Monday, 18 April 2011

More family champions

Emma Harrison has announced that two other councils have joined Blackpool in piloting her Working Families Everywhere scheme. They are Hull and Westminster. Neither council seems to have told their electorates, since there's nothing on their websites. Perhaps they are reluctant to announce, at the same time as making hundreds of council workers redundant, that they are employing "family champions".

4 comments:

  1. Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and
    consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present
    Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—

    1Training wage
    (1)Any person who would otherwise qualify for entitlement to the national
    minimum wage, as defined in the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, shall not
    be so entitled if he or she has entered into a written contract of employment
    5providing that his or her entitlement is to a training wage.
    (2)A contract of employment providing a training wage must also include an
    entitlement to training from the employer in skills relevant to the employment.
    2Short title, commencement and extent
    (1)This Act may be cited as the Training Wage Act 2011.
    (2)10This Act comes into force on the day on which it is passed.
    (3)This Act extends to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. do not sign anything stating you will work for a "training wage" if this bill is passed. be aware.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am also suspicious of a "training wage", but it's meant to enable employers to take trainees on without having to pay them the full amount. It has nothing to do with work placements, where your income from benefits plus the extra for being on a scheme will probably come to more than the training wage.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know this anonymous person is desperate to get his point across. But how many times does one have to say this? - you are not working for nothing. You receive an income from the state. If you refuse a work placement you are playing into the hands of those who say you don't want to work. You refuse to put something on your CV which shows you are actively looking for work.

    If that makes me sound like a supporter of the system, I'm not. I know that a lot of work placements are soul-destroying if you feel that you are just being used as free labour. But there's precious little sympathy for that view out there.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "where your income from benefits plus the extra for being on a scheme will probably come to more than the training wage."

    You no longer get a top up of JSA if you are on a scheme I think. Certainly I did not last year when I was with a4e under New Deal. I even was expected to pay the $4.40 travel expenses to/from their office.

    This was not the case with Flexible New Deal,

    ReplyDelete

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