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Workfare is a government scheme to force people into unpaid work. Recently the Archbishop of York made clear that this scheme is immoral, that it should be stopped and that employers should not join the scheme. There are powerful objections to workfare - both economic and moral and it is worth examining them.
The economic objection to workfare is that it damages the effectiveness of the labour market. When governments force people to provide free work for particular employers they both distort the supply of labour and the demand for labour. Or, to put the matter more simply, when governments force geologists to stack shelves they both stop the geologist from finding the best use of their skills whilst taking a paid job away from the person who had been previously stacking shelves.
Workfare is an inefficient and self-defeating policy and it is disturbing to see the UK's Conservative-Liberal government embracing one of the most disastrous economic policies of communism.
Workfare is not only bad economics it is morally wrong. Workfare is a modern form of slavery. This may seem an extreme statement, for we tend to associate slavery with racial oppression, when black people were forced to work for white farmers. But slavery is not always racial and it is not always achieved by violence.
Often people have had to give themselves up to slavery simply to survive. Economic slavery has existed for thousands of years and it is still a common phenomenon today; for example in India many people live in this kind of debt-slavery.
Slavery is forced labour. It makes no difference whether that force is the fear of death by violence or the fear of death by starvation. Calling forced labour 'workfare' may make it sound better, but it is still slavery.
Even when slavery was common people knew it was wrong. The ancient Jewish law created a system of Jubilees to ensure that nobody would be forced to live in slavery for too long. In the Jewish calendar, every fifty years, all slaves would be freed and their original tribal property rights would be returned to them.
Slavery is also in conflict with the basic idea of fair exchange, or, as Christ puts it, "the workman is worthy of his meat" (Matthew 10:10). Fair exchange is free exchange. This is not the same as forcing someone into work. Slavery strips away the dignity of the person by taking away their freedom.
None of this means that it is not important to think about how we help people to find work. The great Jewish theologian Maimonides argues that the highest form of charity is to help someone find work or self-employment and put them beyond the need for charity. But he also makes clear that even the lowest form of charity is incompatible with slavery.
Instead of forcing people into unpaid work we need to design a benefits system that both guarantees us enough to live on and us all with natural incentives to work and save. This is a feasible and affordable reform that would help us make much better use of the freely given talents of all citizens.
Justice and slavery are not compatible. Dressing slavery up as a new kind of welfare reform will not help. Employers and citizens should support Boycott Workfare and stop pretending there is any justification for modernised slavery.
Follow Dr Simon Duffy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/simonjduffy
Workfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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People in some quarters feel it is some sort of human right that the government owes them a living, it does not but tries its best to educate, support healthy outcomes and point people in the right direction. Sadly, many could not care less and look to the State to handout but give nothing in return.
My dear friends those days are well and truely over so get over it - a Factoid.
Workfare is simply giving charity to the rich and exploiting the poor. No one would willing work full time at a boring souless uninteresting job for benefit money. Perhaps it will appeal to socialists who wish to sabotage companies by screwing them up. People getting no money are unlikely to give value for money or make an effort. But resentment can be a driving force. And anyone living in poverty would resent someone else receiving 100% profit from their hard work - so no hard work in their interests. Hard work against them yes.
In future initiatives graduates should regularly be given a dual 'work experience' quality systems role that offers a p/t temp supplementary task of reporting data to the particular work experience scheme's quality monitoring system.
The data gathered should be made transparent to employers and confidentiality terms put in place to assist employer confidence. But the identity of those tasked with this extra duty should NOT be revealed to employers in advance. Anonymous statistical quality data should be publicly accessible. If an employer does not meet standards re ~a pre-agreed training plan~ they should be given a reasonable opportunity to improve, or otherwise be politely dropped from any scheme.
Employers should be offered worthwhile growth incentives for worthwhile work experience plans. For instance a VAT discount on capital expenditure (vehicles, eqpt etc). at say £1.50 per scheme hour.
A standard calc should be made of a participant's global benefits figure and this equated to a number of hrs per week at national minimum rate. Any commitment they choose to make in work ~beyond~ those hours should be purely voluntary and optional. (taking into account any expenses incurred)
Those who are 'milking the benefit system' would be expected to redress that situation at times on substantial work experience (preferably working in govt funded areas, where value is returned to the nation and not some shoddy retail chain). Those, who receive small benefit would have less work experience commitments.
Which tells you all you need to know about IDS. Let's see that k******d work full time for BELOW MINIMUM WAGE. No, let's see him lose his job and his livelihood and then go on to job seeker's allowance, first.
M***n.
If we want real policy for change strip them of all their assets for a decade and pay them the minimum wage, see just how fast things change then.
You have omitted completely that these people "forced" to work for free are in receipt of many benefits; for job seekers/ unemployment/ redundancy aid.
It is not "slavery" because slaves do not receive any wage. Workfare employees are receiving their benefits in leau of working.
Many people (not all) who receive Job Seekers allowance, do not seek jobs, at all.
This scheme gives people experience to put on their CV. Stacking shelves looks better on a CV than "I just sat at home for 5 years pretending to look for jobs whilst the Government paid me tax payers money to do it".
You should not need the benefits system to be changed before you have the motivation to apply for a job. Being labelled as unemployed should be enough to do that.
Employers are forced by law to not sack or fire any current employees to make room for Workfare employees. Instead, it's directed towards new stores who don't already have a work force, or for stores who are expanding and need new workers.
Do not throw the word slavery around so easily because it still exists today and in those circumstances is still as bad as it "used to be". I'm sure the people who are still stuck in human trafficking and slavery would gladly take up a role at the local PoundSaver and receive a benefit from the Government until they can find a "proper job".
Can't work, or won't work?
Benefits is the cheapest form of crowd control you can buy, unless you want 80% of 2.5m having to either steal or die and take the elevated costs *of* that difficult decision in the form of much higher insurance premiums, hospital waiting times and costs, policing costs, legal costs and time, downgrading of crime as prisons become even more overstuffed, higher costs of prisons, etc... (and which would you choose between steal or die, if you were being honest? And if you had a family, too?!)
Even if not "slavery" it's some other form of damnable usurping of human rights as it's beneath minimum wage - or else, what is a minimum wage for work *for*?! It's also stoopidly demarcating the workforce (devaluing ALL jobs above one step down) and removes jobs *from* the economy, weakening an already ailing system. And it only benefiiiiiiits...? The predatory opportunistic unscrupulous company and their paid-off politician friends.
"Expansion" is still demarcation if it moves forward at less than a real minimum wage. Anyone could work that out, too.
Not every job is suitable for every candidate, but every candidate is suitable for some kind of work, so the work experience scheme should be tailored so that people who will benefit from a particular placement are sent on that placement. Failure to attend an appropriate work placement should result in reduced benefit.
Every employer can (and maybe should be forced to) give people an opporunity to have work experience relevant to their abilities.
NO employer should be allowed to simply keep replacing one 'work experience' person with another to the detriment of fully paid employees, so the system should ensure that there is a reasonable space between placements at one employer.