I walked past the Conservative Party Conference site in Manchester on Sunday, along with at least 50,000 others craftily avoiding being caught on camera by the BBC.
Emblazoned across the conference centre facade was the motto 'For Hardworking People'. I couldn't help wondering why, if that were so, there seemed to be so many nurses, teachers, firefighters, builders, doctors, paramedics, civil servants and all manner of other unquestionably 'hard workers' marching by outside booing and jeering at the Tories within.
Among the 'workers' were plenty of retired people and many who were clearly permanently severely physically disabled; those who value the NHS more than most and have arguably felt the impact of 'austerity' hardest of all. There were almost certainly some long-term unemployed people as well and, from that snide strapline about 'hardworking people' and a few well-placed leaks, they probably had a fairly good idea that they would be cast as the villains of the economic story once again. But I'm not sure that any of us would have expected not only the odious Secretary of State for Work and Pensions but the Chancellor and today, the Prime Minister himself, to have singled out unemployed people for so much 'tough love' - by which they mean such caring policies as expecting them to pick litter or clean grafitti for their benefits, attend the Jobcentre on a daily basis or, if you're under 25, manage without any benefits at all.
Apparently, or so we are told by the media, proposals of this type are popular with the voters. Naturally they are, when we are spoon-fed such unpleasant stereotypes of what the 'long-term unemployed' look like: that would be Frank Gallagher from 'Shameless' or his real-life equivalent, gleefully tracked down by a so-called 'reality' TV show, accessorised with a can of beer and a big telly. Similarly our unemployed 'youth' is a youth - a young man, smoking, hood up or cap pulled down over his face, sloping out of the jobcentre, swearing and grumbling. You see these images so often that even if you work in welfare rights, they are almost the default, and that's what the Government rely on when they make these announcements - a lack of empathy.
Except that true 'reality' doesn't look like this at all. Real long-term unemployed people don't choose a 'lifestyle' of unemployment and they are as varied as their counterparts still in work. The majority are likely to be older workers from occupations that don't pity advancing age, from manual labourers and care-workers where physical fitness is key to employability, to teaching and technology where burn-out is an occupational hazard and skills quickly become outdated. As likely to be over-qualified as under-qualified: a story today highlights how a woman was threatened with a potential sanction for refusing to 'dumb down' her CV by a Work Programme adviser. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2439989/Job-centre-staff-told-unemployed-graduate-told-dumb-CV-remove-degree-work.html Yes, I'm afraid that is a link to the Daily Mail website - even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Making someone in either group pick litter for a few months will do nothing to usefully bridge the two-year gap in their CV. Once they are 'long-term unemployed', the damage is done. Access to retraining and support needs to be immediate, genuine and compassionate, not imposed as a form of punishment and bullying on people messing up the economic recovery statistics.
Similarly our jobless young people. They aren't all school-leavers, though even if they were, there would be much wrong with assuming their parents could continue to keep them once the tax credts and child benefit run out, even if there are parents. Cutting benefits will make care leavers even more vulnerable than they are already, surely? But by the age of twenty-five, it's possible to have spent nine years in paid employment and been made redundant, to have a partner and children and a home of your own, mortgaged or rented. Even if you have have just left school, there is no guarantee that there will be job opportunities close to home. Students who have studied away from home may have a better chance of securing work in their University town - but how will they do this with no housing benefit even for a room in a shared house while they look, nor the £57 a week or so currently paid in JSA to the under 25s. If you've grown up in a run-down town with few job opportunities, how do you move to a place with better prospects on no money at all? It will leave many young people seeking to make a new life for themselves desperately vulnerable to exploitation and crime.
What is so vicious about these proposals is framing them as a form of community service punishment to be dished out to 'persistent offenders' who have failed to get jobs after two years and a run-in with the Work Programme. As if no-one who has been long-term unemployed might be willing to take a job street-cleaning or catering, only the Councils who employed people to do these jobs have had their budgets slashed and these posts have had to go. As if someone struggling to master writing a CV and manage online Jobsearch might not welcome the opportunity to see their friendly Jobcentre adviser more regularly than once a fortnight, except that the Jobcentre adviser is now expected to manage a massive caseload and cannot treat any of them as individuals, being under pressure to sanction not support. As if people held back by poor educational attainent wouldn't be glad of the opportunity to brush up their maths and English, if so many libraries and adult education facilities weren't being closed. And as if people with addiction issues aren't crying out for support to help them get clean and lead less chaotic lives, only this Government's cuts have made that support harder to access.
But the Government's own plans for 'Welfare Reform' will themselves increase the numbers counted as 'out of work'. Couples who work now need to manage at least 24 hours a week between them to qualify for working tax credit - up from 16 hours, so a typical 181/2 jobshare is no longer enough if your partner is, for example, sick or a carer - you'll have to fight a colleague for extra hours. Lone parents have had to seek work at an ever decreasing age for their youngest child, and people with health problems that previously saw them classed as unfit for work are now miraculously 'cured' via the ESA work capability assessment. Universal Credit goes further, proposing to pressurise increasing numbers of low-paid and part-time workers to get extra hours or risk losing their benefits, and will extend these work-seeking requirements to people currently off the radar as far as unemployment statistics are concerned - the working-age partners of retired people, people with a low income currently claiming for rent only, including volunteers or carers or childminders for their family, or those in some other way playing a small but useful role in society.
With many more people already chasing the jobs available than there are posts, why add people needlessly to the ranks of the 'unemployed'? Because, unless something is done to create more real jobs, rather than continuing to cut public services still further, how are any of them supposed to become 'hardworking people'?
