The recession, benefits, the safety net, and the learning curve

SingleSue

Oh yes, don't get me wrong, it is good that they have these courses (via Learn Direct but with referral from the Job centre) but sometimes it would help if the job centre staff actually listened to the person in front of them, or looked at their CV to see what they were capable of instead of just shoving them piece meal into a course which is not at all suitable for them.

It only serves to make one feel even more demoralised than before if your level is above this.

PasturesNew

The trouble I'd have with courses is I've probably taught most of them in my past. I've taught ECDL before and CLAIT. There's nothing higher ... although I did know somebody up North who was doing an Advanced ECDL, but I'd never heard of it/seen it, so it's only available in a few places.

There aren't any "real courses", that actually help people who are already skilled/experienced, to just fill a gap or get a magic piece of paper the adverts are asking for.

Last time I got laid off, I didn't sign on, I signed up for a week's course costing about £1500 to get myself the magic bit of paper ... and to date it's never been used/asked for. Although having it means I can apply for double the jobs (those that want the job doing - and those that also want the magic bit of paper).

I've always paid for all my courses myself, but when you work full-time and wages aren't great you just don't actually have the money, time or access to them to go.

SingleSue

You hit the nail on the head there PN, I need the magic piece of paper for the jobs I have been going for, without it, they wouldn't even bother looking at my application. This is despite being able to do admin while standing on my head, running a large website (and an ultra large team of people) and having umpteem years in customer service relations.

Oh and because I don't have GCSE's (well I actually have one - went to night school for that one in the early 90's) because mine are O Levels!

Time is an awkward one...my degree tends to be done at stupid o clock in the morning as there just isn't the time during the day especially right now when there are appointments for the boys by the truck load (youngest sons induction day at the High school he is starting in September didn't go well and it's think and panic again time!)

fc123

Max_Headroom wrote: »

I quite like the sound of that but I really should have started it (if I were going to) when I was being made redundant. Not a lot to say now, and if i do get a job it'll be a very short-lived blog!

That's what tenses and memory are for.

JG Ballard based 'Empire of the Sun' on his childhood but didn't write it as he lived it.

I had a dire self indulgent ranting blog which I deleted as it was associated with myself + my work, which is, ultimately my label/brand...and my customer base were like !!!!!!? They want to read upbeat zippy zany tales...not facts on what it's really like being niche crawling around at the bottom of the pond gasping for breath.


So..you start out a bit retropsective as in your first post.......or you start present tense at the point a few months on when you are staring out the window wondering if you will ever sell another helicopter, top totty moment or Rolex, deluxe piccy mix pack (or whatever it was you sold) and then you end up in the present..and so it goes on.

I was trying to find the name of the ex priest who left the church, ended up shelf filling in a supermarket and wrote a fab blog about it. He was smart as he revealed the ins and outs of min wage supermarket life and all the characters he worked with without taking the P and offending the actual supermarkets in any way.

It was published in the Mail (I confess, I read it sometimes for Liz Jones, horoscopes and recipes) which is where I first read it.

They are the modern day version of scrapbooks and diaries...cheaper than therapy too.

Wife in the North (which ended up getting published as a book) was written in present but was actually written from past expereince initially then met up in the present after a while.
She wrote 6 entries prior to going live online.

The List..you have to visit 'elsewhere' occasionally and read some therapy posts to keep your placing.

LydiaJ

lostinrates wrote: »

One of the things I despise most about my condition is the random relationship I now have with language, which was previously a strong skill.

I didn't know you had a condition, LIR. It sounds annoying. I'm sorry you've got it.
But your language is still perfectly strong enough to make you someone whose posts I enjoy reading.

JayScottGreenspan

mvengemvenge wrote: »

Whilst i agree with you in lots of ways, let me explain the dilemma...

Jobseekers Allowance (brought in by the Tories, carried-on by Labour) has procedures built-in to it to do more checks on people in terms of their efforts to find work. I recently interviewed someone who blatantly didn't want a full-time job, wanted to carry-on doing his part-time university course, but still receive an allowance for job seeking. In his forties, spent his whole adult life in further education, never worked, lived with mum and dad.

Now, on the conversation screen, staff had written every two weeks..."Excellent jobsearch", because he'd written several jobs he'd 'applied for' in the last fortnight. Yet he knew, and I knew, that he didn't want a job.

What do we do in today's society? Do we go back to Unemployment Benefit, where you just got money because you didn't have a job, and were left to your own devices, or do we apply more rigorous rules, to check taxpayers aren't just paying people to sit at home watching daytime TV?

Both political parties want to do the latter, and judging by the usual discussions we get on here, so do most MSE'ers. Unfortunately, you are now in the eye of the storm of this debate, because the rules and procedures have to apply to everyone, genuine or not, to check they are fulfilling the rules for claiming the benefit.

Staff will become aware that you are genuine, but they still have to apply the rules to everyone, unfortunately.

The easy fix would be that after three months of looking the claimant has to take the first minimum wage job the jobcentre can find for them, or they have their benefits stopped. Those using jobseekers allowance as a passport to housing benefit and council tax benefit would then need to work in order to receive these top-ups.

If necessary, I'd be perfectly happy to continue my job search whilst working at minimum wage.

LydiaJ

JayScottGreenspan wrote: »

The easy fix would be that after three months of looking the claimant has to take the first minimum wage job the jobcentre can find for them, or they have their benefits stopped. Those using jobseekers allowance as a passport to housing benefit and council tax benefit would then need to work in order to receive these top-ups.

If necessary, I'd be perfectly happy to continue my job search whilst working at minimum wage.

It's a nice idea. A lot of thought would need to go into how to make it work in practice, though.

Firstly, I think you'd have to put in some kind of proviso about the job they found for you being suitable. I mean, if it was me in that situation, I'd be happy to stack shelves, or do office temping, or sit on a check-out or something. However, I'd have ideological objections if they found me a job helping to market tobacco products or infant formula to unsuspecting customers in under-developed countries, for example, or pushing dodgy finance deals to people who would be ill advised to take on the debt. I'd have personal objections if they found me a job as a model for a life drawing class, or similar. I'd have practical objections if they found me a job that was shift work or involved a long commute, because I'm a single parent with primary school age children and I wouldn't be able to sort out the childcare.

My fear is that if you said the job had to be suitable, then the long term work-shy would find ways of saying that all the jobs found for them weren't suitable. There might be some way round it, but I suspect it wouldn't be as easy as one would hope.

Furthermore, employers of minimum wage jobs don't like employing people who are just biding their time while looking for a better job. They say people like Max are overqualified, and would be likely to leave too soon. They don't like employing the long term unemployed, either - too many of them don't make ideal workers, and the rest get tarred with the same brush. After all, lecturers at colleges of FE say that the worst students are the ones who are only there because they have to be in education or training to get particular benefits. They don't want to learn and they mess things up for the students who do. These problems aren't necessarily entirely insuperable, but they would probably be intractable, and I think the scheme would come up against significant opposition from employers.

How would you suggest making it work in practice, JayScottGreenspan? This could be quite an interesting discussion.

Max_Headroom_3

Very good points Lydia.

As an employer I certainly wouldn't be very keen on taking someone on who was only taking the job in order to be entitled to benefits, how motivated would they be? Would they even turn up half the time? Could they care less whether they did the job the way they were supposed to? Would they interact with customers or other staff appropriately? Not in a million years.

"Well sack them if they don't behave" will undoubtedly be the answer but do I really want that hassle? And then get another work shy no hoper and go through the whole process again?

Sorry, but if I were an employer? No thanks.

vivatifosi

I've only signed on once, for a month and it was early on in my career during a similar downturn. I got fed-up then with how unproductive I felt. How I looked around where I lived and could see things that needed doing, but couldn't access the means to get to the people in charge or the tools to do them. Simple things, like cleaning street signs that had green mould growing on them, mowing overgrown lawns in communal areas, planting a few flowers to make an otherwise concrete monstrosity look a little more welcoming, cleaning rubbish out of the local streams and rivers. Years later and these things still aren't being done. Its a shame schemes can't be put in place to do things like this now. Not a full time job per se, but still something that people could volunteer for while they are redundant.

harryhound

JayScottGreenspan wrote: »

The easy fix would be that after three months of looking the claimant has to take the first minimum wage job the jobcentre can find for them, or they have their benefits stopped.

LydiaJ wrote: »

Firstly, I think you'd have to put in some kind of proviso about the job they found for you being suitable. I mean, if it was me in that situation, I'd be happy to stack shelves, or do office temping, or sit on a check-out or something. However, I'd have ideological objections if they found me a job helping to market tobacco products or infant formula to unsuspecting customers in under-developed countries, for example, or pushing dodgy finance deals to people who would be ill advised to take on the debt. I'd have personal objections if they found me a job as a model for a life drawing class, or similar. I'd have practical objections if they found me a job that was shift work or involved a long commute, because I'm a single parent with primary school age children and I wouldn't be able to sort out the childcare.

My fear is that if you said the job had to be suitable, then the long term work-shy would find ways of saying that all the jobs found for them weren't suitable. There might be some way round it, but I suspect it wouldn't be as easy as one would hope.

Furthermore, employers of minimum wage jobs don't like employing people who are just biding their time while looking for a better job. They say people like Max are overqualified, and would be likely to leave too soon. They don't like employing the long term unemployed, either - too many of them don't make ideal workers, and the rest get tarred with the same brush. After all, lecturers at colleges of FE say that the worst students are the ones who are only there because they have to be in education or training to get particular benefits. They don't want to learn and they mess things up for the students who do. These problems aren't necessarily entirely insuperable, but they would probably be intractable, and I think the scheme would come up against significant opposition from employers.

How would you suggest making it work in practice, JayScottGreenspan? This could be quite an interesting discussion.

Hi Max,
As someone who was found to be surplus to requirements in his late 50's, I know exactly what you are going through.
One of the biggest problem is that nearly all your friends don't have the same problem. There is even the "leper" feeling. Perhaps they think it is catching, or perhaps they are trying to be kind = "Can we invite him to the latest "p1ss up", I'm not sure the old xxxxxx will be able to afford it"
Dole money (JSA) is a joke, even when you qualify for it. Even a minimum wage job, given a couple of hours overtime, pays more in a day than JSA pays in a week.

So, if I were the minister of unemployment, I would try to set up a "buddy" job sharing system, where two people were employed to do one "dole" job. If the 50 hour a week job had less than 45 hours of input, the employer could refuse to pay anyone for the day in which more than than 2 hours were not worked. No if's no but's that is the deal.

(You get the idea, the employer is entitled to an 8 hour day, the contractor partnership are entitled to 10 hours paid work). These little partnerships would be "self employed" and entitled to a week's notice.

The partners would get mutual support, they would not be "unemployed" demoralised, with skills rotting away. There should be time enough to make job applications in the other 4 or 5 days per week and flexibility to organise interviews.

The employer would get two brains for the price of one. A reliable no hassle job.

(I'm married to someone who managed to organise a job share when our kids were young, with another woman in a similar situation. I thought it worked brilliantly, even though 'phone calls cost real money in those days:D)

Harry