Is the DWP pushing benefit claimants into Workfare again?
It seems Therese Coffey is sending benefit claimants back into an old scam.
The Work Trials scheme doesn’t appear to be an exact return to the Mandatory Work Activity scam, but may be Workfare by another name in practice.
Unemployed people claiming state benefits are put into unpaid work with companies for up to 30 days, with the possibility that it could lead to a paid job at the end of that time.
But will it?
The DWP says it checks to ensure that employers are offering genuinely worthy opportunities that could lead to employment.
But are they? Or are they only saying that, in order to get their hands on people who will do the work of fully-paid staff for nothing – and then throw them away after a month?
The people doing the work would receive only around a quarter of what they would get on the government’s so-called living wage – a minimum amount that is actually much less than what people need to survive without claiming any benefits at all.
Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s Glasgow South MP, said the scheme ran against what he had been told by the government:
“I have previously been told by Government ministers that unpaid work trials are exploitative and against the law and I see clearly that this is absolutely not the case when the Government’s own departments are helping create such unpaid work trials.
“Jobseekers and those on benefits participate in these programmes out of good faith, sometimes for up to 30 days at a time, and it is not right should they receive no wage and no guarantee of a job at the end of it.”
This Writer agrees. I have spent years campaigning against Workfare.
But the proof of what this policy does will be in the number of people who succeed in getting a long-term job with it.
Do any readers have experience of it, and has it done you any long-term good?
Source: DWP accused of ‘exploiting’ benefits claimants with unpaid work trials – Daily Record
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Fascist tory dictatorship – aka little fascist dictator duck johnson and his fascist cronies don’t care that workfare is illegal because no one will take them to court! Instead another golden opportunity for the fascist criminal tory boys to exploit unemployed women and men by forcing them into slave labour work!
Well done fascist tories for reinstating slave labour once again!