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Category Archives: JSA/Workfare/Work Programme
Charities Abandon Workfare Schemes – Cancer Research and British Heart Foundation Both Out!
There’s little good news in this week’s diktat from the DWP that sick and disabled people can now be sent on unlimited workfare or face being forced into near starvation and possible homelessness.However yesterday’s Guardian report contains one chink of hope which may yet prove the unraveling of this vicious and inept welfare regime. Earlier reports that British Heart Foundation are pulling out of workfare appear to now be confirmed. This is despite the floundering welfare-to-work companies who run the scheme offering them bribes to continue using forced unpaid labour.
Cancer Research UK are also set to abandon exploiting people on the Mandatory Work Activity scheme in their charity shops. Whether this also applies to Work Programme participants forced into unpaid work is unclear. Let’s hope so. If not those on sickness benefits diagnosed with cancer could soon find themselves working unpaid for the UK’s largest cancer charity.
Disability charity Scope – who from Monday will have powers to send sick and disabled people on endless workfare themselves as Work Programme providers – are also reviewing their involvement in workfare and may pull out.
Many in the so called third sector have been shamefully slow to wake up to the realities of workfare, no doubt because so many of them have lucrative Work Programme sub-contracts themselves.
These announcements, by three major UK charities, are important however. British Heart Foundation are believed to have been one of the biggest workfare placement providers. Cancer Research were probably not far behind. This leaves a big hole in the number of organisations who are prepared to abandon decency and their charitable credentials and force unemployed, unwell or disabled people into forced labour.
The ‘voluntary work’ option of Tony Blair’s New Deal, the first mass workfare scheme, largely collapsed due to providers not being able to find enough work placements.
Some charities are unrepentant. The Conservation Volunteers boast of how they have quietly and ruthlessly exploited 20,000 workfare workers since the 1980s. It is these types of charities, which need a lot of physical work doing and are not in the public eye, who are likely to make use of the Government’s plans to force disabled and in some cases terminally ill people onto workfare.
It has been public pressure, from demonstrations outside their premises to an onslaught of anger online, which has forced these charities out of workfare. With a huge escalation of workfare underway, it is down to all of us to make workfare unworkable.
Join the Week of Action Against Workfare Charities beginning on December 8th for starters.
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Never Trust A Hippy – The Green Charity With 20,000 Workfare Slaves
The Conservation Trust for Volunteers (formally BCTV) have been exposed as one of the largest exploiters of unpaid labour.According to the charity, 20,ooo people unemployed people have been forced to work digging ditches and other physical tasks without pay since 1980 (PDF). The charity even boast about their relationship with the DWP on their website along with their use of Mandatory Work Activity (MWA).
Mandatory Work Activity is four weeks full time work used as punishment for unemployed people judged not trying hard enough to find work by Jobcentre officials. CTV claims these people are ‘volunteers’ and they are providing a ‘route into paid employment’. The evidence shows however that this scheme is useless at actually helping people get a job.
Claimants can only be sentenced to Mandatory Work Activity, it is not possible to volunteer for the scheme.
All those in the green movement who are committed to both environmental sustainability and social justice should immediately boycott these fake fluffy bastards. And tell them what you think on twitter @tcvtweets and facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TheConservationVolunteers
With workfare for sick and disabled claimants to begin on December 3rd – International Disabled People’s Day – many have wondered where all these new placements are set to come from. The Conservation Volunteers may well be one of the largest users of unpaid forced labour in the UK. Make it cost them.
Thanks to StokeBloke1972 for pointing this out in the comments
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Despite the alleged ‘payment by results’ model much hyped by Iain Duncan Smith, tax payers could have paid out up to £60,000 for every job gained by sickness or disability claimants on the Work Programme.
Whilst much of the attention this week has been focused on the appalling job entry rates for those on mainstream unemployment benefits, the performance figures for those on sickness or disability benefits has received less scrutiny.
Under the Work Programme, claimants on the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG), are now forced to attend job search sessions or face losing benefits. This group represent those who have been assessed as being able to work at some point in the future and therefore not eligible for full sickness or disability benefits.
In a damning admission the DWP this week showed that just 1000 people in this group had gained work out of a total of 79,000 people referred to the scheme. Most of these claimants will have be sent to carry out job search with charities who are sub-contracted to deliver the Work Programme.
Charities share lucrative Work Programme pay outs with the prime contractors, the welfare-to-work parasites such as A4e and G4S who run the scheme. Each referral to the programme for WRAG claimants comes with a £600 ‘attachment fee’ meaning that around £47.4 million pounds has been paid out so far.
On top of this the providers are paid a job entry fee after the participant has been in work for six months. They are then paid further fees for up to two years as long as the job lasts. The maximum that can be paid out for someone who stays in work for two years is £13,720 – the minimum for a job that lasts just six months is £1,200.
This means that between somewhere between £48.6 and £60 million pounds has been handed over to charities and their poverty pimp bosses. With only 1000 people finding work this works out at a cost of a staggering job outcome cost of between £48,000 and £60,000 pounds each.
The total spend on Work Programme for sickness and disability benefits is around the same as the money saved by the Remploy closures. Since a small amount of WRAG claimants would have been expected to find work without any help from the Work Programme, it seems this money has simply been flushed down the toilet.
Perhaps most galling of all, some of the money spent has been handed to the very same charities who supported the closure of Remploy such as Mencap.
Under ordinary circumstances this amount of money being spent on providing access to work for those who are disabled or unwell might be seen as a positive step. Yet all of those in the WRAG group have been signed off work by their own GPs. With long term unemployment soaring, all the Work Programme has represented is a programme of harassment and benefit sanctions for people unable to work due to illness or disability. Money that could have Saved Remploy, or the Independent Living Fund, has been squandered by charities and private companies involved in the Work Programme.
Work Programme charity Scope have been quick to condemn the dreadful Work Programme performance figures. Yet they themselves are one of the largest charities to profit from the scheme. Scope claim disabled people need more “tailored and targeted support to find a job and the Work Programme just doesn’t offer them this.”
If Scope haven’t been offering this support then it begs the question of what exactly have these tens of millions of pounds been spent on? The Government has responded by giving charities the powers to force disabled people to attend full time unpaid workfare. The very strategy which has been so disastrous for non-disabled unemployed people is now to be inflicted upon people who are unable to work due to sickness or disability.
Whilst some charities, including MIND, and Addaction have announced they will not co-operate with workfare for disabled people, the silence from @scope so far has been deafening.
On December 8th a National Week of Action Against Workfare Charities will take place with protests, pickets and actions already expected in Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham, Brighton, London, Edinburgh and Liverpool.
Service users and supporters are waking up the true motivations of these organisations who have so willingly profited from the most inept and brutal welfare-to-work programme ever devised. It’s time to hold so called charities to account for their involvement in a scheme that seems to do little more than punish claimants with workfare and benefit sanctions simply for being sick or disabled .
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