Poundland ruling shows Govmt work scheme to be nothing but work for nothing!

CLAPTON

grizzly1911 wrote: »

Personally I would prefer charitable/local work to benefit the community ahead of private companies.

By all means allow those companies to take the worker on a trial basis but it should be paid at the going rate.

The objectives of this scheme aren't to directly benefit the 'community' or indeed private industry.

The objective are to change the attitude of the long term unemployed, encourge them to actively seek work and to provide a bit of a CV.

In many case these people are simply a cost to the company and not a benefit.

I do some (unpaid) work for a local care home (charitible trust). The home does receive a lot of offers of unpaid help; unless people have specific skills then most have (reluctantly) to be refused because the cost of supervision, training, crb checks, reliability and commitment issues and H&S issues etc makes accepting this 'help' impractical.

johnny_storm

They used a private company as hopefully the company might find a few stars and make them full time and permanent.

Though I do agree there are loads of jobs in the community that need doing, from picking up litter, getting bins out of peoples property and putting them back after the bin men have emptied them (remember when they did that themselves) , cleaning graffiti, doing peoples gardens. The list is endless really.

When being on benefits is seen as something people do as an essential to surviving when faced with no other choice and not as a cushy life of leisure then we will have set the right tone.

sabretoothtigger

prowla wrote: »

If there is a job then it should be a paid job.
There is a benefit to people gaining work experience and skills, but that should not simply be disguised cheap labour

N1AK wrote: »

I'd be all for training up some of them to do road maintenance work.

Enforced labour tends to be the precursor to very bad government I think.
It could be a stepping stone if they encouraged extra pay via learning construction skills

They should have non violent prisoners or open prison labour crews, those guys are supposed to be repaying a debt to society so seems fair. We could have the best roads in europe

BobQ

DecentLivingWage wrote: »

so youre happy that we as tax payers pay Poundlands labour costs for them? For so-called pay that was little more than subsistence money anyway, and was even then at risk of being stopped - not only unlawful, but also inept as well . not to do the legal stuff/research etc - lightweights politically!

Not sure its for nothing. The regional contractor for the work programme is paid to deliver the encouragement, partly per referal of a "customer" and partly by the "customer"'s future employment record. The contractor has employers as sub-contractors, so they may actually get paid to employ free labour!

CLAPTON

Out of curiousity, do any of the employers of the posters here offer free work experience ?

If so anyone actually involved and can give us specific freedback on the benefits and costs to the company?

Generali

CLAPTON wrote: »

Out of curiousity, do any of the employers of the posters here offer free work experience ?

If so anyone actually involved and can give us specific freedback on the benefits and costs to the company?

Most places I have worked have used an internship program. These used to be unpaid but are generally paid these days, in some cases quite well.

You get some good people through these programs but they are a bit useless whilst on them as they don't have any skills. We normally find a make-work project for them to do, something qualitative generally.

All but one of the staff on our quant desk came through the intern program in my current job.

BertieUK

CLAPTON wrote: »

Out of curiousity, do any of the employers of the posters here offer free work experience ?

If so anyone actually involved and can give us specific freedback on the benefits and costs to the company?

The benefits to anyone that can get work experience whether paid or not is certainly a step in the right direction to gain the most important words that you could have on any 'CV' and that would be 'Work Experience'

When I read of the many young people being turned away from prospective employment because they have no work experience must be heart breaking for them.

I think that this offer of work experience should be more readily available. May I put it before the house.:)

DecentLivingWage

Yes, good points, but I think I prefer Labours upcoming Jobs Guarantee Scheme as it removes the humiliation for those job hunters as ,even though the pay is still low (living wage) it is a real job - not dole.

(And I must say that I LOATHE the idea of tax payers paying Poundlands employee 'wages!' )

Generali

DecentLivingWage wrote: »

Yes, good points, but I think I prefer Labours upcoming Jobs Guarantee Scheme as it removes the humiliation for those job hunters as ,even though the pay is still low (living wage) it is a real job - not dole.

(And I must say that I LOATHE the idea of tax payers paying Poundlands employee 'wages!' )

Of course you do. You hate anything that the Tories do because you're a blinkered, class obsessed ideologue.

BobQ

Generali wrote: »

Of course you do. You hate anything that the Tories do because you're a blinkered, class obsessed ideologue.

To be fair, the Government are doing some positive and innovative things to help people into work. I had assumed that it was just the Work Programme and that it was essentially based on compulsory free labour.

There are several schemes available and some do involve voluntary work experience to benefit your CV and employability. Its also possible to volunteer to work for a voluntary organisation. Also there is more to the Work Programme than compulsory work experience without pay. The WP seems to incentivise its contractors through payment by results based on whether those referred to it get and sustain a job, and involves each referred person getting an advisor to encouraghe them to explore a wider range of opportunities including work placements. As the firms are paid by results it makes sense to them that they focus on the easy cases who are easily employable.

My view is that the Government has made a mistake by conflating the compulsory activities with the advisory and voluntary activities. I would rather they helped those who wanted help and so were more likely to benefit from it.

Where people are not finding a job but appear not to be trying or interested I see no problem with requiring them to do a NMW job stacking shelves with the threat of otherwise losing benefits.

But the Government seems to have conflated the genuine help with what is essentially a punishment.