Following on from my rather widely read post on Labour’s unhappy relationship with workfare (now why don’t you read me when I talk of bloodless revolution? Sign the bloody sustainability manifesto, for goodness sake!), there have been quite a few comments on Facebook. In reply to one which suggested that Liam Byrne was acting as a result of Ed Miliband’s (otherwise admirable, for sure) collegiate leadership style, I made this comment:
Collegiate style is positive, as you say. But you have to ensure there exist principles which guide too. Here, Ed is maybe a little loose still.
I then went on to point out that:
I don’t, however, think it’d take the scalpels of a neurosurgeon to work out that a party called Labour shouldn’t believe in making people who have little power work for nothing because the top brass have mucked up their socioeconomic policies.
And finally laid out my uncertainties at the moment in this way:
Byrne knows what he’s doing and for whom. What I really am worried about is that Ed, actually, likes the idea of using him as an outrider. Now if that’s the case, I’d be questioning Ed’s position.
For all the last decade’s talk of Labour values versus rolling change – how to keep the heart and soul of the Party at the heart and soul of everything we do, even as what we do involves upending some of the tools we’ve traditionally used to achieve our goals – Blairism was finally little more than a cuckoo in a fairly selfless nest of good-hearted workers.
Ed (Miliband) should realise this.
I’m sure he does.
What I’d really like to feel comfortable about is that he realises another cuckoo – in the shape of One Nation Labour (the comparisons between the language of the latter and the original “New Labour, New Britain”, if you think carefully about it, simply don’t bear contemplating) – really isn’t what the country needs right now.
So if One Nation rhetoric is to mean anything at all, let it not mean Blairism Mark II.
Liam Byrne would be its standard.
And we clearly don’t want that.
Time, dear Ed, to define behind whose flag you wish to march.
I can’t possible transmit effectively or accurately how most people on my Twitter timeline who’ve expressed an opinion have reacted to Labour’s abstention today in relation to workfare-related issues.
Three documents, then, to bring you up to speed. Labour’s Liam Byrne, Iain Duncan Smith’s opposite number in more ways than one it would seem (the two of them were acidly described as being like two bald men fighting over a comb), wrote this today in Huffington Post. Caroline Lucas, of the Green Party, countered with this piece. Meanwhile Sunny Hundal, in Liberal Conspiracy, had already set the scene quite critically here:
[...] the concessions [Byrne claims to have extracted from Duncan Smith] won’t stop those wronged by the DWP’s blunder to get compensation. Stopping them from getting compensation is the sole purpose of this emergency bill. Liam Byrne counters that if the DWP was forced to pay out these fines then it would have to make more benefit cuts elsewhere. But that still betrays the job-seekers who have been exploited by the system thus far.
Yesterday, Unite the Union also released a statement slamming the government’s rushed attempts to shore up unworkable Workfare schemes.
It’s time the unions also pressed Labour to take a stronger line against IDS’s Workfare schemes.
My attention was also drawn this evening to a Hansard description of the unhappy proceedings in question. In particular, to this exchange:
Will the right hon. Gentleman therefore explain to claimants, trade unions and everybody who has looked at this Bill why the Labour party will be abstaining today? If this Work programme is no better than no work programme at all, why on earth is the Labour party sitting on its hands?
I will address that point directly, as the answer is very simple: because this Bill restores the general legal power of the DWP to issue sanctions. It is a broad sui generis power that has been in place since 1911. I will be interested to hear later the hon. Gentleman’s argument on why he thinks the power to issue sanctions, which has been in place since 1911, should now be struck down for the period in question.
The worst aspect of all this is that the Secretary of State was warned that he was heading for a failure not simply in this House, not simply by commentators opposed to his plans, and not simply by people who had a profound disagreement with him, but by the very specialist Committee he set up to advise him on these questions. This is what the Social Security Advisory Committee said about the 2011 regulations:
“SSAC ask why the Department did not opt to narrow the scope of the original regulations”,
Indeed, it was, of course, their broad and unspecified content that the Court of Appeal objected to.
In essence, Byrne – and by extension Labour and the movement it represents – believes that a legal technicality overrides the need to defend a basic human right: the right to be paid and remunerated for work done. And whilst – via the miasma that is Parliament, the legal profession and everything associated with lawmaking – the outsiders we are perceive that stuff isn’t as simple as it might seem at first glance, there is, at least for me, a serious question left hanging in the turgid atmosphere of this affair: what does Labour’s abstention really mean?
For if I am to remain a part of this party of labour, of this movement of labour, of the party that takes its name from the flesh-and-blood side of the economic equation, I need to know the answer to the following question: why did Labour really abstain?
Was it:
in order to resolve a hiatus in a law which Parliament has seen fit to maintain since 1911?
in order to continue a relentless battle for voter turf as per Labour’s triangulatory instincts of yore?
in order to re-establish, in the guise of One Nation unity, a Brand New Old New Labour comeback?
That is to say, did Labour abstain because it was process-driven by insensitive technocrats, tactically-driven by inept strategists or ideologically-driven by power-crazed sub-Blairites?
In any of the above, I have to say I’m inclined to reserve my judgement. But if it comes to light that Labour really did abstain not because it was playing silly political buggers at all but, rather, because it was too bloody embarrassed to come out and honestly admit – in the fading light of a bad March evening – that it actually believes in a “something for nothing culture”, then I’m really afraid it’s going to be curtains for very many people.
And when I say “believes in a ‘something for nothing culture’”, I do of course mean the process whereby:
a person loses their job as government austerity cuts run deep, whilst the incompetence of our political class destroys infrastructures various
a person goes spare, whilst unable to find another job
a person is finally obliged to go on a workfare scheme in order to continue receiving benefit
a person, just maybe, ends up in a very similar job to the one they used to do before – only this time being compelled to do that workfare-inscribed “something for nothing”
Meanwhile, a corporate sponsor or two or three or a thousand find themselves benefiting from a double societal whammy: on the one hand, escaping what would be fair and equitable tax burdens through tax avoidance schemes, whilst simultaneously taking advantage of a nation’s taxpayer-funded infrastructures; and on the other, being able to employ an ever-increasing queue of people at the mercy of these “something for nothing” ideologies – ideologies which Byrne, and Labour more widely, appear to share so strongly with their counterparts in the Coalition.
So Labour.
What’s your answer then?
Did you sit on your hands because your strategists fucked up – or did you sit on your hands because your strategists fucked us?
And thinking on this fearful government campaign against the concept of shirking as James would prefer to understand it – a concept we could just as easily describe as idle thoughts, imagination and deliberately unfocussed creative and lateral thinking in general – makes me wonder if our government doesn’t have a couple of prejudices driving it:
Thinking idly must be the preserve of the idle rich – because it’s one of the most sure-fire ways of getting richer.
Thinking idly must be the preserve of the already powerful – because, as one sure-fire way of understanding how the world really works, it’s bound to lead the plebs to reconsider their assigned positions in society.
What I didn’t realise was that there is science behind what is happening. Watch this video, first – it’s only ten minutes long and will change your life for sure.
As you will see if you follow my instructions to the letter, unthinking work responds positively to the attractions of monetary payments. They dangle a larger carrot in front of you – or threaten you with a larger stick for not working harder – and, verily, you end up working harder. But when it comes to using your brain to think, more money actually makes you perform worse! Time and time again, the data proves the latter. An astonishing – and apparently counter-intuitive – conclusion.
Are human beings, in reality then, hard-wired socialists by nature?
It’s certainly a thought, anyhow.
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Naturally enough, this got me thinking. I worked for about seven years in a large banking corporation. My experience in one department there led me from relatively thinking tasks at the beginning to evermore desultory and meaningless data entry six years on. The trends were absolutely clear: the dumbing down of processes and their corresponding procedures was an instinct which was manifestly part and parcel of corporate life. The question was: why?
I always assumed it was an urge to reduce training costs, limit the impact of staff turnover and make it impossible for any one worker to be in control of sufficient intellectual property which a move into another company might prejudice.
The dumber the processes the workforces have to carry out, the fewer of those processes – and their value-adding implications – they can take away with them out of malice or pique, for example.
But in the light of what we’ve just seen in the RSA video above, it would seem that there is an intuitive (maybe even conscious) conspiracy sustaining itself to take out of a thinking society such as ours – trained for decades, as it has been, in the constructive cocoon of compulsory education to cogitate better and more profoundly than ever before – all the relevant and value-adding opportunities to use our cognitive and self-motivating side to be precisely that.
So instead of substituting a stick-and-carrot system designed to make simple and repetitive tasks function at least minimally well with an alternative system which would fit exactly with our thoughtful and educated latterday brains, large and small companies everywhere have decided – whether deliberately or instinctively – to jettison all attempts to take advantage of our minds and, instead, return us to the drudge of manager-driven wage slavery.
In a thinking society, where almost everyone has been taught how to imagine, create and laterally devise, this is why they’re dumbing down all the processes: it’s a power thing, after all. A desire to keep a hold of those old hierarchies. A need they have to maintain the control that externally motivated work has over the worker bees it commands.
And what’s even more curious is that as we continue to find ourselves carrying out more and more meaningless tasks in our work time, in our leisure time we’re blogging and videoing and writing to our heart’s content. What’s more, with mostly very little monetary reward.
Whilst we’re pushed towards evermore robotic work experiences, our need to think and cogitate cannot be suppressed. Just as, in fact, our democracy is removed from our politicking, so our desire to search out and practise democratic process moves into online and other virtual manifestations.
However hard you try to remove freedom of thought and cognitive opportunities from human beings and their daily experiences, you are bound, I think we can all agree, to ultimately fail.
And whilst we humans are pushed towards – and back into – meaningless work, and whilst our robots become cleverer and more ingenious, no wonder our politicians feel the need to criticise the thinkers: to criticise them roundly, describe thinking as shirking – and let it be understood that those who wonder are wasting their time.
After all, imagine how difficult it might be to rule over a nation of people far cleverer than you.
A nation of people who thought stuff without the petty reward of the only thing that separated you – with your concentrated wealth – from them.
A nation of people who didn’t believe stuff in accordance with what you gave them or withheld.
A nation of people who did what was right because doing what is right is what keeps them alive.
That, in conclusion, is what we now have in the United Kingdom.
Too many clever voters who think better in their spare time than their leaders are now managing in their paid time.
Curious, isn’t it? Curious how historical hierarchies always seem to fight to reassert themselves.
The new academic year saw the launch of another 12 ‘studio schools’, the work-based sister project of academies. By next year there will be 30, with more on the way. Launched quietly in 2010, studio schools allow private businesses to run state education for 14 to 19-year-olds with learning ‘on the job’ and not in the classroom. For under‑16s, that means unpaid work for corporate sponsors as part of the curriculum.
The piece is angled and headlined as workfare for children. Unpaid fourteen-year-olds carrying out tasks for corporate sponsors? It does sound the very worst example of how our current Coalition is lining up our infants as wage-slaved cannon fodder for the present and future of the already ultra-rich.
But I’d like to step back from thinking that this is wholly wrong. Even as, by doing so, I wonder if I’m becoming a bad person.
My middle son, for example, almost at the end of his A-level education, is looking to get into the film industry. Initially as an editor; sometime in the future as a director. He doesn’t want to stay in the UK – but has this huge goal of studying at the New York Film Academy instead. In the meantime, however, he’s prepared to combine school with weekend courses here and there. He’s been studying Media Studies for almost four years now: he would be a massive plus for any corporate sponsor out there.
If only, I say, as an interested and quite poor parent, one of these “studio schools” had existed at the beginning of those four years near where we live. He would have been delighted to get on-the-job training as an investment by the state in his and the country’s future film industry at the tender age of fourteen – in fact, such an opportunity would surely have convinced him that the UK had a lot more to offer him in the area than, in the end, he has concluded.
Learning to work for someone isn’t only the training they offer you. The value a school’s sponsors can add isn’t only the course fees – whether paid for by the state or the company in question. Exposure to real, discrete and specific people – that opportunity to interface and network with professionals, bosses and hierarchies – is just as important, and adds just as much value, as a properly-paid wage.
But I see this in two minds, two minds my left-leaning tendencies should not allow, not only with my son and his very particular circumstances. My daughter, who actually is only fourteen, came to me this morning with a request: “Dad, can you find me a job?” She wants it for two very clear reasons: firstly, because she needs the money; secondly, because she wants the experience – she wants to do something at the weekends which doesn’t simply involve going to town with her friends, as they window-shop the same old shops and eat at the same old fast-food restaurants.
There’s something going on here, I think, which many of us on the left do not appreciate. Children are growing up earlier these days – in everything. And the world of work is no exception. Whilst the government justifies “studio schools” on the basis that our state education system isn’t properly preparing our children for the world of work, I would argue, anecdotally I must admit, quite the opposite: I would argue that our children, exposed as they are to a multitude of empowering technologies from a very early age, are actually treading the paths of potential genius and intellectual splendour – if only our education system (and here I would suggest both state and private) understood exactly what transformations have been taking place.
Workfare for children? It all depends on how you implement it. But certainly, given the choice between a bog-standard state or private school and a so-called “studio school” which offered a real contact with and a practical application of morally sustainable corporate relationships between sponsored and sponsor, I can tell you – right now – which my children would really, truly, prefer.
The question, of course, being whether the corporations mentioned – and others like them – are capable or not, any more, of being morally sustainable. But that, perhaps, would be a matter for a different post.
I’m glad Dave feels he’s not being taken into account. Perhaps a taste of the medicine he so loves to dish out will finally do him some good.
Meanwhile, ignoring me is what he’s done on the NHS, on DLA, on free schools, on Legal Aid, on welfare reform, on digital rights, on News International, on Andy Coulson, on workfare and forests (for a while), on human rights legislation (surely pretty soon) – and on more or less everything that currently preoccupies me about this unfair and unpleasant land.
Which, I suppose, in a perverse kind of way, brings me closer to Dave than ever before.
The worst of it being, of course, than I’m really not sure if this ignorance of Dave’s is unintentional or fashioned. Politicos these days are so clever – in full marketing mode – at selling their weaknesses as virtues that any virtues you perceive out there must automatically be discounted as weaknesses hidden by the cloak of clever obfuscation.
In short, Dave’s a passive-aggressive bully – and there’s nothing a passive-aggressive hates more than to be simply ignored.
Well done, European Union. My faith in your judgement is beginning, very slowly, to be renewed!
Maybe workfare is just the state’s equivalent – its construct if you like – of what private sector and self-employed individuals desperately spend most of their time struggling with: unpaid overtime in the hope of distant promotion; wining and dining in the hope of distant contracts. And the reason we have workfare, even where it may be illegal, is because – in a reasonably illegal (or at least immoral) way too – the private sector has, over time, had to become accustomed to playing the same unremunerated games.
After all, the state and the private sector are often mirrors of each other: closer in what and how they do the stuff they do than detractors of either would care to admit.
Work Your Proper Hours Day (24 Feb 2012) is the day when the average person who does unpaid overtime finishes the unpaid days they do every year, and starts earning for themselves. We think that’s a day worth celebrating.
Over five million people at work in the UK regularly do unpaid overtime, giving their employers £29.2 billion of free work last year alone. [...]
Meanwhile, back in 2010 I reported on Mr Duncan Smith’s penchant for blaming the unemployed for the state in which they found themselves, as I wondered if we were stumbling into “Alice in Wonderland” or Kafka. In the event, and from today’s perspective, it would seem it was a case of the first written by the second. The piece I wrote does, in fact, make for painful rereading – especially in the light of what’s been happening of late.
Prescient, even. Sadly enough.
And I am reminded of when I worked in a large corporation where it was suggested that volunteering activities should form a part of the bonus-attached compulsory annual objectives – that is to say, and I swear this really happened, an HR department of an 80,000-worker company was capable of coming up with the wizard wheeze of making volunteering compulsory.
Things like this do of course give volunteering a bad name. For it’s a small step from not wanting to volunteer any more to refusing to work in good faith under any circumstances. And we certainly don’t want that to happen.
So in a society where capitalism is no longer a force for freedom – and it would appear every capitalist of a successful bent has the perfect right and permission to maximise their personal wealth at the expense of everyone else – what place does the good faith that is this desire to work without being paid actually have?
That is to say, what is the place of volunteering in a society of the selfish?
Does it have any place in a society where everyone who is in charge is only out to maximise their outcomes?
Chris, over at Stumbling and Mumbling, has an interesting post on the case for workfare – or, at least, on the case for something which might aim to do what workfare is alleged, by its proponents, to achieve. He expresses understandable outrage – which I am sure many of us share; though, interestingly, a point made by a commenter does in a way undermine our moral coherence on this matter:
Re the “outrage” at firms getting subsidised or free labour, what’s the reason for the outrage? The Western countries have implemented HUNDREDS of different employment subsidies since WWII that involve supplying subsidised or free labour to firms. If you have some fundamental reason for thinking this sort of measure is immoral, or something like that, let’s have the reasons. (I’m 100% any such reasons can be demolished.)
Reasons for the outrage after such a long time? Maybe we’re all late to the party. This e-petition, and a follow-up comment on Facebook which came my way, does point us in a separate direction:
Petition to Abolish Work for your Benefit/Workfare Schemes in the UK
Responsible department: Department for Work and Pensions
We want to abolish work for your benefit/workfare schemes in the UK.
People selling their labour should be fairly remunerated for their work at the normal level paid for the tasks they perform and treated in the same way as a standard employee with full rights and representation if requested.
These are the basic rights of any worker in a modern democratic society.
Workfare is effectively forced labour and is therefore illegal in the UK.
I’ve signed the petition myself, and would ask you to consider doing the same – although I would like confirmation, if possible, of the final assertion thus contained. As already mentioned, someone on Facebook has argued that if it can be classified as forced labour and is indeed illegal in the UK and elsewhere, doesn’t there exist the opportunity for a class action by all those who’ve been affected over the years?
The very fact that it’s been happening in one way or another for decades doesn’t preclude our right to say “Stop!” at some time. Better late than never, surely.
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Chris mentions a number of reasons in favour of a re-engineered workfare. One of the key ones is ensuring that the unemployed don’t become isolated – that those who might become unemployed don’t fear it as much; that anyone who faces the prospect will feel their networks won’t collapse around them:
2. In getting the unemployed out into society, it would increase their circle of friends and acquaintances. This might help them get back into private sector work, not only by encouraging work habits and skills, but also by widening the social networks (pdf) through which people learn of job opportunities. In this regard, workfare might be a better alternative to the numerous courses offered to jobseekers in how to find work.
Surely, however, the problem isn’t exactly as described. The fact of the matter is that, since time immemorial, social networks have been tools for achieving competitive exclusion much more than enveloping environments designed to share out the easy pickings broadly.
Networking – and networks – only carry out the function attributed to them because they create pyramids of hierarchical worth where, in a puzzling flux, the many aggregate around the few in the hope of occasionally getting a few breadcrumbs of recognition – and perhaps even paid work.
Most of the time, however, these highly structured relationships, which people tend to think the unemployed miss out on, generate just as many unpaid opportunities in the hope of something better as workfare of any kind ever did.
Maybe workfare is just the state’s equivalent – its construct if you like – of what private sector and self-employed individuals desperately spend most of their time struggling with: unpaid overtime in the hope of distant promotion; wining and dining in the hope of distant contracts. And the reason we have workfare, even where it may be illegal, is because – in a reasonably illegal (or at least immoral) way too – the private sector has, over time, had to become accustomed to playing the same unremunerated games.
After all, the state and the private sector are often mirrors of each other: closer in what and how they do the stuff they do than detractors of either would care to admit.
Work Your Proper Hours Day (24 Feb 2012) is the day when the average person who does unpaid overtime finishes the unpaid days they do every year, and starts earning for themselves. We think that’s a day worth celebrating.
Over five million people at work in the UK regularly do unpaid overtime, giving their employers £29.2 billion of free work last year alone. If you’re one, why not take some time to reflect on how well (or badly) you’re balancing your life? This is one day in the year to make the most of your own time. Take a proper lunchbreak and leave work on time to enjoy your Friday evening – You deserve it!
I think it jolly well is – and should, equally, make us reflect.
Networks aren’t the solution: they’re the problem.
There’s been much movement on Twitter and other social media over the past couple of days as Tesco and other companies have admitted to using workfare (more here). To be fair to Tesco, public outrage does seem to have had an impact as it is now asking the government to ensure any such schemes become entirely voluntary. But voluntary is as voluntary does. And the principle of workfare, once established, may quite easily continue to be used against the vulnerable and unemployed in our society – whether, in principle, it is considered voluntary or not.
It would seem, therefore, that slavery – of a kind – is returning to our shores. Which makes the website Slavery Footprint evermore relevant. Take the test and compare your result. For my standard of living, for the gadgets I’ve bought, for the few clothes and shoes I own, they calculate that at least forty people across this 21st century world are currently working in conditions of slavery. That is to say, I inhabit the society I do – as I do – because forty other people find themselves existing in a living hell on earth.
Which brings me to my final point tonight. Do you remember the story last year about the supermarket bullies and how they were driving farmers and suppliers out of business through abuse of their monopolistic positions? Well, it did occur to me this morning that what we really need is yet another piece of ethical and informative labelling on our food products.
No. Not more data telling us how everything we like is bad for us. Rather, a percentage indication of how much of the final cost to the consumer went to the farmers and suppliers. This would then allow us to determine – in a Fair Trade-like kind of way – where we would be best leaving our hard-earned cash on that inevitably weekly shop.
If slavery – of a kind – must return to our shores in this and other ways, at least let us fight back with the best tool we have to hand: a free and just flow of consumer information for the benefit of the whole supply chain which finds itself supposedly at our service.
In fact, it does also occur to me – in the light of the recent workfare stories – that we might have to add yet another piece of labelling to our already overloaded products and services: the differential paid by the company in question between its lowest and highest-remunerated personnel.
