The future of work

If you didn't see the Panorama programme last night, you really should.  It's on iplayer.  It's called Workers on the Breadline and is a real eye-opener for those who think poor people are all idle and feckless.  It looked at working people whose incomes have to be topped up by tax credits.  (The presenter used the word hand-outs a lot, and I objected to that, but perhaps he was just reflecting the language of the right-wing press.)  There were couples where both partners worked (and had no more than three children) but even with WTC were living on the edge; and there was a single man, Jason, working in a zero hours job, earning around £10k a year and getting only £300 a year in WTC.  These were real people, struggling (and in Jason's case drowning) and knowing that it will only get worse.  It was pointed out that working overtime or extra hours isn't the answer because you lose most of your benefit, and for people with children the cost of childcare is impossible.  I haven't seen the BBC do anything this competent and important for years, so it's sad to learn that they're ditching all investigative reporting from Panorama.  There were no politicians waffling; the positions of the two main parties were set out succinctly.  And two authorities offered no solutions, admitting that Britain has become a low-skilled economy and wages are far too low.  While education and skills would seem to be important, one said, if you come out of university and the only work you can get is stacking shelves, that in itself isn't the answer.
There was a disturbing report from Liverpool on Saturday that half the jobs on Merseyside are now temporary agency jobs.  (See this Liverpool Echo piece.)  Agencies like Prime Time get hand-outs from the government to take people on under the Work Programme then pay them so little that, after travel costs, they can come away with £3.72 an hour.
This is a lunatic downward spiral.  Of the families featured on the Panorama programme, one husband and wife both work at Tesco.  But they can't afford to shop there.  All the big supermarkets are losing market share to the discounters.  And that's just one obvious result of how making people suffer frozen wages and benefit cuts impacts on the economy as a whole.  Those at the very top rake in a bigger and bigger share of the nation's money, but they don't spend it down at the supermarket.

What is the answer, then?  Raising the minimum wage is an obvious part of it, despite the protests of business that they can't afford it.  Genuine skills training has to be in there too.  Jason said in the programme that the only way he could see of getting a better job was to have a driving license, but he obviously couldn't afford driving lessons.  Why not set up a free driving school for people in his position?  And anyone who has spent years working in a particular industry and then loses his job should be re-trained.  Another component is to get rid of all the free labour, workfare schemes which allow companies to avoid actually hiring people.
The answer is not the Work Programme.  Both Labour and the Lib Dems have come round to the idea that local councils have to be in control of this.  They couldn't just end the contracts but they could negotiate changes which would give councils the power to commission programmes suited to the needs of their areas, and to use the money currently being wasted on the WP to fund the the schemes many councils are already operating in conjunction with skills training organisations.

The status quo is not an option for much longer.

Confusion - and a rant from IDS

Are Tesco and Next importing foreign workers because they cost less than British ones?  It's the claim by Labour MP Chris Bryant, indignantly denied by the firms concerned, and it's all a bit confused at the moment.  Many of us have little doubt that Bryant is right in general; but it's necessary to get the details absolutely right.
That's never been a consideration for Iain Duncan Smith.  He has penned an extraordinary rant in the Mail today.  The headline is: "For those eyeballing benefits as a one-way ticket to easy street, I have a wake-up call for you: those days are over! Says IAIN DUNCAN SMITH".  That in itself is enough to get jaws dropping among benefits claimants.  But the bizarre statements have yet to come.  Did you know that "there are 4,000 single people making more in benefits than many individual people would earn from work"?  Just try working out what that means.  You'll notice that there's no mention of the fact that this is all down to the cost of rents.  But IDS wants Mail readers to know that by the end of September those people will be subject to a new cap of £18,200.  Then there's the Claimant Commitment" which "transforms the relationship between the claimant and the system.  Claimants will sign an agreement to undertake certain activities in order to get their benefits in return.  Our advisers have the power to sanction people who don't uphold their part of the bargain.  No longer can people just turn up to claim benefits with no onus on them to better their situation."
What can one say to that?  Does he not know that the current system is already exactly what he describes?  And why won't he publish the sanctions figures?  Well, probably, but it's not truth or accuracy which matter, it's feeding the prejudices of the public at large.  And that seems to be the case with yet another poverty entertainment show tonight.  Channel 4, which once did such a good job with Benefit Busters, now prefers to give us a series which harks back to the start of the welfare state in 1949 and see how today's unemployed would fare.  The Mail, of course, has no doubt.  It uses the term "handouts", which had no place in 1940s thinking.  It says that "benefits were originally conceived as a temporary helping hand in times of trouble, not a lifestyle choice".  There's that phrase again, the lie which says that all unemployed people have made a choice to be so.  I won't be watching.
Duncan Smith's past is coming back to haunt him, and I'm starting to understand why he hates the BBC so much.  Well before the scandal broke over MPs' expenses, there was a lesser scandal of MPs employing their relatives on the government payroll, often for doing nothing at all.  One of the MPs caught up in this was IDS himself, who was leader of his party at the time.  The BBC's Michael Crick discovered that he was paying his wife, Betsy, £15k a year.  "Betsygate" was uncomfortable for IDS, but it was worse for some of his staff.  A blog points us to evidence given to Parliament by his aide Dr Vanessa Gearson in October 2003.  It's long and detailed, but well worth a read.

Two links

Just a couple of links to end an eventful week.

The first is to a BBC local news item on the "millions for Emma Harrison" story.

The second is the Mail Online's take on the Tesco free labour row.  Someone had the foresight to capture the offending advert before it was pulled. 

Free labour for Tesco

Many people will have seen the news today about Tesco's use of free labour.  It started with a "job" advert on the government's own website for a night shift worker in Tesco in East Anglia.  Pay - "JSA + expenses".  Outrage spread via Facebook and other sites.  Then Left Foot Forward showed how this was far from a one-off.  Guardian journalists had found several similar adverts.  Tesco's response fluctuated.  First they told people that they were helping young people by taking part in a government scheme; then they said at had been a mistake.  Now John Harris has written a considered piece in the Guardian about what he calls the "sinister reality" of such schemes.

I can add little to what has been written.  But it will be interesting to see whether the story is taken up by the rest of the media.  Newsnight, perhaps?  If you're one of those driven to boycott Tesco because of their use of free labour to save on employment costs, bear in mind that Sainsbury's and the Co-op have decided to steer clear of the scheme, and can be patronised with a clear conscience.