Punishment of low-paid workers under Universal Credit isn’t new – it was always the Tory plan
Helen Smith: ‘Because I was working I just didn’t understand why I was sanctioned.’ [Image: Howard Barlow].
The idea, it seems, was rather than legislate to make employers pay a living wage, people would be made to work themselves into an early grave, simply to get off in-work benefits that could be sanctioned at any moment, leaving them in debt.
Result: Higher profits for rich employers; serious health issues for poor workers who must cope with overwork and overwhelming stress, every day of their lives.
That is how the Tories stand up for against working people.
Fines imposed on full-time workers who claim universal credit amount to “punishing the working poor”, experts have suggested, as it emerged that one woman was docked £220 for missing a jobcentre appointment because she took a family holiday.
The fines, part of a little-known “in-work conditionality” programme introduced by the then work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, have been called “political dynamite” by academics, who warn that it may undermine unemployed people taking low-paid jobs.
Ministers have been widely criticised for imposing strict sanctions on people claiming unemployment benefit, dishing out millions of often arbitrary financial penalties in recent years for apparent breaches of jobcentre rules, despite there being no clear evidence that the fines helped those affected to get a job.
Now similar penalties are being extended to thousands of workers in receipt of universal credit (UC). They are expected to prove, as a condition of receiving low wage top-ups, that they are actively seeking to work more hours or take on extra jobs to earn more cash.
Source: DWP ‘punishing’ low-paid full-time workers under new benefits rule | Society | The Guardian
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This has been around since before the 2015 GE I think their trials started in the April that year.
If they were working 24 hours a day, seven days a week that still wouldn’t be enough for the Tories. It is worth remembering that the ancestors of many of these people opposed the abolition of slavery (eg Cameron’s family). People like him have never lost the mind set.
It’s actually worse than that. Since Housing Benefit is subsumed into Universal Credit there are a lot of people working part-time who don’t get the Jobseeker’s Allowance element (living expenses) and only get the Housing Benefit element (housing costs). Under Universal Credit people who fall foul of in-work conditionality requirements can not only get fined but have their Housing Benefit docked or stopped as a punishment FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY! The result: rent arrears and possible evictions and homelessness.
This mess is down to Lord David Freud, a freak more cruel than IDS himself.
Under the tories, work does not pay, you’re gonna get screwed as much as people who are on welfare!