programme.
- The forced labour is in exchange for the profit of the owner and not the slave. There is absolutely no gain for the participant (“slave”) as at current prior to proposals and its implementation; the unemployed person (“slave”) would be receiving the same amount in benefit which would be unaffected if s/he kept meeting the Jobseekers Allowance conditions. The Training Allowance to be paid instead of Jobseekers Allowance is of the same amount… so also no gain there.
If the workfare provider (“owner”) sells or decides to “charge employers for [work]” undertaken by the participants (“slaves”) as stated in Part (4)(a) that is permitted by an greater authority: Jobcentre Plus in part (4)(b) this also meets the requirements for the definition of slavery.
- Slaves held against their free will. Participants (“slaves” ) are to be forced to work against their will. There are proposals that the work will be done supervised. This meets part (1)(b) of the definition.
- Since capture of the slaves… Workfare provider will not be purchasing the participants’ (“slaves”) or getting them from birth, however, at the earliest a person doing welfare must have claimed for 2 years – thus didn’t opt in, knew about its existence or agree to the workfare scheme when they first signed on – many jobseekers are unaware initially on Flexible New Deal that the Work for Your Benefit (workfare) scheme is coming up if they are unlucky enough not to secure employment.
The capture is deemed to mean when Jobcentre Plus (or Flexible New Deal provider) refers the jobseeker to the Work for Your Benefit scheme via allocation without their prior notice or consent (its understood as its law they wouldn’t require the consent but its not the point). A jobseeker could sign off; just like a person about to be captured for typical stereotypical forms of slavery could run and attempt to escape prior to capture… its not their fault if they cant get away.
- Threat of destitution to slaves. Destitution has a few definitions but we are using the definition that is “an extreme state of poverty”. We aren’t living in the typical third world environment (Africa etc.) but it also means higher living costs. All jobseekers are technically in mild poverty under being income-deprived, however, extreme poverty here means without common essentials people can take for granted such as shelter, food, clothing and water.
Without benefits there is no income. This matches part (2)(a) and part (2)(b) (“extreme hardship”) – including other members of your family, children etc.
- No right to withdrawal of labour and no right for payment of service. Unlike a job where you have the right to stop work (either officially through a Union or unofficially by refusing subject to disciplinary) there is no right to withdrawal of labour on workfare.
Participants (“slaves”) also have no right to get National Minimum Wage or any payment for their work (even though the workfare provider (“owner”) is gaining financially from it not to mention the “employer” gaining from the free labour). This matches part (1)(d) and completes the definition of Slavery.
- Maintaining at minimum level. Part (3)(a) states that forced labour can be made with payment (in this case: benefit – the Training Allowance). This amount barely allows someone to support themselves at a minimum level (subsistence) as its below the level of income-deprivation and far below the National Minimum Wage.
- Duration restrictions. The only defence for workfare is the duration of 6 months (instead of a lifetime for most other forms of slavery) – this has no justification of it though however.
It is also not to the magnitude of “the slave trade”, and the contemporary types of slavery such as trafficking and sexual slavery. This isn’t a defence to this type of slavery. (i.e. If you murder someone in their sleep so they never became aware of their death it doesn’t make it right or less severe then allowing someone to slowly bleed to death in agony.)
9 Responses to “Work for Your Benefit: providers to sell workfare victims to private businesses?”
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Spot on! This summary should be on every person in chrage of the scheme and every politician’s doorstep. And that’s just for starters!
To whom it may concern,
2004; I worked unpaid in a local college under New Deal to acquire NVQ-3. Despite working unpaid as a teacher for a year I left the scheme and the college LESS QUALIFIED than when I started with a nervous breakdown from the treatment from the college and Chamber of Commerce management.
In May 2005 I discovered the NVQ documents I had been studiously working towards, issued to me by a PROGRAM AREA MANAGER, were bogus.
I have been working non- stop since to get this looked into. City & Guilds, several Mp’s, House of Commons, +every other legitimate avenue of complaint have been simply stonewalling me. Not a single solicitor in the midlands will advise or even discuss my complaint.
(I actually received a refusal from Ed. Ombudsman before I received a referral)!
Not only do I believe New Deal schemes are taking unprecedented advantage of the deprived, they have failed catastrophically over the last 30 years and are now impacting and undermining legitimate administration of our higher ed. System.
For more info go to my site policriticalpup.co.uk (use GOOGLE) or E-mail me at pupcases@hotmail.com Please get in touch; your E-mail IS a VOICE AND a VOTE.
Further Education is failing because of this. Please help to put a stop to destructive slave trade for short-term private profiteering.
Estimated figures from own research conducted over 5-year period:
a) 4-5 MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR ‘vanish’ into these schemes with no civil rights whatsoever.
b) Approximately 150MILLION people (almost THREE TIMES POPULATION OF BRITAIN) have vanished into these schemes over thirty-year period.
c) EACH ‘trainee’ given away costs taxpayer up to £11,000 per ‘trainee’ (TRAINEE SEES NONE OF THIS ‘AID’); where does it go?
d) NATIONAL FIGURES distorted by approx. 14% by ‘missing persons’.
AN INDEPENDENT COMPLAINTS COMMISSION MUST BE SET UP TO ENSURE TRAINEE OR FUNDS HAVE NOT BEEN ABUSED>
I remain a staunch supporter of legitimate work-based training, but this is vile; HELP PUT A STOP TO THIS WHILE THERE IS SOMETHING LEFT OF THIS COUNTRY!
Slavery I thought that had been abolished. Correct meif Iam wrong doesn’t this undermine human rights
If it feels like slavery when you’re doing it, then it is slavery.
I’m hopeful of a legal challenge, but presumably it will have to be by someone who has been allocated to Workfare rather than a third-party to do it.
.-= *** *** =-.
Please visit my website policriticalpup.co.uk or E- mail me at pupcases@hotmail.com This is seriously underming equality and our nation. Together we CAN change this.
Thanks for posting such a terrific site. this blog was not only knowledgeable but also very inventive too. There normally are a limited number of bloggers who can create technical stuff that creatively. I look for articles about a subject like this. I have gone in detail through many websites to find knowledge regarding this!!!
By ‘eck guys, I’ve been reading the pages of this site with an ever increasing sense of despair. To be a jobseeker today is to be worried about offending some jumped-up administration worker, it’s about being bullied and cheated and lied to and it’s about working for nothing but still enriching other undeserving bastards.
There has to be ways of fighting back. People in history have fought for improvements in their life chances and have tamed injusticies in their societies. The new age sanction filled benefit regime is a real injustice in today’s society, but let’s get creative and challenge the
injutice. We’re victims of an unworkable economic system-just people out of work not crimials forced to live in fear on the edge of society.
Let’s discuss ways of fighting these people who make our lives such a misery, let’s campaign, complain, appeal, seek legal advice at every opportunity, talk to our MPs and union represenatives about the horrible regime that ordinary decent people have to endure.
Fighting back might just achieve something good but it may also achieve nothing. But at least it’s worthwhile and if we don’t fight the rich and their powerful friends will continue the onslaught.
In answer to your question yes there are things you can do. complain to your M.P.Write letters to the DWP and the secretary of state., Appeal everything, question everything and passive civil dissobedience. They might force you to work but nothing in the rule book says you have to do it competently.
You could try joing a union or keeping up a union payments. I think a union would have quite a bit to say and if you kept up your payments free legal representation could ensue.
You could also play the system and make sure you getpaid everything coming to you