My Workfare Nightmare

240 hours’ work for no pay – then back on the unemployment scrapheap

Hull YJF activist

After being unemployed for over eight months in Hull, one of the worst areas for unemployment in the country, I was put onto a ‘voluntary’ work experience scheme.

The Jobcentre had been mentioning the Work Experience scheme to me for a good few weeks when they phoned me up to put me forward for what they called a “brilliant opportunity”. This amounted to a four to eight week placement at a Home Bargains store with a possible job at the end of the placement – if they chose to ‘keep us on’.

In the end I worked 30 hours a week for the full eight weeks (almost double the contracted hours we would have if we got the job) – six hours a day, Monday to Friday. Four of us started at the same time and another four started a month later. This meant that the shop, which employed between 30 and 40 people, had seven (one participant got a job elsewhere) people working the contracted hours of 15 fully paid workers but receiving nothing from the employer!

Numerous members of staff asked if we were part of the A4e programme which was recently shown to be nothing more than a money-making scam for the shareholders of the company. This indicates that the use of people forced onto benefits due to a lack of jobs is commonplace at the store I worked at.

Although the placement was supposed to be about gaining ‘experience’, within three or four weeks I was fully trained in pretty much all aspects of the work. After a month I and my fellow work experience colleagues were used as nothing but unpaid workers – not shadowing anyone but given the same responsibilities as members of staff.

I was also asked to a do a ‘stock take’ while at the store but this was scheduled for a Sunday. This was technically illegal as we had been told that we weren’t permitted to work weekends or bank holidays. Bur we all realised that to challenge this probably would have resulted in us not getting work at the end of the placement.

The most galling thing about my time on work experience was that after the first week the store manager said that she would look at putting us on the payroll after we were till-trained. Well, by the end of the third week I was fully till-trained yet still I heard nothing about being kept on.

At the end of my eight weeks I was told that I wasn’t getting the job. As annoying as this is, it was made worse by the fact that, as a result of the placement, I missed training opportunities that would have given me a much higher chance of gaining employment.

These schemes are used, not to give training or experience, but to undercut those who are in paid employment using unpaid ‘volunteers’. Because of this it is vital that the trade union movement, especially those that organise in retail and fast food, take up the issue of workfare and also of youth unemployment – which is now over one million.

A coordinated trade union fightback which includes moves towards unionising un-unionised workplaces could see workfare fully defeated and be a huge blow to the Con-Dems and their pro-big business agenda. Youth Fight for Jobs is campaigning across the country against workfare and for genuine job creation as young people say: we won’t be a lost generation!

YFJ Speaker at Bradford Trades Council Public Meeting

Rhiannon speaking at a YFJ public meeting in Leeds last year

On Thursday 17th May, Rhiannon Wright spoke on behalf of Youth Fight for Jobs at a public meeting on youth unemployment organised by Bradford Trades Council. Rhiannon has been forced onto workfare schemes by Tory scum Iain Duncan Smith’s “reforms” of (read: attacks on) the benefits system and the odious Chris Grayling’s pro-slavery “Mandatory Work Activity Programme”.

Dave Younger

The sheer inability of British captialism to provide able-bodied people with jobs means she is one of 1 million young people Cameron’s government of toffs and millionaires considers fair game for super-exploitation. Rhiannon reminded those present of the stark statistics:

Official unemployment level: 2.6 million*

Number of 16 to 24-year-olds unemployed: 1 million

Total number of job vacancies in the country: 400, 000.

Percentage of jobs needed which don’t exist: 96%

Percentage of the 14% of needed jobs that do exist which are temporary or part time: 90%

*This first statistic does not include people on temporary or part time employment, people forced into workfare schemes by the government, people in the process of being made redundant, people on incapacity benefit or people suspended from receiving unemployment benefit.

A lecturer from the UCU present at the meeting pointed out that If Britain measured its unemployement rate using the same system as is used in the United States, the official British unemployment rate would stand at 6.3 million people, which is around 10%.

Rhiannon spoke of her experience of the Con-Dem’s Mandatory Work Activity Scheme: “They say it’s voluntary, but it’s not: the clue’s in the name.” This scheme involves sending 16 to 24 year olds to work full time at for their measely unemployment benefit, effectively a wage of £1.75 an hour, 35 hours a week. Their other choice is to be “sanctioned” and have their benefits revoked entirely. Not much of a choice when there are several million people out of work and only 400,000 vacancies out there, is it?

And who makes money out of this – the corporations, of course. Not just companies like ASDA, Tesco, Boots, Burger King, HMV, Greggs and other high street chains who use the slave labour of vulnerable young people to line their pockets with profit. There are also uber-parasitic corporations like Ingeus-Deloitte, and the recently dropped A4E, founded by David Cameron’s “workless families tsar” and high-flying fraudster, the vile Emma Harrison,  who make billions of pounds from government contracts, paid for by the taxpayer, out of this despicable scheme.

Youth Fight for Jobs will continue to campaign against these attacks, and is planning a demonstration in Bradford in the autumn to demand a future for young people.

Interview With Leeds Trinity Students Against Cuts activists in Today’s Independent

Today’s Independent has published a feature on the Leeds Trinity Occupation led by Youth Fight for Jobs & Education activists, the publicity for the campaign and the Jarrow march mentioned in the article are welcome. Unfortunately, the article glosses over most of the actual politics of the occupation (that they were demanding that the university management make no cuts and fight for the funds to maintain courses and services from the government). It also confuses the nature of the actual occupation in January when the university management made concessions, including giving the Leeds Trinity Students Against Cuts an office, with them using the office they have since gained, from which they have organised students to attend demonstrations in Leeds and further away, helped build Horsforth Against Cuts and helped support the two strikes of UCU members at Leeds Trinity. It was the threat of delaying building work within an area of the college which forced management to make these concessions (therefore the assertation in the article that the occupation wasn’t disruptive was untrue).

Student protest against Leeds Trinity’s fee rises is longest sit-in in the country

The activists tell Richard Garner why they won’t give up the fight

Thursday, 7 July 2011

You drive past Horsforth Cricket Club as you approach Leeds Trinity University College. The leafy Leeds suburb gives you no indication you are about to approach one of the most impressive (or militant, depending upon your point of view) examples of student protest witnessed in the past year.

Yet the students at the college have notched up the record for the longest occupation/sit-in in the country, since demonstrations against the rise in tuition fees began last November. In some ways, it is a very British protest – going on now with the blessing of the university management, which says it is “supportive” of their protest against government cuts.

The students themselves have also been accommodating to the college management. When they realised it could cost the university money if they continued to stage their protest in a defunct staff room due for development, they reached agreement to move to another office.

Andy Smith, aged 28 and a second-year psychology student who is the most prominent amongst the demonstrators, says: “We’re protesting about cuts to higher education and we were there to make sure the college spent its money wisely. If there were delays in the contractor moving into the building, there would be fines for the college – and that didn’t seem to make sense.”

The occupation started when the students returned from the first mass demonstration against the fee rises in November – notorious for the storming of the Conservative party headquarters at Millbank. The Leeds Trinity group on that demonstration did not join the occupation but milled around outside the building, as they knew they had to get back to Leeds by coach that evening.

At first, it was students from the psychology department who were in the forefront of the protest. “I think 11 of the 13 that went down to London for the demonstration were from psychology,” says Andy Smith. It made it difficult to keep up the 24-hour occupation if there was a key psychology lecture about to take place. “We had to text round furiously to see if could get other students to take over,” says Jordan Kelly, aged 19, who is a forensic-science student.

The protesters were sustained during the occupation by staff at the university, who kept on bringing them cakes and cups of tea and coffee to sustain them. This is in sharp contrast to the more high-profile protests at University College London, where the university took legal action to remove the students.

Because the students have been so conscientious and well organised, they are adamant that the occupation has not affected their studies. For the duration of the occupation, they have operated a sort of rota. In fact, their tutors predict that those involved in it will do well in their exams. There is also a note pinned to the door saying that if their present office is unoccupied at any time, it is only because they have had to shoot off to take an exam and someone will be back soon. The students themselves believe being involved in the occupation has bolstered their confidence.

Tanis Belsham-Wray, an 18-year-old first-year psychology student, says: “I didn’t really do any public speaking beforehand. I’ve got a lot in terms of organisational skills and the confidence to do things out of it. Also, there’s motivation – you put so much energy into it.” Andy Smith adds: “It really does build life skills. Perhaps it should be a mandatory part of every student’s course.”

Leeds Trinity is a small university with a strength in teacher-training and journalism courses and 3,500 students. But it does not hit the headlines as much as its better-known counterparts in the city – the Russell Group Leeds University and Leeds Metropolitan. As Jordan Kelly put it: “At least you can Google us and see what we’ve done now.”

The occupation has been scaled back now that the students – who are independent of the students’ union at the university (although five of them have won places on its executive next year) – have been granted official permission to occupy an unused office in the building. There is no need to mount an overnight occupation because they know they are not going to be turfed out.

From the university’s point of view, Professor Freda Bridge, principal and chief executive of the university, says: “We are supportive of their campaign against government cuts in higher education and have worked positively with them to ensure they can carry out their protest. The students initiated a sit-in in December which they have continued to date.

“By providing them with an office base we placed our trust in them to continue their activities in a peaceful manner and they have respected this by maintaining a well-organised protest that is not disruptive to our business and they have been professional at all times,” she adds.

Has this very polite protest achieved anything, though?

One of the reasons the students first started their occupation was a perceived threat to the university from the Coalition Government’s plan to move teacher training out of universities into schools. (The university is adamant that it has a robust future.)

They have taken their protest out into the local community, making links with local political groups and turning it into a protest generally about the impact of public-spending cuts and have successfully set up a “Horsforth Against The Cuts” campaign, which has taken to the streets to oppose local spending cuts. They probably would not have envisaged that happening at Horsforth Cricket Club a few months ago.

Will it continue next year? Well, it is being stood down for the summer holidays but next term it is expected to start again when the students plan to put up marchers who are planning to recreate the 1936 Jarrow march against unemployment as they make their way to London.

What academics and students at the university would agree upon is that it has created a breed of students who will not be apathetic and will want to take an active part in the future democratic life of the country. Andy Smith, for instance, stood for election (albeit unsuccessfully) to the local council this summer.