Jobcentres send you 90 miles for job?

k3lvc

HappyMJ wrote: »

Never declare to the jobcentre that you own a car as you will be expected to use it and travel 45 miles.

I could travel 45 miles from here and it would cost me about £15 on the train. However, I would refuse to even pay that as it simply isn't worth it. £6.08 times 7.5 hours is £45.60 a day less the tax and ni would leave me with £40 less the £15 rail ticket leaves me with £25 a day or £125 a week less the benefits I would lose of £67.50 (JSA) and £91 (HB) and £16.50 (CTB) per week plus the WTC's of £52 I would get makes me £2 per week better off. No thanks...... Not for being out of the house for 50 hours. I am not working for 4 pence an hour I make more on the internet.

Apologies if I'm sitting here in my cushy job (for which i commute 16hrs per week to a foreign country albeit for slightly more than NMW) but this single post smacks of exactly what's wrong with the country and current system (and not intended as a personal attack). The fact that you're receiving that income in the medium/long term and this is influencing your decision on whether to return to work and pay your dues is a real issue and IMHO the sooner this decision is removed from people the better.

Hopefully you're declaring the 'more than 4p per hour' that you make on the internet.

micky2phones

Hi,folks new here 1st post.
Hope people are well,just a reply to FBABY post looking long term i worked for a company in a factory,in dirt,noise,heat up to 43 celsius.Worked 9 years with only one day off,went 5 years with no pay rise,worked weekends though breaks to finish orders,stepped in as a forman when needed.Only to be sacked while on long term sickness.
So FBABY starting shall we say at the bottom,i started on 120 pounds a week less than others and doing more worked my way up only to be treated that way. You have a good boss but there are still bad bosses out there.

jazzy

DannyboyMidlands wrote: »

Or alternatively they could just slash benefits so that the workshy have to get a job to support themselves rather than sponge off others.

The only problem is that there are very few jobs around, if any in some areas. A lot of the current unemployed have only just been made redundant after many years of service, so do you think it is fair to slash their benefits after all of the money that they have put into the system even though they are desperately looking for work?

NASA_2

So few jobs about - yet my mum was made redundant one Friday and started work with a new employer the next Friday.

Hadnt been applying for jobs until out of work either - in a town with not a lot of opportunities.

There are always jobs in the papers I read.

flight747

I disagree with the government! JSA should be look for work in their local area not outside of their area! This is so wrong! I think we can tell the government to sod the JSA money once for all and staying at home for no money and will dying to death.

NASA_2

flight747 wrote: »

I disagree with the government! JSA should be look for work in their local area not outside of their area! This is so wrong! I think we can tell the government to sod the JSA money once for all and staying at home for no money and will dying to death.

What a load of crap.

I've been travelling out of my 'area' since I was 16. For the first few years I was doing it and had absolutely nothing to spend on myself. What 'profit' I did come out was taken by my mother for household costs.

The travel is tedious, and sometimes helps drive me to thoughts of suicide, but if I have to do it so should everyone else.

Oldernotwiser

flight747 wrote: »

I disagree with the government! JSA should be look for work in their local area not outside of their area! This is so wrong! I think we can tell the government to sod the JSA money once for all and staying at home for no money and will dying to death.

Most people would think that an hour's travel was "their local area!".

Oldernotwiser

2sides2everystory wrote: »

This is dangerously out of date wishful thinking again. Take SportsDirect.com - a supposedly successful company. Huge bonuses paid in 2011 to staff who had been with them 2 years or more apparently.

It is a part of retail you will find up there in every important shopping mall.

Walk into one. Look around. Where are the "managers"? Tell us what you see. Talk to some staff. Do they impress you? Are they recognised for being impressive ? Are they tolerated when they are not impressive? Tell us how motivated they seem. How many even see six months out do you think? How many are informally training the constant influx of new joiners because of the huge staff turnover? How many of those trainers receive recognition for their skills. How many on NMW? How many under 21 or under 18? How many of the staff are on zero hours contracts?

Walk into any bank. The cashiers are largely graduates. They dream of being personal bankers in maybe 3 years if they are lucky. What's the training period necessary for someone "lucky enough" to be recruited directly in as a personal banker from outside? Significant you expect? Wrong. You could do it with your eyes closed ONW but you wouldn't last long because you wouldn't be "hungry enough" and malleable in the way you might promote or discard your values. Those kids, those graduates, those cashiers are stressed to hell to come up with sales leads and it is very wrong. They call it retail banking. Banks like retail people. Like mobile phone salesmen. They like immigrants, Eastern Europeans, and not necessarily EU either, they like South Americans, Iberians - hungry people. People who will just 'take' and knotch up 'sale' after 'sale' from customers even if it is just making twenty quid stick in a new savings account for three months by hook or by crook. Because that's the way retail likes it and that's the way retail rewards the hungry economic migrant labour.

Retail is not all John Lewis, not all 20 years ago M&S, not all 30 years ago Sainsburys. It is a ruthless business now.


Look too at agriculture. Where are the jobs now? 35 years ago a thousand acres needed three or four full time employed men or women to plough the fields and scatter and bring the harvest home. Now farmers congratulate themselves on employing no-one at all permanently, on employing Eastern Europeans dirt cheap. Never mind pick your own being the only way it could work, get Eastern Europeans to pick the harvest for peanuts. They don't even have to speak any English and boy do they work. They don't even go out on a Friday night - too tired, and they save their money. Good good.

The Farmers Weekly Interactive magazine held its annual awards recently at the Dorchester I believe - and who won the 2011 Farmworker of the Year Award? Indeed, what sort of person wins that? It's all computerised this and GPS that and super complex chemicals the other, plus you almost have to have half the technical knowledge of an old style veterinary surgeon to get the best out of your livestock in 2011.

Well there are other skills needed too now. It might be good to be able to talk to the animals, but seriously, the winner is a multilingual lady - 5 languages I think - fascinating how the required skillset has changed. Seen as a firm but fair person - yes more good stuff - but what does she do?

Well actually she organises the labour for fruitpicking - she's from Ukraine I think I read and she speaks all the languages that the current (in season) active agriculltural labour market speaks.

Good on her. They work hard. They live in tough conditions. They work very long hours. They send money home. They even go home for most of the year or they find other work. Amazing how many black economy painting jobs can be found when fruit-picking is done, and kitchen fitting and making two bedrooms out of one for BTL landlords, turn their hands to anything they will. Good on them all. But the old agricultural labour market is totally wrecked. The more ruthless farmers grin constantly like Cheshire Cats. The construction labour market is wrecked too - how many truly local residents got jobs at the Olympic Park? I could have worked there, but not their unofficial minimum 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for weeks and weeks which is what the faceless labour-gangers were insisting upon. No silly overtime rates, just wall to wall work for those willing to do it. And who really pays?

I would have liked to work on the Olympics site. Instead I am surrounded by foreign labour that lives 5 people to a room, feeds the unscrupulous BTL market with any old tenants, coming and going at all hours, constantly moving in and moving out - transients - little control - they don't mix with neighbours - we don't know who they are or what they really stand for because they are, as I say, somewhat transient, inadvertently messing up the decorations with their bikes and and their constant removals in apartment-land stairwells that decent people have to pay far too frequently to redecorate after they have gone, littering the streets with beaten up white vans.

And yet, huge parts of the UK don't ever have to see this. They may not even believe it is a feature of the landscape. They live in their baby boomer years acquired houses in nice areas and if they feel uncomfortable with not hearing any English spoken in the aisles of their local supermarket, they simply drive their Prius to a Waitrose where only successful babyboomers can afford to shop.

Ah yes, and Waitrose is part of John Lewis, proper retail, good job advancement prospects, right? Yes indeed, for the lucky few.

Meanwhile, please spare a generous thought for the far greater numbers of decent people whose lives were wrecked when the various labour markets I have mentioned were wrecked one by one. People who became dinosaurs, not because they needed to upskill, but because they held outdated mindsets which contained maps of what was once ingrained as decent. Decency has become a serious hindrance to those who need to get rich quick. Get rich quick is good business. Get rich slow is bad business. So decency is out the window. All that labour now needs to survive is sufficient hunger to work like transitory economic migrants, travel to work like them, and of course to do ruthless employers' biddings meekly, and without question. Keep our mouths shut. Don't even think about taking holidays unless the boss loves those dates for you - the ones where the work is slack anyway and when the boss doesn't need you to cover for some more favoured persons holiday. Easy. Let's all just do that, and we'll get on fine and the 'economy' will grow - black, or ungreen, or crystal clear that there's no more when that lot's finished - it doesn't really matter because it's "jobs" and its entrepreneurs and its not hindered by inconvenient workers rights, nor that bloody daft 'elf n' safety - it'll be vibrant - you'll see

I hope you feel better for your rant, some of which I agree with and some not.

bestpud

It's an employers market out there and progression comes from saying yes to every demand. If someone is already travelling miles, they are less available to do the necessary brown nosing.

Personally, I don't think I'd do it - people may call me workshy because I have a limit, but that's their problem. As I said before, it's easy to sit at a keyboard and say we'd 'walk to the moon and back for £5 a week', but in reality, most people would be less keen.

robus

roy_harper wrote: »

Is this right?

Are Jobcentres seriously being told to offer clients jobs 45 miles there and 45 back in day.

Tot up the cost of travel, rent/mortgage and deduct that from minimum wage!

And if you don't go for interview, at your own expense from JSA - you get your JSA stopped anyway.
:eek:

I don't honestly know what the problem is with this. Many people travel far more than that every day to a job. It is not unusual to pay out 1/4 of your wage in travelling costs.

I travelled by car to Greenwich, London (72 miles each way) for 7 years. Travelling time worked out on average of 5/12 hrs every day + working for 9 hours!!

Then I moved closer to home and travelled 49 miles each way for the last 6 years. Travelling time for that was about 3 hours in total a day.

I feel sorry for some people who think that they should only have to work just round the corner.

I know people that work in Manchester. They stay in a cheap B&B for 5 nights, travelling 320 miles up on a Sunday afternoon, and coming back home after work on Friday night arriving at well past midnight!

You have to put yourself about if you want a job!!

And if you just look at the cost V wage scenario, I would have been better off working at Sainsburys round the corner stacking shelves for 30 hours a week and expecting the government to top up my income with Tax Credits instead of following my career, working hard and not being able to claim Tax Credits.

What is more important, money in your pocket for little effort or try to make something of yourself for less overall money.

90 mins travel is too far my backside!!!