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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2012-06-14 12:00 pm
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toothycat: (sunkitten)

[personal profile] toothycat 2012-06-14 05:55 pm (UTC)(link)
I have one counter-example to the work programme being exploitation - unfortunately, I think it's rather isolated. A friend of mine who used to work in web design has been out of work for a while, and was thinking about retraining, when he was told he had to work at a charity shop stacking shelves or lose his dole. He was unimpressed, of course - but at the last moment he got a phone call telling him they'd found him somewhere more suited to him, and they had. He's still not getting paid, of course, but he's working for a different charity helping them to set up a Unix server, which is something he wouldn't have been able to train himself to do alone. Plus, he actively enjoys having the work to go to, although of course he'd prefer to be paid.
I am depressingly aware that he is probably one of the very few to have been given a position that is actively helping him to gain skills he wants and would not otherwise have been able to learn, but for him, the scheme has worked so far. If he actually gets a job using these skills, it'll have worked properly.
Interestingly, I think it's a pilot scheme being run in Cambridge - it is part of the general work programme, but perhaps they're doing it differently or something. I don't have any more information on that, sorry.

[identity profile] khbrown.livejournal.com 2012-06-14 10:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Good for your friend, but what about the person who works setting up Unix servers and who has perhaps been denied that bit of work? If said server runs on Linux or BSD and your friend has a computer is there anything preventing them from downloading a few ISOs and experimenting with installing them, setting up SAMBA, LAMP etc? There are plenty of resources out there for the autodidact.
toothycat: (sunkitten)

[personal profile] toothycat 2012-06-14 11:09 pm (UTC)(link)
It's a very small charity, and there's no money. The boss wants the server set up, but it's not absolutely required for the charity to function. If my friend hadn't been helping them, there would have been nobody else doing it; it would have been one of those jobs left to rot on the backburner.

My friend does not autodidact. It's a shame, but some people simply can't learn that way. He should really have had more help in previous times but for various reasons (not all his fault) has not managed that. This is something I don't think he'd have got any other way.

[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com 2012-06-15 09:35 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I think doing something voluntary definitely CAN be helpful. The problem seems to be, the government assumes there are millions of unfilled jobs out there that people could get if they just cleaned up their act and tried hard enough. But there doesn't seem any evidence for that: where are these shelf-stacking jobs desperately looking for an employee, but unable to find someone who can do it? It seems massively more likely that there aren't enough jobs (sample evidence: companies are laying people off because there's a depression).

So the policy generally seems to be "trick people into doing one of these schemes as punishment, and hope they give up on getting any benefits or get a job by sheer force of will".

I don't think it's NEVER useful. Just that it seems more harmful than helpful. (And has a lot of secondary bad effects.) Placing people to do charity work that would otherwise go undone is a good start -- it's still possible to cause serious problems, but if it works it's actually providing some positive improvement to society. (A good indication that this is what's happening would be that people who are ALREADY doing volunteer work or unpaid internships, especially ones related to their core skills, were rewarded and praised, rather than villified and punished.) It seems workfare does vary a lot by local region: if some ARE doing it better, that's a good thing (although it's been such a disaster, I'm not sure it's worth saving).
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