It was not long after I had started working in offices, even for comparatively small companies, that I came across what I think of as the 'Holy Grail Syndrome'. There may be some official term for it, but that is the one I use. Basically it is a belief that is widespread across a company and held very strongly that some handbook or piece of software exists that contains regulations, guidance or some facility that you need to solve some common problem in the company. I have held down over 16 jobs in the past 25 years and have encountered this view in almost every single one. Of course, if you ask where this handbook is or where you can download or install the software from, no-one knows, but they would swear that someone knows, you just have to ask. The trouble is, once you have asked around and found that no such thing exists and so the problem you have encountered cannot be solved by this non-existent thing, then you encounter hostility. The response is that you must be useless or stupid not to have been able to locate the item or have simply not spoken to the right people. The faith in the item exceeds faith in your abilities and so your reputation suffers. In the end you have to simply put up with the problem the way everyone else has done up until then or look a complete idiot and/or lazy. I thought encountering this attitude once or twice was just coincidence but have now found it so prevalent that it seems inherent in a range of British workplaces. I wonder if readers from elsewhere have found it in their country too or if it is confined to the particular attitudes of the UK.
Now I am unemployed once more and on the slippery slope yet again to having my house repossessed I have encountered a very similar situation in regard to benefits paid by the government. I have had very good moral and financial support from my family as has the woman who lives in my house and shares the mortgage with me. Her business is in meltdown given the economic climate, another complicating factor I will come to in a minute. Anyway, the hardest thing to deal with after the lack of money, having no job and about to lose our house, is how repeatedly friends and family keep saying 'I cannot understand why you cannot get benefits to pay for this stuff' and then followed up with 'have you asked?' and then 'you can't have asked properly/in the right way'. Then you get 'in the papers you read about these people get hundreds/thousands of pounds and you are more deserving than them, why can't you get this money?'. So it goes on. We are made to appear as if we are lazy or clueless because we cannot get the funds that everyone knows that other people are getting.
I have worked in a job centre and I know how hard it is to sign on to get benefits and how rigorous the checks are on people. As someone who has been unemployed more than he has been in work in the past three years, I have also seen it from the consumers' side too. I have noted before, how if there are doubts about the way your job ended, even if you were made redundant, this can delay or eliminate your ability to even claim the basic Jobseekers' Allowance: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/oh-your-job-didnt-end-in-correct-way.html This has happened this time round. First my claim was delayed by over five weeks while they Department for Work and Pensions tried to work out why the woman in my house could be working 16-20 hours and ending the week with less money than she started. These days they assume everyone gets paid minimum wage for every hour they work. However, this does not apply if you run your own business. As prices have been slashed she is now in a situation where competitors are selling at below the price she paid for her stock, so when she sells it, it is at a loss. She has been told she cannot wind up the business because that would be making herself deliberately unemployed which would bar her and me from benefits and yet she is not losing enough to be declared bankrupt. Every week I have to fill in an inappropriate form for her saying how many hours she has worked and when she will be paid by her 'employer' and how much tax she has paid, assuming she is on PAYE (Pay As You Earn) rather than Self-Assessed Tax. The net pay these days is generally a negative number. There is no form available if you have someone who is self-employed in the house, but you still have to show how their 'income' impacts on the household budget, week-after-week. Of course, there is no government pay to plug a loss.
After the situation of the woman in my house was sorted out I received backdated benefit of £70 (€88.20; US$108.50) which does not cover the food and utility bills but is something. It also opens up the door to other benefits, notably reducing the council tax to 20% of the usual charge, once we have filled in the relevant six-page document from the council, and after 13 weeks of unemployment, the interest, not the capital, on the mortgage will be paid. However, by the time that comes around we will have lost the house as we are already defaulting on the mortgage. One month's default puts a black mark on the credit rating of everyone in the house for six years, even if they are not named on the mortgage (I had a friend who was affected by his father's bad credit rating years after he had left home); by the second month's default they move to repossession, on the third month's there is no way back. So, I thought, great, despite the complexity of the business situation, I could at least get some money. Then what happens? My previous company, the one that discriminated against me and treated me in such an appalling way, decided that it had not hammered me enought and wrote the Department of Work and Pensions to say that I had left my job in an inappropriate way. I had made great efforts to secure accurate letters outlining what had happened so that I would be acceptable to the government and then I find the vindictive staff have decided to try to reverse this and so get me barred from benefits for six months. Once the Jobseeker's Allowance is taken back the other benefits fall down like a house of cards even down to the boy who lives in my house being disallowed from getting school meals.
Of course, this is not the picture which is painted in the media. You only have to walk into a supermarket to see the right-wing newspapers, notably 'The Daily Mail' screaming about 'dole cheats'; people having multiple children to earn benefits or being foreigners and qualifying immediately for payments and people working and getting paid benefits paid unchallenged. I have seen how hard it is from both the civil servants' side and the claimants' side. I have seen the anti-fraud teams setting out from job centres to catch the genuine criminals who tend to be men running cleaning, building or agricultural businesses who organise for their workers to claim so they can reduce their pay. I know how whenever I go to a job interview or go into a benefit office or even to the bank, I have to produce a current British passport as if identity cards have been introduced by the back door. Even if you manage to fool the job centre, what do you get? I was receiving £70 per week and a couple could get £111 as if the second adult is expected to eat a fraction of what the first one does. You could get more from stealing a mobile phone from someone let alone their bicycle.
The constant stories about people getting so much money out of the state makes it impossible for anyone receiving the standard benefit payments let alone people like me, who because of complex issues, regulations and the malice of employers, cannot even get that. Family and friends believe it is so easy to get this money that I should be able to pay the mortgage and other bills, when in fact I am battling to get even the money to pay for food and it now seems that even that has been choked off. The sensational headlines pander to the prejudices of readers and sell more newspapers, but they make it even harder to claim benefits , which is part of the reason billions of pounds remain unclaimed. I think this is partly a drive to benefit employers by encouraging people to take any low paid job going, even those below minimum wage. The woman in my house is trained in catering and a woman who range a catering service offered her a job, saying she could set her own pay level. The woman from my house did, asking for £10 per hour and then reducing it to £7.50 per hour for a ten hour day. The caterer laid her off after that day, expressing anger that the woman from my house did not ask for pay below the minimum wage, even though to pay it was illegal.
There are people who manipulate the system, but the extent and the severity of it is far, far less than the myths that are peddled by the newspapers. By lying in this way, they hurt ordinary people, trying to get the low levels of benefit they are entitled to and allow family, friends and even random strangers to harangue those of us who are trying to hard to get what we are entitled to, let alone need. When you have no job accusations of laziness or lacking knowledge are hard enough to deal with, without this extra layer of stress being rained down on you by those who should be most supportive.
Showing posts with label benefits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label benefits. Show all posts
Monday, 25 June 2012
Saturday, 19 June 2010
'Oh, Your Job Didn't End in the Correct Way': Additional Challenges of Claiming Benefit
As regular readers might have noticed I am again unemployed. Unlike last year when made redundant, this time it seemed to be that I could claim Jobseeker's Allowance, i.e. unemployment benefit without much trouble. I am keen to find a job and I had a full set of National Insurance contributions. Having paid such contributions is one way of being entitled to receive Jobseeker's Allowance when unemployed, the other is having too little money and being assessed on a means-tested, i.e. needs basis. You have to prove you are actively seeking work which means not implying too narrow parameters in terms of the distance you will travel for work, the hours you will work or the type of work you will do. You have to do at least 3 activities per week, e.g. look on websites, look in newspapers, ring an employer, etc. and apply for 2 jobs per week. Bascially I know in my job that I have to move for work and though I said I am seeking it in a 130 Km radius of my house, I actually applied for jobs 255 Km from home so far. I have also applied for all kinds of things in business and the civil service. In two weeks I have applied for seven jobs so am in with the quota. I attend my signing on time twenty minutes early and do everything that you are supposed to do in order to claim benefit.
In contrast to last year when the Department for Work and Pensions seemed to have a problem with me sharing a house with a woman who ran her own business, this year things went smoothly. Rather than having to wait 2½ months to receive my first payment, this time it took just 2 weeks. I was told that the benefit will continue for six months and then I can be reassessed on means-tested basis. That is not brilliant news but it is better than nothing. That was until today when I received a letter saying, that despite them already paying me benefit they had questions over how my last job ended and so might not only cut off my benefit but want what they have paid (£65 per week for two weeks) repaid.
Now, I have written before how unpleasant my last employers were. See my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/sledgehammer-management.html My line manager actively sought out any minor thing to attack me with and when this seemed insufficient this manager began making up things. By the end my line manager was claiming tens of colleagues had complained about me, but when I asked them they had no idea what my line manager was talking about. My line manager made discriminatory comments about me which later unsurprisingly could not recollect. Then this manager went on to fabricate stories to the personnel staff and was bent on pushing me out. The union representative was incredulous at what he felt was a playground style behaviour and by the end even the personnel manager did not involve my manager in talks. As it was my department was going to be merged with another meaning that there was going two people doing my job, me and another, in the new merged department. So, personnel offered me a deal, voluntary redundancy if I did not make a victimisation claim against my line manager. I got a far better payment than when made redundant from my last company which I had worked for, for over four years. As it has turned out this month I probably would have faced compulsory redundancy anyway.
Now, however, I fear my line manager has not been satisfied with the arrangement and is out to cause me trouble as I sign on. This manager made clear the opinion that I was unsuitable for the post right from the start and kept trying to get me into lower grade posts. I believe the manager had some condition, possibly Asperger's because the manager printed out every email received and underlined individual words. Me getting a settlement is probably galling to my former manager and I fear this is leading to trouble. I suspect a letter has been sent, 'informant letters' as they are termed in the civil service, saying falsely that I was sacked. I hold tight to the letter which outlines the details of the agreement. The trouble is, the decisions are taken far distant from my local job centre and I fear that my benefit will be cut off without me ever getting the chance to counter the vindictiveness of my former manager. In theory if you resign or are sacked from a job you cannot claim benefit for six months. In this case, even when you have made a deal it seems that people can twist it around to rule you out of getting benefit. I both loathe and fear how much power one bitter individual who was prejudiced against me from the first occasion we met and made that very clear, can wield over me even after I am far away from that job. I suppose I should not be surprised that in the neo-Thatcherite era we are living in, as an ordinary person you are going to get hammered by the privilege and they will continue hammering you even when you are far from their site because they loathe anyone who challenges what they seem to believe is the sanctified right to behave how they choose and discriminate just as they feel.
I have long written that I anticipate losing my house to repossession and this certainly seems another step in that direction. I suppose under a regime in which there have been proposals to cut free school meals for the poorest 15% of children in order to pay for the 'free' schools scheme, in fact the freedom for parents to set up schools wherever they choose and only let in the people they like, we should not be surprised that at all levels of society the privileged are stamping down on us in every way they can.
In contrast to last year when the Department for Work and Pensions seemed to have a problem with me sharing a house with a woman who ran her own business, this year things went smoothly. Rather than having to wait 2½ months to receive my first payment, this time it took just 2 weeks. I was told that the benefit will continue for six months and then I can be reassessed on means-tested basis. That is not brilliant news but it is better than nothing. That was until today when I received a letter saying, that despite them already paying me benefit they had questions over how my last job ended and so might not only cut off my benefit but want what they have paid (£65 per week for two weeks) repaid.
Now, I have written before how unpleasant my last employers were. See my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/sledgehammer-management.html My line manager actively sought out any minor thing to attack me with and when this seemed insufficient this manager began making up things. By the end my line manager was claiming tens of colleagues had complained about me, but when I asked them they had no idea what my line manager was talking about. My line manager made discriminatory comments about me which later unsurprisingly could not recollect. Then this manager went on to fabricate stories to the personnel staff and was bent on pushing me out. The union representative was incredulous at what he felt was a playground style behaviour and by the end even the personnel manager did not involve my manager in talks. As it was my department was going to be merged with another meaning that there was going two people doing my job, me and another, in the new merged department. So, personnel offered me a deal, voluntary redundancy if I did not make a victimisation claim against my line manager. I got a far better payment than when made redundant from my last company which I had worked for, for over four years. As it has turned out this month I probably would have faced compulsory redundancy anyway.
Now, however, I fear my line manager has not been satisfied with the arrangement and is out to cause me trouble as I sign on. This manager made clear the opinion that I was unsuitable for the post right from the start and kept trying to get me into lower grade posts. I believe the manager had some condition, possibly Asperger's because the manager printed out every email received and underlined individual words. Me getting a settlement is probably galling to my former manager and I fear this is leading to trouble. I suspect a letter has been sent, 'informant letters' as they are termed in the civil service, saying falsely that I was sacked. I hold tight to the letter which outlines the details of the agreement. The trouble is, the decisions are taken far distant from my local job centre and I fear that my benefit will be cut off without me ever getting the chance to counter the vindictiveness of my former manager. In theory if you resign or are sacked from a job you cannot claim benefit for six months. In this case, even when you have made a deal it seems that people can twist it around to rule you out of getting benefit. I both loathe and fear how much power one bitter individual who was prejudiced against me from the first occasion we met and made that very clear, can wield over me even after I am far away from that job. I suppose I should not be surprised that in the neo-Thatcherite era we are living in, as an ordinary person you are going to get hammered by the privilege and they will continue hammering you even when you are far from their site because they loathe anyone who challenges what they seem to believe is the sanctified right to behave how they choose and discriminate just as they feel.
I have long written that I anticipate losing my house to repossession and this certainly seems another step in that direction. I suppose under a regime in which there have been proposals to cut free school meals for the poorest 15% of children in order to pay for the 'free' schools scheme, in fact the freedom for parents to set up schools wherever they choose and only let in the people they like, we should not be surprised that at all levels of society the privileged are stamping down on us in every way they can.
Thursday, 13 August 2009
'Now You're Unemployed, You Can Do ... Everything'
It seems mad that when you are unemployed you actually work harder than when in a job. Of course, in many occupations in the UK especially those based in offices, much of the time is spent not working but answering more or less important emails, going for coffee, sitting through meetings and so on. I have done jobs where you cannot slack so much, but even working in warehouses, there was time to linger emptying the bins, chatting with friends, playing games with damaged stock and even going to the toilet to read the newspaper and/or masturbate, the latter seemed to be the prime occupation of many of my colleagues.
Being unemployed, however, you are often under much more scrutiny than you would ever be in most jobs. I know in some jobs they expect you to account for every hour you spend there, but in many there is really little attention to what you get up to especially if you can manage to attain the overall target. Now, I have to outline every fortnight what I have been doing to find work. The job centre books appointments for you to turn up 20 minutes before you will actually be seen and this is to monitor what you do when at the job centre. I got into trouble on my first visit this time round because even though I had arrived when I was told I should and had informed the front desk, they had neglected to tell the case worker who then chastised me for not doing the 20 minutes of job seeking in the job centre that I was supposed to do, though in fact I had done it. Aside from this I have had to sign up to apply for 3 jobs per fortnight. I think this is unfair for me, as for many vacancies you simply send in a CV, for posts in my field you have to complete 5000 words of application, taking up to a day if you want to get it right. I have also had to say that I will visit various websites and read 'The Guardian' newspaper on a certain day.
I know many people will say that if you want money from the state you should be prepared to jump through hoops to get it. I know people who claim if you want any benefit you should be compelled to sell your car and television first, as if to prove you are deserving of aid. I have no opposition to the rules I am now under but am uneasy that there is an assumption that if I was not compelled to demonstrate I am looking for work I would simply not bother. The thirty applications I made in the run-up to my redundancy count for nothing. As is often repeated to us unemployed 'finding a job is a job in itself' and so it does take time, it does not happen instantaneously. However, trying tell the woman in my house this. This is something I know a lot of unemployed people encounter.
There is an assumption from housemates, partners, whoever, that now that you are unemployed, your life is utterly empty and that it must be filled with every domestic job possible. Often it even involves chasing up things that you soon find you cannot do because you are not the account holder. However, failure to do any of these tasks opens you up to being charged with being lazy, a portrayal you constantly battle against when unemployed but is particularly galling when it comes from people you share a house with. As I have noted before, I have always felt it was fair to split jobs in a house and I do not adhere to any gender division on this. I clean the bathroom and toilet, vacuum clean the house, make the beds, do all the washing up and buy the bulk of the groceries. Now I am unemployed this is apparently not enough and I now have to child mind, post parcels, tend to the garden and the laundry. The other morning I had to break off from all of this to actually apply for a job as I realised that I would have nothing to show the job centre when I turned up for my fortnightly interviews. However, my housemate has no understanding of the pressure I am under and I am simply seen, like so many unemployed people, as the free labourer she has now gained to make her life easier.
I have encountered this before even when one of four adult residents in a house. Suddenly the others find a free servant that they can criticise with impunity. Any complaints are responded to with the fact that you are lazy or not trying hard enough because apparently you sit around the house all day. Ironically for me I now work harder than when I had a job and in fact have far less time to look for vacancies and apply for them than when I was working. Of course, I cannot reveal this to the job centre as they would say I was unavailable for work and so not deserving of any benefit payments. So, I am trapped between two forces shaping my time and whipping me with the accusation that I am not trying hard enough. I have felt literally castrated by being made redundant. Men do find it hard when they lose their jobs and for me there is a real pain, a psychosomatic one I acknowledge, but uncomfortable all the same. I have no idea what the future holds even whether I can hold on to my house and this is not light stuff. Handling being unemployed and the daily humiliations that carries as well as lacking funds to alleviate the gloom, is tough enough, without being compelled to be an unpaid domestic servant beaten by the stick of accusations of me somehow being lazy. I can only fear that this will break me emotionally far faster than I expected and I will be unable to stir up any enthusiasm even if I get any more interviews, assuming, that is, that I can find some time between the next batch of chores in which to actually search and apply for some jobs.
Being unemployed, however, you are often under much more scrutiny than you would ever be in most jobs. I know in some jobs they expect you to account for every hour you spend there, but in many there is really little attention to what you get up to especially if you can manage to attain the overall target. Now, I have to outline every fortnight what I have been doing to find work. The job centre books appointments for you to turn up 20 minutes before you will actually be seen and this is to monitor what you do when at the job centre. I got into trouble on my first visit this time round because even though I had arrived when I was told I should and had informed the front desk, they had neglected to tell the case worker who then chastised me for not doing the 20 minutes of job seeking in the job centre that I was supposed to do, though in fact I had done it. Aside from this I have had to sign up to apply for 3 jobs per fortnight. I think this is unfair for me, as for many vacancies you simply send in a CV, for posts in my field you have to complete 5000 words of application, taking up to a day if you want to get it right. I have also had to say that I will visit various websites and read 'The Guardian' newspaper on a certain day.
I know many people will say that if you want money from the state you should be prepared to jump through hoops to get it. I know people who claim if you want any benefit you should be compelled to sell your car and television first, as if to prove you are deserving of aid. I have no opposition to the rules I am now under but am uneasy that there is an assumption that if I was not compelled to demonstrate I am looking for work I would simply not bother. The thirty applications I made in the run-up to my redundancy count for nothing. As is often repeated to us unemployed 'finding a job is a job in itself' and so it does take time, it does not happen instantaneously. However, trying tell the woman in my house this. This is something I know a lot of unemployed people encounter.
There is an assumption from housemates, partners, whoever, that now that you are unemployed, your life is utterly empty and that it must be filled with every domestic job possible. Often it even involves chasing up things that you soon find you cannot do because you are not the account holder. However, failure to do any of these tasks opens you up to being charged with being lazy, a portrayal you constantly battle against when unemployed but is particularly galling when it comes from people you share a house with. As I have noted before, I have always felt it was fair to split jobs in a house and I do not adhere to any gender division on this. I clean the bathroom and toilet, vacuum clean the house, make the beds, do all the washing up and buy the bulk of the groceries. Now I am unemployed this is apparently not enough and I now have to child mind, post parcels, tend to the garden and the laundry. The other morning I had to break off from all of this to actually apply for a job as I realised that I would have nothing to show the job centre when I turned up for my fortnightly interviews. However, my housemate has no understanding of the pressure I am under and I am simply seen, like so many unemployed people, as the free labourer she has now gained to make her life easier.
I have encountered this before even when one of four adult residents in a house. Suddenly the others find a free servant that they can criticise with impunity. Any complaints are responded to with the fact that you are lazy or not trying hard enough because apparently you sit around the house all day. Ironically for me I now work harder than when I had a job and in fact have far less time to look for vacancies and apply for them than when I was working. Of course, I cannot reveal this to the job centre as they would say I was unavailable for work and so not deserving of any benefit payments. So, I am trapped between two forces shaping my time and whipping me with the accusation that I am not trying hard enough. I have felt literally castrated by being made redundant. Men do find it hard when they lose their jobs and for me there is a real pain, a psychosomatic one I acknowledge, but uncomfortable all the same. I have no idea what the future holds even whether I can hold on to my house and this is not light stuff. Handling being unemployed and the daily humiliations that carries as well as lacking funds to alleviate the gloom, is tough enough, without being compelled to be an unpaid domestic servant beaten by the stick of accusations of me somehow being lazy. I can only fear that this will break me emotionally far faster than I expected and I will be unable to stir up any enthusiasm even if I get any more interviews, assuming, that is, that I can find some time between the next batch of chores in which to actually search and apply for some jobs.
Monday, 3 August 2009
The New Face of 'Signing On'
To some degree despite my interest in a range of issues, this blog, like most, has also reflected developments in my life. It has had stuff about mean landlords and greedy councils and the travails of the employer who made me redundant on Friday. It has shown my continued failure at interviews and the poor way so many of them are organised anyway. Now, today I am officially unemployed for the first time since the Summer of 1993. I was interested to see how claiming unemployment benefit, now termed the Jobseekers' Allowance has changed. After being unemployed I actually ended up working in a job centre for over a year so saw the process from two sides. I left just as the final step of the evolution was proceeding. Even in the early 1990s job centres were different places to what was then called the DSS (Department of Social Security) offices where the 13 other benefits aside from unemployment benefit, were claimed. The job centre was open plan and had carpets; the DSS had bleak rooms with furniture fixed to the floor and staff behind thick glass.
I went to my local job centre today and found it similar to the one I had stopped working in 1994. The technology has advanced, there are touch screens to access things. You are welcomed at the door as if going into a branch of Pizza Hut. Then I found out that you do not make a claim, as the process is still known, physically, you have to telephone first and go through a 40-minute interview. I actually found this easier than tackling someone face-to-face, though I have that element later this week. The face-to-face interview is only for me to confirm that what has been written about me is accurate and for me to bring evidence for what I am saying. Unsurprisingly given the populist concern about immigrants and employment in the UK, there were lots of questions about my nationality, despite the fact they took my National Insurance number at the start. So, the experience was very much like it would be in any other service sector location, if I went to a chain restaurant or my building society. I suppose that should be unsurprising. Of course, a lot of it is not about appealing to claimants, but to employers. Employers tended to view job centres as places where the failures went and a location that they were unlikely to find suitable candidates. Low-paying employers, conversely, saw it as a location where they could pick up cheap workers. I remember the restaurant chain Fatty Arbuckles complaining in 1993 because it had had only 4 applicants for posts in its restaurant in the town where I worked. They went on the local radio station whining that locals were lazy and preferred to 'scrounge' than work, despite the highish level of unemployment with the early 1990s recession just coming to an end. The rate of pay they were offering was £2.14 per hour (worth about £3.14 now compared to the minimum wage of £5.73 per hour) and you would have had to work an hour to cover your bus fare in from many of the villages. So, job centres evolved to look more like employment agencies. I noted the other day that a high-level company I applied for asked if I had seen the vacancy at a job centre (or Job Centre Plus) to give it, its full title, which to me suggested that they had succeeded in winning over employers.
Of course, the bulk of people who claimed at job centres were never lazy. In periods of full employment in the 1960s only about 35-70,000 people remained unemployed and I imagine that if we had full employment now the figure would probably not top 150,000. The rest of people claiming want to work and try very hard to get a job. A lot of unemployment is always 'transitional' even in periods of relatively high unemployment, a lot of people are without work because they are between jobs rather than starting a long period with no work at all. Of course, the pattern varies greatly regionally, but people forget how much work is seasonal and needs workers who can move from it to something else. Of course, with the cost of living in the UK being so high compared to in neighbouring states, it is almost impossible to build up savings to tide people over this transitional phase and without unemployment benefit you would see real hardship. You see hardship as it is, no-one is going to get rich claiming benefit, despite the myths put around by lazy newspapers. No-one seems to go after the tax evaders. In my personal experience a tax dodger owes the state £4000, you would have to be claiming benefit for almost two years to come close to that level of money from the state. Somehow, if you manage to dodge taxes you are a folk hero; yet even those claiming benefit legitimately are too often still seen as pariahs.
Being unemployed does not mean you should be compelled to forget all dignity and totally abase yourself and work for pitiful wages, without rights or in poor conditions. Of course, that was the line of the Thatcherites, and I remember being told repeatedly in the late 1980s that people claiming benefits should not be permitted to have a television. There was a real strain of thinking that harked back to the sense of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor. Benefit offices were very much like Nonconformist chapels in those days, set up to make people feel guilty for claiming anything and that they should be very grateful and humble for anything they did get; that they should give up everything of any light or pleasure in exchange for the small sums they received. I see some of this attitude amongst the public today, usually targetted at drug addicts and immigrants, but there are still the enduring myths that 'Jane Smith, she has five kids and the government pays her mortgage, she never even tries to find work'. These myths endure. Having worked in benefits offices and a tax office, I know that the state will cut off anyone getting anything they are not entitled to at a shot and will try to reclaim it immediately. Why do people think that if they are not getting a particular benefit other people are somehow getting it and far more generously than them? I suppose it is an element of human nature to always be envious, especially in Britain where moaning is a sport.
Given that we are returning to the high levels of unemployment we last saw in the 1980s, I hope people begin to realise this time, that the bulk of people who are unemployed hate the situation they are in. With companies laying off staff in their thousands, the majority of people in job centres will not be the durg addicts, but ordinary people, who given a quarter of a chance would be working. Losing your job dents your self respect. It leads to many sacrifices. This is bad enough without people telling you that you are lazy or are scrounging or stealing. There are lazy people, but as the weeks go by they become a smaller and smaller fraction of the millions out of work. Looking for a job, applying for jobs, attending interviews is time consuming and not without both financial and emotional costs. I hope that in part the approach of job centres in the late 2000s helps to normalise and certainly humanise the experience of being unemployed. People feel bad enough when without work, making them feel guilty simply reduces human dignity further and people who feel they have nothing either turn against society or turn against themselves and that is not what you need. The recession will come to an end. Despite the prophecies of the end of capitalism, it has been through worse situations than this. When it ends, do you want a workforce who have been so hammered while out of work that they have no self-respect, no initiative, no ambition? I know many employers like that, but that is one reason why we got into this mess in the first place.
No doubt, I will see how much I get made a pariah and how well I weather the burden of being unemployed. However, I must say the job centre approach prevailing currently, already is making me feel a bit better than it did back in the 1990s.
I went to my local job centre today and found it similar to the one I had stopped working in 1994. The technology has advanced, there are touch screens to access things. You are welcomed at the door as if going into a branch of Pizza Hut. Then I found out that you do not make a claim, as the process is still known, physically, you have to telephone first and go through a 40-minute interview. I actually found this easier than tackling someone face-to-face, though I have that element later this week. The face-to-face interview is only for me to confirm that what has been written about me is accurate and for me to bring evidence for what I am saying. Unsurprisingly given the populist concern about immigrants and employment in the UK, there were lots of questions about my nationality, despite the fact they took my National Insurance number at the start. So, the experience was very much like it would be in any other service sector location, if I went to a chain restaurant or my building society. I suppose that should be unsurprising. Of course, a lot of it is not about appealing to claimants, but to employers. Employers tended to view job centres as places where the failures went and a location that they were unlikely to find suitable candidates. Low-paying employers, conversely, saw it as a location where they could pick up cheap workers. I remember the restaurant chain Fatty Arbuckles complaining in 1993 because it had had only 4 applicants for posts in its restaurant in the town where I worked. They went on the local radio station whining that locals were lazy and preferred to 'scrounge' than work, despite the highish level of unemployment with the early 1990s recession just coming to an end. The rate of pay they were offering was £2.14 per hour (worth about £3.14 now compared to the minimum wage of £5.73 per hour) and you would have had to work an hour to cover your bus fare in from many of the villages. So, job centres evolved to look more like employment agencies. I noted the other day that a high-level company I applied for asked if I had seen the vacancy at a job centre (or Job Centre Plus) to give it, its full title, which to me suggested that they had succeeded in winning over employers.
Of course, the bulk of people who claimed at job centres were never lazy. In periods of full employment in the 1960s only about 35-70,000 people remained unemployed and I imagine that if we had full employment now the figure would probably not top 150,000. The rest of people claiming want to work and try very hard to get a job. A lot of unemployment is always 'transitional' even in periods of relatively high unemployment, a lot of people are without work because they are between jobs rather than starting a long period with no work at all. Of course, the pattern varies greatly regionally, but people forget how much work is seasonal and needs workers who can move from it to something else. Of course, with the cost of living in the UK being so high compared to in neighbouring states, it is almost impossible to build up savings to tide people over this transitional phase and without unemployment benefit you would see real hardship. You see hardship as it is, no-one is going to get rich claiming benefit, despite the myths put around by lazy newspapers. No-one seems to go after the tax evaders. In my personal experience a tax dodger owes the state £4000, you would have to be claiming benefit for almost two years to come close to that level of money from the state. Somehow, if you manage to dodge taxes you are a folk hero; yet even those claiming benefit legitimately are too often still seen as pariahs.
Being unemployed does not mean you should be compelled to forget all dignity and totally abase yourself and work for pitiful wages, without rights or in poor conditions. Of course, that was the line of the Thatcherites, and I remember being told repeatedly in the late 1980s that people claiming benefits should not be permitted to have a television. There was a real strain of thinking that harked back to the sense of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor. Benefit offices were very much like Nonconformist chapels in those days, set up to make people feel guilty for claiming anything and that they should be very grateful and humble for anything they did get; that they should give up everything of any light or pleasure in exchange for the small sums they received. I see some of this attitude amongst the public today, usually targetted at drug addicts and immigrants, but there are still the enduring myths that 'Jane Smith, she has five kids and the government pays her mortgage, she never even tries to find work'. These myths endure. Having worked in benefits offices and a tax office, I know that the state will cut off anyone getting anything they are not entitled to at a shot and will try to reclaim it immediately. Why do people think that if they are not getting a particular benefit other people are somehow getting it and far more generously than them? I suppose it is an element of human nature to always be envious, especially in Britain where moaning is a sport.
Given that we are returning to the high levels of unemployment we last saw in the 1980s, I hope people begin to realise this time, that the bulk of people who are unemployed hate the situation they are in. With companies laying off staff in their thousands, the majority of people in job centres will not be the durg addicts, but ordinary people, who given a quarter of a chance would be working. Losing your job dents your self respect. It leads to many sacrifices. This is bad enough without people telling you that you are lazy or are scrounging or stealing. There are lazy people, but as the weeks go by they become a smaller and smaller fraction of the millions out of work. Looking for a job, applying for jobs, attending interviews is time consuming and not without both financial and emotional costs. I hope that in part the approach of job centres in the late 2000s helps to normalise and certainly humanise the experience of being unemployed. People feel bad enough when without work, making them feel guilty simply reduces human dignity further and people who feel they have nothing either turn against society or turn against themselves and that is not what you need. The recession will come to an end. Despite the prophecies of the end of capitalism, it has been through worse situations than this. When it ends, do you want a workforce who have been so hammered while out of work that they have no self-respect, no initiative, no ambition? I know many employers like that, but that is one reason why we got into this mess in the first place.
No doubt, I will see how much I get made a pariah and how well I weather the burden of being unemployed. However, I must say the job centre approach prevailing currently, already is making me feel a bit better than it did back in the 1990s.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
The Deserving and the Undeserving
The UK is now a country where there seems to be few bounds of morality on the basis that used to exist. People publicly take drugs, commit adultery, have illegitimate children, speed, lie in public, take bribes in monetary or other forms and this is just the politicians let alone 'celebrities'. Sixty-one Conservative MPs were improperly employing members of their families on salaries of around £40,000 paid for by the state; most of these family members did nothing to benefit the MP or the constituency, it was just a sinecure for them. People in the public spotlight seem to face only minimal censure. Possibly this is because so many newspapers and magazines rely on scandal to fill their pages and to press people too much to behave in a respectable way would be to cut off their supply of stories. The only journalist who seems to be raising these issues is Polly Toynbee and I am pleased at that, but she seems like a very lonely voice.
It is interesting that such moral constraints from which the bulk of the population are excused are still applied very heavily to the poor. The sense of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor dates back to the perceptions of the late Victorian era. These seemed to match social welfare with moral behaviour. More than that though, it was a sense that people could prove they were worthy of being lifted from poverty by adopting the correct frame of mind. They needed to compliant and grateful rather than seeking to challenge the situation they were in or the society that kept them there. Benefactors loved to see the needy bowing in supplication and gratitude for the benefits given to them. Anyone who did not behave that way was improper and so should be penalised by having benefits withheld.
Partly this association was due to the fact that it was felt that anyone could lift themselves from poverty if they just tried, so in fact, it was felt, the bulk of people still in that state were lazy, feckless or corrupt. This stemmed from the fact that having numerous children and drinking alcohol were seen as primary causes of poverty, when in fact they were more often the consequences of the things that people used to blot out the discomfort of living in poverty. In the 1930s when mass unemployment came to the UK, it was noted that consumption of alcohol and tobacco as well as gambling increased. In addition funerals became very elaborate. These are aspects that you can still witness in East London where I lived 1994-2001. Of course drugs have also long been part of the mix, laudanum was bought by the pint in the 18th century. These days that factor is more visible, but stems from the same cause. When you are living in a room in a bed and breakfast with no hope of work and little to do to pass the day, you just want to blot out the world in whatever way you can. I agree that addictions lead to poverty, but you must also recognise that poverty leads to addiction, and if you like, immorality. If you have nothing worthwhile keeping in the world, why bother to stay in the world? This is seen in the funerals. I have never seen so long corteges or as elaborate funeral tributes or horse-drawn hearses as when I lived in East London where people have the least money to afford these things. In more prosperous areas, people make less of a fuss. However, in poor districts it is a sense that at least at their death the person gets something decent in their life. It is a celebration too, that the deceased, unlike the mourners, has finally managed to shake off the burdens of debt and worry that continue to plague the living.
In the 20th century, from the 1910s onwards and especially from 1945, the state took over the role of aiding the poor. It tended to move away from moral judgement to a mechanistic approach. If you fit certain criteria then you receive the benefits, if you do not then the benefits are not paid. There is no question of how you use the money, whether you save it or what foods you buy. There have been some moves in this direction more in terms of health, which in the UK having a state-run health system which is often free at point of use, it can be counted as a 'benefit' though one that most people whether rich or poor, unemployed or in work, will use at some time in their life. There has been discussion whether the obese or the elderly or those who smoke should be refused certain treatments, notably IV fertilisation treatments or transplants. As yet this is still generally undecided, but it fits in with the growing attitude that there are people, who because of the lifestyle they lead, are more 'deserving' of treatment than others. How long is it before that extends to determining who gets treatment on the basis of the person's income or their ethnicity. This is a very slippery path, but one that many people in the UK are keen to progress down.
People in the UK often feel that they are both hard done by and that other people are getting more than they are, and usually without 'deserving' it. This is a natural gripe. It is difficult to comprehend how impersonal global economic forces impact on all of us as individuals. It is much easier to identify distinct individuals and blame them. Of course every single person you or I is going to meet today, tomorrow, next week, probably for the rest of our lives, has absolutely no control over the global economy. The people who do, do not mix with people like us. Even Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling should you meet them somewhere, have only limited power to influence what impacts on our bank accounts or whether we will be in a job this time next year. So, we blame other people and we assume, because we come from a superficially prosperous country, that if we do not have enough, then it must be that someone else is taking it from us. We do not blame the faceless ultra-rich who in fact are the ones squeezing it from us in the petrol we pay for (BP the largest British owned oil company post six-month profits of £6.75 billion [€8.5 billion; US$ 13.5 billion] today, equivalent to £37 million per day. They make enough money in profit in a year to pay the annual salaries of 225,000 school teachers, just under a third of the total) or the food we buy, rather we blame the immigrant family on the corner or that layabout family across the road.
If you ever work in a government department as I have done (the Department of Employment and the Inland Revenue as they were named in the 1990s) you know that every day letters arrive at every single revenue or benefits office from people telling on their neighbours who they are convinced must be defrauding the government. In the bulk of the cases they are wrong as the civil service is pretty efficient at catching people defrauding them, they do not need the public to keep pointing out people, in fact it wastes their time as they have to process these 'reports' from the public when they could actually be chasing down fraudsters. The popular media always talks about 'scroungers' and people (often foreigners) supposedly defrauding the state. It never talks about the billions of pounds of unclaimed benefits. In 2007, 2.1 million retired people were deemed to be below the poverty line, a rise of 200,000 from 2006. However, each year, that is each and every year, £5 billion in benefits targeted specifically at people over 60 years old, are unclaimed. People are either ill-informed about what they can claim, or, and if you know British people of that age group, reluctant to claim because of the stigma attached, that they would rather live in poverty than go for this money. Surely any person who has worked in the UK through this past decades 'deserves' all the help they can get, even if you stick to that criteria which I feel is an unsound one.
All of this is going to get work. David Cameron, from his elite public school background, is reviving the rhetoric of the 'undeserving poor' from the Victorian era and rehashed through the Thatcher years. There is no indication on how you can prove you are 'deserving', but as in the past it seems that you must be willing to enlist your family members as free childcare and then go and take lowly paid jobs with long hours in order to prove that you are deserving, that you have sufficient self-sacrifice for the state to deem to come and help you. As I have noted before, the bulk of the UK population, about 25 million of which are working age, want to work. Around 35,000 of them do not. This still leaves 1.55 million unemployed people in the UK who want to work. Many will work in jobs with poor wages, but of course they have to earn enough to live on and pay the ever increasing fuel and food bills. People forget that in the Victorian era a lot of the worst paid jobs came with food and housing as part of the pay, that is not the case any longer. You cannot move to a Victorian economy unless you go to it wholesale, which is to say, men dying at an average age of 45 so having no need for unemployment, children going into employment from the age of 6 onwards without having education, an infant mortality rate somewhere around 15-20 per 1000, accommodation that could be afforded even on pauper wages from factories, a 12-hour working day; cheap adulterated food, and so on. You cannot expect people in the modern UK to somehow behave as if they were living 120 years ago when the rest of society is enjoying all the benefits and advances of the 21st century and also dangling these things in front of people constantly, telling them they are nothing unless they own them.
Is 'deserving' or 'undeserving' a stamp to be placed on people's foreheads? The father of the UK welfare system, William Beveridge, was aware that all people go through ups and downs in our lives. All of us will be ill, all of us will get old, many of us will have children, many of us will find ourselves without work at sometime or another (even managing directors get laid off at times). So this is why he came up with 'national insurance', to insure us against the mishaps of life. There was no question of morality, we just paid in when we could and then drew out when we needed, that was the approach of the welfare state, not taxes feeding into benefits. Obviously it worked better when there was full employment, but it should be working now as employment is still reasonable. However, as with all insurance claims, there are people who feel that they should check the claims. Their judgements are to be not based on how much you have paid in insurance (nor how much you will pay in the future) but whether you have somehow lived the 'right' way to get the money. This is arbitrary. If this is the basis of judging benefits paid to poor people or those just temporarily without a job or with children, I think we should begin applying it to the rich as well.
How would the wealthy respond if we began taking away their salaries and bonuses if they fail to invest in their companies; if they take drugs, drink and drive dangerously; if they produce children who have not bothered to study for qualifications and are a burden rather than a benefit to the country; if they do not pay their workers a wage that reflects their contribution to company profits (no company makes any profit without workers)? I think it is time to come down hard on the undeserving rich. Make them feel embarrassed and guilty for what they suck out of the UK and waste on things that generally damage the environment - big cars, numerous flights, developments in tropical countries, the drugs they take. They do far more harm both to the UK and the world as a whole than any number of families or individuals below the poverty line. Of course we are going to move even further away from anything of this kind. Wealth in the UK buys you exemption from moral criticism. Poverty, however, thrusts you right into the spotlight and even if you do receive the measly benefits you are obliged to feel guilty and oh-so-grateful for them. That is a perverse state of affairs and riling me so much I am going to have to cease this post.
It is interesting that such moral constraints from which the bulk of the population are excused are still applied very heavily to the poor. The sense of the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor dates back to the perceptions of the late Victorian era. These seemed to match social welfare with moral behaviour. More than that though, it was a sense that people could prove they were worthy of being lifted from poverty by adopting the correct frame of mind. They needed to compliant and grateful rather than seeking to challenge the situation they were in or the society that kept them there. Benefactors loved to see the needy bowing in supplication and gratitude for the benefits given to them. Anyone who did not behave that way was improper and so should be penalised by having benefits withheld.
Partly this association was due to the fact that it was felt that anyone could lift themselves from poverty if they just tried, so in fact, it was felt, the bulk of people still in that state were lazy, feckless or corrupt. This stemmed from the fact that having numerous children and drinking alcohol were seen as primary causes of poverty, when in fact they were more often the consequences of the things that people used to blot out the discomfort of living in poverty. In the 1930s when mass unemployment came to the UK, it was noted that consumption of alcohol and tobacco as well as gambling increased. In addition funerals became very elaborate. These are aspects that you can still witness in East London where I lived 1994-2001. Of course drugs have also long been part of the mix, laudanum was bought by the pint in the 18th century. These days that factor is more visible, but stems from the same cause. When you are living in a room in a bed and breakfast with no hope of work and little to do to pass the day, you just want to blot out the world in whatever way you can. I agree that addictions lead to poverty, but you must also recognise that poverty leads to addiction, and if you like, immorality. If you have nothing worthwhile keeping in the world, why bother to stay in the world? This is seen in the funerals. I have never seen so long corteges or as elaborate funeral tributes or horse-drawn hearses as when I lived in East London where people have the least money to afford these things. In more prosperous areas, people make less of a fuss. However, in poor districts it is a sense that at least at their death the person gets something decent in their life. It is a celebration too, that the deceased, unlike the mourners, has finally managed to shake off the burdens of debt and worry that continue to plague the living.
In the 20th century, from the 1910s onwards and especially from 1945, the state took over the role of aiding the poor. It tended to move away from moral judgement to a mechanistic approach. If you fit certain criteria then you receive the benefits, if you do not then the benefits are not paid. There is no question of how you use the money, whether you save it or what foods you buy. There have been some moves in this direction more in terms of health, which in the UK having a state-run health system which is often free at point of use, it can be counted as a 'benefit' though one that most people whether rich or poor, unemployed or in work, will use at some time in their life. There has been discussion whether the obese or the elderly or those who smoke should be refused certain treatments, notably IV fertilisation treatments or transplants. As yet this is still generally undecided, but it fits in with the growing attitude that there are people, who because of the lifestyle they lead, are more 'deserving' of treatment than others. How long is it before that extends to determining who gets treatment on the basis of the person's income or their ethnicity. This is a very slippery path, but one that many people in the UK are keen to progress down.
People in the UK often feel that they are both hard done by and that other people are getting more than they are, and usually without 'deserving' it. This is a natural gripe. It is difficult to comprehend how impersonal global economic forces impact on all of us as individuals. It is much easier to identify distinct individuals and blame them. Of course every single person you or I is going to meet today, tomorrow, next week, probably for the rest of our lives, has absolutely no control over the global economy. The people who do, do not mix with people like us. Even Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling should you meet them somewhere, have only limited power to influence what impacts on our bank accounts or whether we will be in a job this time next year. So, we blame other people and we assume, because we come from a superficially prosperous country, that if we do not have enough, then it must be that someone else is taking it from us. We do not blame the faceless ultra-rich who in fact are the ones squeezing it from us in the petrol we pay for (BP the largest British owned oil company post six-month profits of £6.75 billion [€8.5 billion; US$ 13.5 billion] today, equivalent to £37 million per day. They make enough money in profit in a year to pay the annual salaries of 225,000 school teachers, just under a third of the total) or the food we buy, rather we blame the immigrant family on the corner or that layabout family across the road.
If you ever work in a government department as I have done (the Department of Employment and the Inland Revenue as they were named in the 1990s) you know that every day letters arrive at every single revenue or benefits office from people telling on their neighbours who they are convinced must be defrauding the government. In the bulk of the cases they are wrong as the civil service is pretty efficient at catching people defrauding them, they do not need the public to keep pointing out people, in fact it wastes their time as they have to process these 'reports' from the public when they could actually be chasing down fraudsters. The popular media always talks about 'scroungers' and people (often foreigners) supposedly defrauding the state. It never talks about the billions of pounds of unclaimed benefits. In 2007, 2.1 million retired people were deemed to be below the poverty line, a rise of 200,000 from 2006. However, each year, that is each and every year, £5 billion in benefits targeted specifically at people over 60 years old, are unclaimed. People are either ill-informed about what they can claim, or, and if you know British people of that age group, reluctant to claim because of the stigma attached, that they would rather live in poverty than go for this money. Surely any person who has worked in the UK through this past decades 'deserves' all the help they can get, even if you stick to that criteria which I feel is an unsound one.
All of this is going to get work. David Cameron, from his elite public school background, is reviving the rhetoric of the 'undeserving poor' from the Victorian era and rehashed through the Thatcher years. There is no indication on how you can prove you are 'deserving', but as in the past it seems that you must be willing to enlist your family members as free childcare and then go and take lowly paid jobs with long hours in order to prove that you are deserving, that you have sufficient self-sacrifice for the state to deem to come and help you. As I have noted before, the bulk of the UK population, about 25 million of which are working age, want to work. Around 35,000 of them do not. This still leaves 1.55 million unemployed people in the UK who want to work. Many will work in jobs with poor wages, but of course they have to earn enough to live on and pay the ever increasing fuel and food bills. People forget that in the Victorian era a lot of the worst paid jobs came with food and housing as part of the pay, that is not the case any longer. You cannot move to a Victorian economy unless you go to it wholesale, which is to say, men dying at an average age of 45 so having no need for unemployment, children going into employment from the age of 6 onwards without having education, an infant mortality rate somewhere around 15-20 per 1000, accommodation that could be afforded even on pauper wages from factories, a 12-hour working day; cheap adulterated food, and so on. You cannot expect people in the modern UK to somehow behave as if they were living 120 years ago when the rest of society is enjoying all the benefits and advances of the 21st century and also dangling these things in front of people constantly, telling them they are nothing unless they own them.
Is 'deserving' or 'undeserving' a stamp to be placed on people's foreheads? The father of the UK welfare system, William Beveridge, was aware that all people go through ups and downs in our lives. All of us will be ill, all of us will get old, many of us will have children, many of us will find ourselves without work at sometime or another (even managing directors get laid off at times). So this is why he came up with 'national insurance', to insure us against the mishaps of life. There was no question of morality, we just paid in when we could and then drew out when we needed, that was the approach of the welfare state, not taxes feeding into benefits. Obviously it worked better when there was full employment, but it should be working now as employment is still reasonable. However, as with all insurance claims, there are people who feel that they should check the claims. Their judgements are to be not based on how much you have paid in insurance (nor how much you will pay in the future) but whether you have somehow lived the 'right' way to get the money. This is arbitrary. If this is the basis of judging benefits paid to poor people or those just temporarily without a job or with children, I think we should begin applying it to the rich as well.
How would the wealthy respond if we began taking away their salaries and bonuses if they fail to invest in their companies; if they take drugs, drink and drive dangerously; if they produce children who have not bothered to study for qualifications and are a burden rather than a benefit to the country; if they do not pay their workers a wage that reflects their contribution to company profits (no company makes any profit without workers)? I think it is time to come down hard on the undeserving rich. Make them feel embarrassed and guilty for what they suck out of the UK and waste on things that generally damage the environment - big cars, numerous flights, developments in tropical countries, the drugs they take. They do far more harm both to the UK and the world as a whole than any number of families or individuals below the poverty line. Of course we are going to move even further away from anything of this kind. Wealth in the UK buys you exemption from moral criticism. Poverty, however, thrusts you right into the spotlight and even if you do receive the measly benefits you are obliged to feel guilty and oh-so-grateful for them. That is a perverse state of affairs and riling me so much I am going to have to cease this post.
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