Foolishness is a charitable word for this harsh, counterproductive waste of taxpayers’ money on flawed and unfit schemes – something the coalition, preaching a message of austerity, should be avoiding like the plague rather than throwing money at.
If they wish to use that money to stimulate job creation, that’s fine but this scam looks like nothing more than the taxpayer subsidising the payrolls of a select group of organisations.
Next week sees a week of action against workfare, as the government introduces the harshest forced labour scheme yet seen – “community work placements”. These placements are full time, lasting for 6 months and build upon the failure of the “Community Action Programme” pilot scheme which had no effect on the chances of someone finding work.
Workfare is the system whereby unemployed and disabled people are forced to work for charities, community organisations and companies under threat of having their benefits stopped entirely for up to three years for unemployed people and losing 70% of their benefits indefinitely for disabled people.
The schemes vary from the theoretically voluntary “Work Experience Programme” to the definitely mandatory “Mandatory Work Activity”. The schemes vary in length from 2 weeks to 2 months, but the government has decided this isn’t enough, since none of the schemes are proving to be any…
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