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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: London Riots - The Root Cause
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Persephone Hazard:
They make it so impossibly difficult even for those who are eligible that I rather admire anyone who manages to get through their ten levels of bullshit well enough to con them.
I would suppose it's easier to put in the time and energy to claim benefits if you don't actually need to.
It's like the Wally Effect: it's much easier to sack Dilbert, who is trying to do his job, than to sack Wally who isn't, because Dilbert is putting his energy into doing his job while Wally has lots of energy left over to put into not getting sacked.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Persephone Hazard
Ship's Wench
# 4648
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I would suppose it's easier to put in the time and energy to claim benefits if you don't actually need to.
Yeah, I suppose so. Certainly it was the very thing I was applying to Incapacity for that made it as overwhelming as it was.
They do that on purpose, though. There's no need, practically speaking, for the ten levels of soul-destroying bureaucracy; it's explicitly designed to put people off. Ostensibly I suppose so that only the "really serious" apply, but that's not the effect it has in practice.
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A picture is worth a thousand words, but it's a lot easier to make up a thousand words than one decent picture. - ken.
Posts: 1645 | From: London | Registered: Jun 2003
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Moth
Shipmate
# 2589
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Posted
This reminds me of an article by Harriet Sergeant in the Sunday Times recently. The bit that made me unsure whether to laugh or cry was this:
"Seeing jobcentres and social services from the point of view of Mash, Lips and Bulldog [gang members she was studying] is an eye-opener. We wonder why these boys do not buy into our society. It is because their only experience of our civic institutions are places such as jobcentres whose complexity, indifference and incompetence would have made them at home in Stalin’s Russia.
After three days of trying to get Bulldog, Lips and Mash a job, of queuing, form-filling and getting nowhere, I finally exploded. The boys led me out. Lips said: “I told you this place fair gives you a headache. That why me and the others do the robbin’, innit. We don’t like coming here.”
Recently I met an official from the Department for Work and Pensions. How did it judge individual jobcentres, I asked. She looked puzzled. “Well, they are always very enthusiastic when we visit,” she said. I suggested she go with the boys. She looked pained. Finally she admitted the department had no idea which jobcentres actually found jobs or how many. It did not even have an internal league table."
No-one who has not applied for benefits should presume to say that they are an easier life than working. Even more stupid, the worst bit is getting into benefits at the start, so there is no incentive at all to take a temporary job then return to benefits. You will almost certainly lose money, be kept waiting for your money for weeks, get into arrears with your rent and your council tax, and generally be made to wish you had stayed on benefits throughout.
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"There are governments that burn books, and then there are those that sell the libraries and shut the universities to anyone who can't pay for a key." Laurie Penny.
Posts: 3446 | From: England | Registered: Apr 2002
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moth:
Finally she admitted the department had no idea which jobcentres actually found jobs or how many. It did not even have an internal league table."
Why am I not surprised?
Even thirty-odd years ago when I last signed on, and they were better run than they later became (though jobs were even harder to get than now) I never really thought they were abut getting peopel into jobs.
If I remember correctly it seemed to me that the actual main functions the system served were, in about this order:
1) defusing rebellion and riot by providing a minimal income to those who don't work. I became convinced of this one during the summer of 1982 when they dropped the requirement to sign on weekly and started mailing giros to us from the DVLC in Swansea.
2) visibily humiliating the unemployed as an Awful Warning to those with jobs in order to persuade them to toe the line. The Reserve Army of Unemployed has to be visible for the effect to work.
3) a cheap way of recruiting people into the various make-work schemes or so-called training courses that abounded at the time - and were designed not so much to get people into permanent emplyment, as to make the unemplyment figures look good, and divert public money away from the unemployed themselves and into the pockets of the so-called "entrepreneurs" who ran the little schemes.
These three aims are not entirely compatible of course. But on the general principle that people aren't stupid, so if they spend a lot of time and money organising a system that does something then they probably wanted to do it, I reckon all of those aims were more important to them than helping the unemployed into productive work.
Things are not yet as bad as they were in 1981/82, or for a few years afterwards, and I hope that they won't get as bad, but the present governments anti-growth, anti-employment strategy doesn't give me any confidence in that.
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Ramarius
Shipmate
# 16551
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Posted
Evening Moth,
Jobcentres know exactly how many people they each get into work. Google Job outcome target and find details on the Jobcentre Plus website.
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Posts: 950 | From: Virtually anywhere | Registered: Jul 2011
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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ramarius:
Evening Moth,
Jobcentres know exactly how many people they each get into work. Google Job outcome target and find details on the Jobcentre Plus website.
Moth was interested in the jobs found by individual job centres. I've found the site and only national data appears available for 2010-2011 (although regional and district data is available before then). The granularity of data, which would expose relative effectiveness of Jobcentres is now lost (or at any rate, not available to the public - anyone for an FoI request?)
If you know different, could you provide links?
btw, Excel is a fine way to make data available for use and analysis, but a lousy one to present data to the public, ministers or managers for that matter - believe me, I've been told!
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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"
(Paul Sinha, BBC)
Posts: 24276 | From: Newport, Wales | Registered: Apr 2004
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Ramarius
Shipmate
# 16551
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Posted
....district data is an aggregate of individual job centre data.... JC+ knows exactly how each job centre is performing, although comparisons between centres can't be done on a simplistic basis of numbers in/numbers out since factors in the local job Market will effect how easy or otherwise it is to enable people to find jobs....
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Posts: 950 | From: Virtually anywhere | Registered: Jul 2011
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Moth
Shipmate
# 2589
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ramarius:
....district data is an aggregate of individual job centre data.... JC+ knows exactly how each job centre is performing, although comparisons between centres can't be done on a simplistic basis of numbers in/numbers out since factors in the local job Market will effect how easy or otherwise it is to enable people to find jobs....
That may well be true, but it's interesting that if it is, the minister in charge did not know that. It does suggest that no-one really expects them to find jobs, but more to keep people off benefits. Neither my son (21) or my sister (49) have found the job centres (two different ones 130 miles apart) any help at all in actually getting work, though both have good qualifications and my sister has lots of experience as well. Now that she is not on benefits, as her husband works, the job centre have no interest in her at all, though she's desperate to find a job.
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"There are governments that burn books, and then there are those that sell the libraries and shut the universities to anyone who can't pay for a key." Laurie Penny.
Posts: 3446 | From: England | Registered: Apr 2002
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
Surely it's a bit unfair to rank individual Jobcentres against each other, when the ability of Jobcentres to find people employment is ultimately limited by the number of jobs available in a given area? Sure, they can match people to vacancies, but they can't create jobs ex nihilo.
[Sorry, just seen Ramarius made the same point.]
[ 02. September 2011, 17:48: Message edited by: Ricardus ]
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
Surely it's a bit unfair to rank individual Jobcentres against each other, when the ability of Jobcentres to find people employment is ultimately limited by the number of jobs available in a given area?
Maybe, but one travel-to-work area will have multiple jobcentres. In London, dozens of them - maybe even hundreds.
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Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
True.
FWIW, from my experience of signing on, I'd say your earlier comments are spot on.
The practice of signing on every fortnight serves no purpose other than mild humiliation. It exists to tell the unemployed that "you are dependent on us, and you must do as we say". The actual contact time with an "advisor" is far too short for them to impart any actual advice - even if they knew anything about the myriad different occupations people might practise. (A friend of mine was very offended when his advisor didn't know what an auditor was.)
It doesn't even cut fraud, because if you say you've been applying for lots of jobs and been interviewed for a few, there's no way they can check up on it.
I think the actual front-line advisors know how shit the system is and try to mitigate it by being all friendly and happy and positive. If you come from the right postcode area, that is.
(The aforementioned friend and I used to sign on at the same Jobcentre, but I came from a nice area while he was from an estate so violent it was nicknamed Beirut. They ask you your postcode as a security question and he reckoned his treatment afterwards was much worse than mine.)
ETA: there's also a plethora of worthy-sounding parasitic enterprises whose role is to get people back into work. As it's the Government that pays them, rather than the unemployed, all their effort goes into satisfying the Government that they're a worthy recipient of grants, rather than into actually helping people.
Yes, I am slightly bitter ...
[ 02. September 2011, 19:28: Message edited by: Ricardus ]
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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Eigon
Shipmate
# 4917
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Posted
Bitter, but realistic, Ricardus.
One of the things that really annoyed me about A4E was the fact that, when I was a tax payer, I was paying for that bunch of useless idiots. Thirteen weeks of turning up every day to basically sit around in a room pretending to apply for jobs that I realistically would never get (I used to take my knitting), combined with my "work experience" actually working in their own office, and hearing the despair of their employees who were jumping ship as fast as they could manage it, was both infuriating and deeply depressing.
In the end, the job I got had nothing whatever to do with their feeble efforts, and everything to do with my own networking and good reputation in my local area.
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Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind.
Posts: 3710 | From: Hay-on-Wye, town of books | Registered: Aug 2003
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