daily signing at jobcentre

trollopscarletwoman

amiehall wrote: »

One of my friends who graduated last summer has been sent on a compulsory numeracy course by the job centre. All well and good except she graduated with a maths degree.... Just have to go though, no real point in arguing with them.

That's the stupidity of it.

gettingready

Well, I did argue and I was "excused" - there is no way I would have wasted my time for this and take a place from someone who may actually need it just to tick a box on some pen pusher's form.

dekaspace

amiehall wrote: »

One of my friends who graduated last summer has been sent on a compulsory numeracy course by the job centre. All well and good except she graduated with a maths degree.... Just have to go though, no real point in arguing with them.

Also similar to the fact my mums friend has been working for years often 2-3 jobs as a time but now unemployed and despite having a 2:1 degree from a high ranking uni she was forced to travel 20 miles each day to a training course to do basic form filling in and they make excuses about paying her expenses so it comes of her single persons JSA

custardy

donnajunkie wrote: »

social justice? they arent criminals you know. similar effort? no they dont get a similar income or similar rights. you as a taxpayer do not benefit from a person sitting in a room signing their name everyday. you as a taxpayer lose because it costs you money to enable that to happen and you get nothing in return. of course the person doing it does not benefit from it either. it does not improve job prospects. if anything it hinders them.

Who mentioned criminals?
According to yourself,the unemployed are just a sanction away from murder,robbery,assault etc.

mattcanary

custardy wrote: »

Who mentioned criminals?
According to yourself,the unemployed are just a sanction away from murder,robbery,assault etc.

If you murder someone and get sent to prison, you have food and a roof over your head.


That's not guaranteed if you get sanctioned

BillJones

mattcanary wrote: »

If you murder someone and get sent to prison, you have food and a roof over your head.


That's not guaranteed if you get sanctioned

Well no, it's not much of a disincentive if it doesn't cause some hardship, is it?

Morglin

Months after promising to, Duncan Smith has finally had a meeting with a JC "whistleblower" who has worked there for 20 years and disclosed unacceptable staff behaviour, targets and sanctions applied (mostly unfairly):

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/stitching-up-claimants-part-job-says-3537051

Last week Iain Duncan Smith met a whistle-blower who has worked for his Department for Work and Pensions for more than 20 years.

Giving the Secretary of State a dossier of evidence, the former Jobcentre Plus adviser told him of a “brutal and bullying” culture of “setting claimants up to fail”.

“The pressure to sanction customers was constant,” he said. “It led to people being stitched-up on a daily basis.”

The man wishes to be anonymous but gave his details to IDS, DWP minister Esther McVey and Neil Couling, Head of Jobcentre Plus, who also attended the meeting.

“We were constantly told ‘agitate the customer’ and that ‘any engagement with the customer is an opportunity to !sanction’,” he told them.

Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, the member of the DWP Select Committee who set up the meeting, has renewed her call for an inquiry into inappropriate sanctioning.

“I am deeply concerned that sanctions are being used to create the illusion the Government is bringing down unemployment,” she said.

Sanctions pre-date the Coalition as a way of ensuring benefit claimants, who include the jobless and sick and disabled people on Employment Support Allowance, attend appointments and apply for jobs. But under the Tory-led Government, they have soared – to 897,690 a year from the most recent data.

Sanctions can last from a couple of days to three years, and leave claimants destitute.

Abrahams says that !sanctioned people only continue to be counted as unemployed as long as they continue to sign on.

The DWP says most people who receive a sanction remain on Jobseeker’s Allowance for the duration of their sanction and so will be included in the claimant count.

IDS and his department have repeatedly denied there are targets for sanctions.

“They don’t always call them targets, they call them ‘expectations’ that you will refer people’s benefits to the decision maker,” the whistle-blower says. “It’s the same thing.”

He claimed managers fraudulently altered claimants’ records, adding: “Managers would change people’s appointments without telling them. The appointment wouldn’t arrive in time in the post so they would miss it and have to be sanctioned. That’s fraud. The customer fails to attend. Their claim is closed. It’s called ‘off-flow’ – they come off the statistics. Unemployment has dropped. They are being stitched up.”

For 20 years, the whistle-blower loved his job as an adviser. He says: “It was really rewarding helping people into work.”

But he says the culture changed after the election of the Coalition.

“Customers were being deliberately and inappropriately targeted,” the whistle-blower says. “I would see people crying in frustration, knowing they have been stitched up. Yet my Jobcentre was held up as a shining example to others. One of the district managers came to congratulate us. He said, ‘I see these people hanging round the precinct, being lazy, drinking, taking drugs’. That was a very senior leader. Another said, ‘These people are taking your money’. There was a total disrespect for the customer.”

Advisers were told to “inconvenience” benefit claimants, he says. “I was told see them face to face, agitate them. ‘Let’s inconvenience the customer’, they said, ‘get on these people from day one’.

“They were treated appallingly, lots of conditions put on them. Many of them were vulnerable people with low self-esteem or coming back off sick. We were setting customers up to fail.

“If I do my job well and their claim is managed well, there should be fewer sanctions. Instead, good advisers were the ones who sanctioned more people. It was a daily mantra, ‘Have you sanctioned anyone?’

I particularly remember a well-qualified father, he was desperate to work, with a wife and child to support. I was told to agitate him. They said, ‘Tell him he’s got to apply for factory and labouring jobs. Change his contract. If he doesn’t take the jobs, stop his benefit’. It was a trap.”

When managers refused to listen, he became sick with stress. “My body just gave up,” he says. “I had high blood !pressure, I was put on beta-blockers. I was in a state of physical collapse.”

Lin

red_devil

Well said its true. Bit you still get the brigade on here who think its not true whats going on and down the country in jobcentres. They better hope its never them on the end of this crap dished out by the jobcentre.

bll78

I'm sorry but I just don't get it my brother who has no qualifications, a spotted work history (through time out travelling among other things including prison) walks in and out of jobs in a matter of days. If he can find work, stacking shelves, working in factories, warehouses etc.. why can't others who are HEALTHY in 3 years (bolded so people don't incorrectly think I'm getting at those that are ill) . Yes it may not be your dream job, it may not get you where you want to be but earn the money and use it to study in your own time like I did.

donnajunkie

custardy wrote: »

Who mentioned criminals?
According to yourself,the unemployed are just a sanction away from murder,robbery,assault etc.

refering to it as justice implies they are criminals.
yes if you have nothing the liklihood of you turning to crime increases, is that difficult to understand? havent you ever wondered why the highest crime rates wherever in the world tend to be in the places that are the poorest.