Asa Dawson was made to work at Poundland’s Bridlington branch last October. He is 18 and has qualifications in IT support, but was told he had to do it.
“The jobcentre said once it was offered to me I didn’t have the choice to refuse it".
“They said it’s ‘voluntary’, but if you refuse they cut your jobseekers’ allowance. And I’m using that to pay my rent.”
Tim Knight-Hughes says his experience was similar when he was made to work unpaid for door-to-door sales firm JM Enterprise in Norwich.
“I was told it would be ‘minimum wage’ with ‘commission based bonuses’,” he said.
“It was a lie. After completing three rounds of interviews I had to sign a contract saying I would work for free for a trial period without a guaranteed prospect of a job.
“If I walked out in disgust it would threaten my benefits.”
This is workfare in a nutshell:
Tim says the vast majority of people who worked for free at the sales firm didn’t get jobs at the end of it either. “After the ‘trial period’ I complained to the jobcentre that this job wasn’t really a job at all".
If there is work to be done let it be done, fine, but let it be done for a wage.
This is the attitude of our overlords:
“I was reprimanded by the jobcentre manager—and told that ‘beggars can’t be choosers’.”
You are not a human being with talent, verve and energy, you are not entitled to help, to dignity or respect; you are a beggar, be grateful for your scraps.
Workfare is a menace, to the employed as well as the unemployed, as it depresses the job market at a time of recession. No wonder the government is afraid of a tiny band of gimlet-eyed dialecticians (insignificant yet strangely able to bring major corporations to their knees). If the government is willing to go this far to grind working people down, how far are working people going to go to shake them off? Who knows? It can't come too soon.