Workfare: Unexpected Intern in the bagging area

The truth of the matter is that the government cares more about statistics than genuinely tackling unemployment.

Photograph: Getty Images

Children have a terrifically simple way of exploring the limits of adult knowledge. They do so by asking a question, then responding to each new piece of data with “but, why?” The, almost inevitable, ending to this line of questioning is either “because I said so” or “I don’t know, that’s just how it is”.

James O’Brien on LBC seems to have elicited similarly impatient but illuminating responses from Iain Duncan Smith on the subject of workfare. Talking about Cait Reilly, who was recently successful in challenging the legality of the state compelling her to take an unpaid placement in Poundlad, Smith declared: “She was paid. What do you think the taxpayer was paying, for God’s sake? Job Seeker’s Allowance? That is what we are paying her to do.”

The interview reveals the dark heart of the matter when it comes to Work Experience, Youth Training Schemes, Mandatory Work Activity, Community Action Programmes and the rest of a panoply of such schemes. Smith ended up describing workfare schemes as “us allowing people to continue to earn their JobSeeker’s Allowance, but also to take experience in companies that allow them to do that.” That’s a lot of allowing; a lot of noblesse oblige.

However one chooses to dress it up, at the core of such policies is the idea that by paying a benefit the state (and by extension the taxpayer) assumes part-ownership of the labour of persons in receipt. I find this position irreconcilable with the ideological basis of a party which believes that the state needs to shrink to as small a size as possible and stand out of the way of individuals who wish to “get on”. The action does not match the rhetoric. What the state is actually doing is buying the labour of millions of people, en masse and below market rate, in order to then contract it out to large and profitable businesses for nothing.

Such schemes do not end the “something for nothing culture”. They simply elevate it to the corporate level. It is a paradox for traditional right-wing commentators who object to funding an individual’s benefits, to appear quite happy to cross-subsidise a huge conglomerate with global revenues of $100bn in 2010.
When opposition to the scheme was first gathering pace, Tesco explained that of the 1,400 people who have been made to serve them (because to use the verb “employ” would require some consideration on the part of Tesco), 300 got a job with the company. This means one of three things, all three very worrying. Either:

1. Tesco were genuinely trying to fill 1,400 positions, but  were only capable of training roughly one in five people to stack shelves in six weeks. Or:
2. There were only 300 positions in the first place (probably due to natural turnover, which I imagine is quite high), but Tesco decided they might as well conduct six-week interviews on our buck. Or:
3. There were 1,400 genuine vacancies in the relevant stores, but why on earth would they fill them with paid employees, when they can have a rolling six-weekly army of 1,400 free ones?

The effectiveness of such schemes is also highly contentious. The government commissioned its own research before implementation. It concluded:

There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers. Subsidised (“transitional”) job schemes that pay a wage can be more effective in raising employment levels than “work for benefit” programmes. Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high.

Perhaps most importantly, these schemes are a state-form of denial; a particularly egregious case of ostrichism. We know from an official response to a parliamentary question that the Office for National Statistics includes people on such unpaid schemes in their data as “employed”. Such schemes are being rolled out on a massive scale. 370,000 unemployed were referred to the Work Programme in the first few months of its existence. Over a million people are expected to be caught by Community Action Schemes. The manipulation of statistics at such a scale may go some way to explaining the continuing disparity between rising “employment” and stagnating or contracting GDP.

Policy on these schemes has become axiomatic. It has become the art of “because I said so” or “I don’t know, that’s just how it is”. It has done so in the face of evidence to the contrary, creationist in its resistance to the truth. There is an overwhelmingly idiotic assumption at its basis; that the reason 2.5m jobless will not fit into 500,000 vacancies, is not mathematics, but a lack of willingness on their part. How can the state tackle unemployment if it is unaware of how many people are genuinely unemployed, where they are and which industries they are trying to find work in?

All this lays bare a stark fact: the Government is interested in the figures looking good, rather than genuinely tackling unemployment. For how can one solve a problem by hiding it in dark statistical recesses and denying it exists? With increasing job insecurity, that is something that should concern us all, regardless political persuasion.

By Alex Andreou
New Statesman