Workfare? Not Fair!

At half past eleven on Saturday morning March 30 protesters took their positions outside Holland and Barratt on Queens Road, Hastings, holding up a banner saying ‘Workfare Isn’t Working’. Joe Fearn, himself a ‘client’ of such work experience schemes,  attended the protest and became more engaged than he had intended.

The protest was aimed against the government’s Workfare scheme which the protesters claim is far from fair. Speaking on their behalf was local activist Dave Francis, a seasoned veteran of the campaign to save the Hastings Pier.  He told me “Workfare is a term used to describe a range of schemes in which people are forced to work without wages in order to receive their benefits. We are here today to highlight the fact that a third of Holland and Barratt’s workforce is currently made up from people on Workfare. We are not here to hinder the workforce, but to support them.”

I asked the obvious question; what harm can there be in giving unemployed people work experience? David said that work experience is fine, but if you sign up for a job you find you are not suitable for, then you are stuck: you cannot leave because your benefits will be stopped. Also, the companies involved do not pay their workers; the taxpayer is expected to subsidise the company’s wages bill.

Protection?

The police arrived to protect both the demonstrators’ right to protest and the public’s right to shop unmolested. The protesters gave out leaflets which outlined their objections to the popularly called ‘work for your dole’ scheme, and the police stayed discreetly inside the shop where the manager was on the phone to head office. I asked the manager what she thought of the Workfare scheme. She said she’d never heard of it, and they only employed people on work placement. I put it to David Francis that it may be possible for a workfare placement to like the scheme, if, after they had worked for no wages for several months, the employer eventually took them on full time.

David told me: “Work experience is fine, as long as the person doing the unpaid work agrees to it. However, Workfare means that unscrupulous employers can lay-off their staff and replace them with people they don’t have to pay. We maintain that the point of Workfare is to drive down wages and working conditions, undermining the minimum wage which many struggle to survive on.” I asked “Doesn’t it save money in the long run?” Francis insisted it did not. “Workfare is a massive subsidy to private companies; providing them with free labour at the tax-payer’s expense. Workfare means less pay for workers and more profits for employers.”

At 12 o’clock the protesters had a coffee break across the road which was interrupted by an accident. An old lady tripped and crashed to the pavement outside the Specsavers and Bon Marché shops on Queens arcade. The protesters rushed to help while I phoned for an ambulance and a young girl chatted and comforted the lady until an ambulance arrived and took her for a check-up.

View from another country

As if this unexpected event was not enough, we were then joined by some young workers from the former republic of Yugoslavia, who did not agree with the protest. They were young women in their twenties, who approved of the Workfare scheme, insisting that it made idle people get off their sofas and give something back to society instead of taking all the time. David dismissed their arguments as ‘pub philosophy’ and they became angry, saying that British workers are idle and workshy, and that they should be grateful to companies who take them on for no pay, because it gives them work experience.

Francis asked them if they would work for no wages. The women became quite animated and shouted that they worked as pickers for farmers who paid them less than the national minimum wage and that they were grateful for it. British workers, they insisted, would not take such low paid jobs, because the British did not have a work ethic. David insisted that all non-voluntary work should be paid, and at the very least at the level of the national minimum wage; anything else was sheer exploitation. The women went on their way, muttering that the protesters were not prepared to change with the times.

A protester from the activist group Solidarity Federation was unrepentant, and explained to me what he saw as the ideological differences between the five workfare schemes. “The Work Programme and Community Action Programme seek to extend control over the daily lives of unemployed and under-employed workers, effectively turning them into state-sponsored agency staff who will fill the roles once performed by the decimated public sector. Mandatory Work Activity is about disciplining the workforce, attempting to impose an economically productive routine on those who aren’t in work. Finally, like all of the above, the Work Experience and Sector- Based Work Academies schemes are simply a gift of free labour to businesses disguised as socially useful endeavours.”

So, who exactly benefits?

As a HOT reporter I am supposed to adopt a detached agnosticism. However, I was forced onto a work experience placement last year by the government agency called ‘Maximus: Tomorrows People’. I personally found out that the scheme was not about providing work experience; it was simply a disciplinary measure and not related to my previous 40 years of work experience or current job goals. A controversial point is that small businesses are given up to £1500 to take on an unpaid worker, and the agency that places the worker is given up to £2000 per worker.

With thousands of people forced to go on work placements, everyone is making lots of money except for the poor person doing the actual work! So does society benefit, in the way imagined by the angry women from the former Yugoslavia? The government has stated that placement must provide some community benefit but that they may be at private companies. However, they also say “working towards the profit of the host organisation” counts as community benefit! As far as this reporter can see, the only beneficiaries of Mandatory Work Activity are private companies – those who organise the placements and those who employ the workers without having to pay them. I admit in all conscience that I couldn’t help but hand out a few leaflets!

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