The wheels have been coming off many of the Tories plans in the last week. The Health Reform Bill is causing them considerable trouble, with the Liberals facing a rebellion from the grass roots. In the last few days it has been their Workfare scheme that has run into trouble.
The Tories measures put forward udner the guise of "Work Experience" for the unemployed, came in for attack after Tesco advertised a job that paid only JSA. In other words a company that produces billions of pounds of profits for its share holders each year was employing workers at the taxpayers expense. Of course, these kinds of McJobs are different from the kind of unpaid internships that the well heeled can afford to place their kids in, so that they get an advantage over others in jobs that ultimately pay above average wages. The idea that anyone is getting any kind of real training, from filling super market shelves over night is laughable.
Then yesterday, it was reported in the press that one of the companies that has been advising the Liberal-Tories on these schemes has seen four people arrested on charges of fraud! The scheme, like the Health Bill has become so toxic that no one now wants to touch it. All of the Health bodies have distanced themselves from the Health Bill, now Tesco and many more companies are distancing themselves from the Liberal-Tory workfare scheme.
As during the 1980's, all of these kinds of schemes are a sham, and provide far more opportunities for State bureaucrats to provide themselves with jobs, and various businesses to make profits from providing "training", "work experience" and so on, than provide anything useful for the unemployed, who want real jobs, at proper rates of pay.
A couple of weeks ago I had the misfortune of having to go into the City Centre. I happened by a private Job Agency, and had a look in their window. They had a range of very low paid jobs, but interspeersed amongst them were a number of better paid jobs, for Managers, Supervisors and Administrators, most of which required the applicant to be able to speak a foreign language. One of them particularly took my attention. It required someone who could speak Swiss. I thought of going in to enquire about it, and to say I could speak Swiss better than anyone in the world. That would have been true, for the simple reason that there is no Swiss language! Switzerland has three official languages - German, French and Italian, but not a single "Swiss" language.
What kind of firm, I wondered required someone who spoke a non-existent language? Well none, I concluded. What they were really advertising was not a job for someone to speak a non-existent language, but a non-existent job, designed to get people through the door.
3 comments:
All I can say is that this definitely isn't an Employer of Last Resort program.
Since you're very much into coops, I was wondering about your opinion of a workers-run employment agency.
Think of union halls, on the one hand, and temp agencies, on the other, but instead a combination of both run by a political party.
Here I'm questioning myself re. the for-profit coop model vs. the non-profit organization model:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/party-based-alternative-t168341/index.html
I've already said in the past that I think its one idea that workers should develop such an organisation. Think of it like the Wobblies "One Big Union", or Owen's GNCFTU, or a Workers Monopoly Supplier of Labour. The idea would be to set Minimum Pay rates, and only supply Labour to employers through such an agency if they agreed to pay.
It has an iedological benefit, in that it would more openly be seen as a Company selling a product - Labour Power - like any other, and whilst bourgeois society has conditioned people to see that companies can choose not to sell unless consumers pay the price, this is never seen the same when it comes to workers selling Labour Power, and striking as a result.
The Co-op would have to have the resources to pay workers on its books who were not found employment, but this would also be an encouragement for this Co-op to be integrated with a wider Co-op sector, so that productive work WAS found for those workers.
But, of course, as I've said elsewhere, if such a Co-op Monopoly was established - and there are many obvious difficulties in trying to establish it arising from the atomisation of workers, and competition between them - the Capitalist State would inevitably intervene through the anti-Monopoly laws to insist it be broken up. That is why a political struggle would be needed, waged by a Workers Party.
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