Government climbs down on work experience forced labour

Following the furore in which Tesco were accused of using slave labour after accepting young unemployed people for unpaid work experience, it appears that several employers were very unhappy with the way that this reflected on them.

The government have listened to the concerns of the businesses (but listening to the concerns of the people on the scheme is apparently to listen to "Trotskyists" (David Cameron) and "anarchists" (Iain Duncan Smith)) and made it possible to withdraw from the scheme at any time if it isn't working well for the unemployed person on it.

The Guardian newspaper reports on this development:

All benefit sanctions on the government's work-experience scheme are to be dropped by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) following meetings between ministers and employers.

The news was conveyed by Anne Marie Carrie, chief executive of Barnardo's and one of the employers present at the 90-minute meeting between the employment minister, Chris Grayling, and more than 50 firms involved in the scheme.

They had met to seek reassurances that the government was not seeking to force young unemployed people into work-experience schemes.

The government says the scheme is voluntary and gives unemployed people eight weeks' work experience. But participants can lose two weeks' jobseeker's allowance if they leave for no reason after more than a week on the scheme.

There have also been suggestions that some jobcentre staff do not make it clear that participation in the scheme is voluntary.

Campaigners against these work experience schemes argue that, by allowing employers to profit from labour without having to pay for it, these schemes mean that employers are less likely to offer full-time, permanent jobs to other people, thus keeping people out of work.

I am in two minds as to whether we can call it "unpaid" work. On the one hand, my current benefits add up to a total that looks like a pretty decent income for a worker (although still barely enough for me to get by on, I have to budget carefully throughout the year). On the other hand, most of that is in the form of housing benefit (or whatever they call it now) and council tax benefit, so that someone who depends on others for their housing (for instance, a young person living with hir parents) it would be a lot less, and much less likely to be enough to enable any sense of autonomy or freedom. If it is just working for one's JSA, then we're talking about working for between half and a third of the national minimum wage (depending on how many hours they're working on the placement). That still isn't "unpaid", but it might as well be in terms of the effect it has on the unemployed person.

Representatives of business organisations, Katja Hall, the Confederation of British Industry's chief policy director, and John Longworth, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, both talk about giving people the opportunity to "get experience of work" or "gain experience in the world of work". While it is certainly true that it is easier to find work when you are in work, there is one huge problem with their claims that it helps to gain interviews or to do well in interviews, and that is this: application forms often ask what the salary/wages were at one's previous jobs. They want to know why you left. That means, effectively, that you have to admit that the job was not paid work but a work experience placement which makes it sound like nobody would be willing to pay you a wage. It says, "I did not get or hold this job by my own efforts, or because I was worth paying to do it".

I actually like the idea of a "feed-in" period in which unemployed people (especially those who are long-term unemployed, like myself) can be recommended to employers by jobcentres or whatever, and given a shot at proving themselves for several weeks with a lower risk for the employer. (There is a two-week scheme like that already, IIRC, but it doesn't seem enough to me.) I would prefer it if there were some penalty for employers who abuse the scheme to get cheap labour instead of using it to give people a chance to prove themselves prior to being given a longer-term contract, and definitely it should involve a proper wage that is equivalent to what the other people doing the same work would receive. My idea would ideally be that the government agrees to pay a percentage of that wage back to the employer. Probably I would then want it set up that the proportion of the wage that is refunded by the government gradually decreases over the course of the placement so that the employer gradually assumes more risk and more responsibility for paying the worker.

The aspect that made work experience and similar schemes seem like slavery or forced unpaid labour, was that it was presented in such a way as to appear mandatory, and it was set up that withdrawing from it meant starvation or homelessness for the people on it (that is, loss of their benefits). That, thankfully, has now been ended for the work experience scheme (although I'm not clear from the article whether the other schemes are now going also going to be sufficiently voluntary).

There are still problems with and objections to the scheme. I don't see how it is really set up to give people work experience that they can build on and use to help themselves grow, or that is geared to their areas of talent. If you're going to do dull, monotonous, repetitive, unskilled labour, then I think you deserve to be paid enough so that you can at least enjoy the time you have away from that work! And that's it: I would be happy doing most types of work (cleaning is the obvious exception) as long as I got a decent wage at the end of it (I've been a farm hand helping to stack hay bales before, and I wouldn't mind doing it again if the money was enough to live decently on - but I'm not that well-suited to physical work like that). Some types of job I would gladly do for a pittance, as long as I had a roof over my head and food in my belly - but those aren't the sort that seem to be offered on this scheme. That's the problem: Robert Townsend wrote, "If you're not in business for fun or profit, then what the hell are you doing here?" And working is a form of business, regardless of the level in the organisation. If you're getting neither money nor some other benefit (i.e. fun) from doing a job, then what reason do you have to engage with it or try to do it well? What's the point in doing it? That's why the scheme is flawed.