A Disease Called Workfare

The New Year had scarcely begun before politicians of all parties were bickering over who could provide the toughest clinical assessment of those claiming jobseekers. Their proposed treatment: welfare cuts and a massive dose of workfare. What does this have to do with the Occupy movement? Everything. Workfare is another example of the kind of corporate culture that many occupiers want to resist.

The Workfare programme forces people to work without pay, or risk losing all social security payments via ‘sanctions’. It is being pushed by the government as part of its wider welfare reform policies and appears in a few different guises, be it Mandatory Work Activity or the Community Action Programme. The biggest programme is the “Work Programme”.

Despite evidence to the contrary, the government argues that ‘workfare’ helps people into work, increases employment and cuts government spending. Yet the government refuses to release figures to demonstrate the policy’s success rate, and it has forced those organizations implementing the scheme to sign a contract preventing them from doing so either. Closer examination of the evidence reveals what workfare actually is: a massive state subsidy for corporate profit.

So called ‘provider companies’, (such as Ingeus, which is owned by city financiers Deloitte) are paid millions by the government whilst forcing people to undertake unpaid work for other big private companies (Asda, H.M.V and Tescos are among them)  – who in turn boost their own profits by employing fewer staff and cutting overtime. After all, they now have a potential workforce of nearly three million unemployed to tap into.

If you have a job, you would be wrong think that workfare will not affect you. The government intends to extend the remit of the scheme to people already in employment who receive in-work benefits – all those who are part-time, low-waged, self-employed or precarious workers will be expected to earn at least £212 per week. If they fail to meet that goal, they will be referred to the Work Programme. As well as punishing the unemployed, the government wants to punish people in work for not making enough money. Low paid retail staff are especially damned – their hours are already being cut by the introduction of unpaid staff on workfare. Oh, and if you are newly graduated, or under 24, then you are going to be fast tracked onto the scheme. Degrees are not taken into consideration.

Unionized public sector workers are not immune from the workfare virus. Even if you are not one of the 700,000 public sector workers faced with unemployment, the DWP has encouraged providers to target local and national authorities as places for the unemployed to carry out workfare. This could see recently redundant public sector workers forced to work unpaid in their old jobs. If you face issues like refusal to advance or increase salary, get help from a lawyer to ensure your rights are protected.

A few local union branches aside, the union leadership have failed to respond to the threat this scheme poses to its membership. If they are hoping for Labour to reject workfare, they will be disappointed. Liam Byrne strongly advocates workfare and an American welfare system. Labour want to celebrate Beveridge’s welfare state by destroying it.

A brief lesson in free market economics: If you can force people to work for you unpaid (and in doing so significantly increase your profit margins), then why would you hire staff and pay them a wage? You don’t have to be John Maynard Keynes to realise that workfare encourages a business model which takes money out of the real economy and leads to a loss in tax revenue whilst giving money to those with a penchant for tax havens.

Yet the Work Programme is such a successful £5 billion policy that it recently saw providers asking for both more money from the government, and to have their targets for getting people into work decreased. Without such action, workfare providers publicly admitted that the scheme would fail. A Nick Clegg intervention and billion pound injection later, Christmas yet again came early for corporate CEOs. For a failing economic system on taxpayer-financed life support, workfare is a corporate drug prescribed to remedy plummeting profits whilst leading to ever more illness for everybody else.

But Workfare is not terminal. People have come together to collectively diagnose Workfare, whether at Tent City University or in the Boycott Workfare campaign (boycottworkfare.org). There are several routes to the cure. The coming year will see them articulated to overcome the disease called Workfare.

 By Warren Richards