Yesterday the media had many reports about Sanctions.
The BBC said,
More than 400,000 people have lost Jobseeker’s Allowance under new government sanctions aimed at ensuring they actively seek work.
Work Minister Esther McVey said,Some 580,000 sanctions were handed down between October 2012 and June 2013, a 6% rise on the same period a year earlier, before rules were toughened.
The people who get sanctions are wilfully rejecting support for no good reason and if there were a reason … there is something known as ‘good cause’, so if that seemed true and genuine you’d have good cause there to not have a sanction, plus there is a process in place just to ensure we are getting it right.”
The BBC
also reported,
Peter Jones avoided a serious brain injury when he fell at work in November last year. But while he escaped with his health, his good fortune ended there – he was told not to come back to work and went to sign on.
This was a month after new rules for those out of work were introduced and he was about to find out all about them.
“I’d worked all my life,” he says. “But they treated me as if I was cheating the system from day one. They didn’t even know me.”
eter, who says he was applying for “five to six jobs a day”, felt this was just what he was doing.Designed to help
He had moved from Llandudno to be near his seriously ill mother in Stafford who was in and out of hospital with brain tumours.
But when he wanted to move back to Wales and look for work there, he says job centre officials 100 miles away in Stafford deemed this an “inappropriate search”.
He was sanctioned and did not have any income for the whole of December. He got into debt and, aged 30, moved back in with his parents.
“I didn’t know what to do or how to get out of it,” he says.
When he moved and signed on in Wales, he was sanctioned again for not attending a meeting with an adviser back in Stafford.
Peter found a job as soon as he returned to Wales but, because of the sanctions, he had only received two JSA payments in the three months he was out of work.
“I’m scared of ever being in that situation again,” he says.
Mark Serwotka, general secretary, of the PCS
union which represents Job centre staff, said:
“Today’s sanctions statistics show a shocking rise in the numbers being penalised, resulting in severe and dehumanising hardship for claimants and their families. The new sanctions regime damages the relationship between Jobcentre advisers and claimants, and is entirely counterproductive in helping people to find work.
“Our members joined to help people back into work, not to trip them up and police an increasingly unreasonable system. The government’s perverse and punitive approach is a collective punishment on the unemployed and the disabled for its own failure to create sufficient jobs.”
Boycott Workfare, the respected
campaign group says,
Boycott Workfare have called on the Public and Commercial Services union, the union for job centre staff, to ballot their members on a boycott of workfare and sanctions.
Boycott Workfare have called for a UK-wide Week of Action Against Sanctions and Workfare from 2nd to 8th December.
