If you want to meet the most financially fragile work experience girl, then find the best-dressed woman on the floor. She is working a second-hand shift dress and a chignon bun, and is side-eyeing the posh intern; who has UGG trimmings for brains and wears denim to the office. The former girl's prickliness comes from sofa hopping and another week of daily, hour-long phone calls to her Jobcentre. One that is cutting her benefits as a penalty for self-reliance.
It was a time that came to mind when I read that Cait Reilly was required to drop her volunteering role in a museum, for £1.33 an hour at Poundland, with no extra salary. I never expected to rely on my Jobcentre, but their conditions for my independent efforts penalised my attempts to help myself.
"I'm afraid, Miss Woolley, if you are working in London we must class you as unavailable for work. And Jobseeker's Allowance will only fund placements supplied by your local Jobcentre."
So, tough luck if you believe in making your own opportunities. Local jobs in Ipswich were non-existent or beyond my skill set: boiler repair and work with vulnerable people.
Naively, I had announced my two-week work experience placement, with Penguin Press, to my benefits advisor. I expected, "Congratulations! It's Penguin. Mums love household names and you can drape yourself over the photocopier when Hari Kunzru appears. Since they're paying your travel expenses, let us help you with food money."
Naive indeed.
Inside Shell Mex House, my Jobcentre phone calls became a lunchtime ritual. Surely, it made more economic sense to back the work that was most likely to bust me out of the dole queue than ask me to wait on Ipswich's watch for hypothetical jobs.
In 2012, I was claiming Jobseeker's Allowance and wanted any work going and a chance to catch up to everyone in the graduate pool. I had spent 18 months recovering from a spinal fusion, pneumonia, and the death of my father. This loss had also cost us our family home and business. We were broke and I was not entitled to benefits during my recovery because I was a student, albeit on a year out for my health. Moving out of my mother's home would have helped my case, but I was living there because I still needed the care that is required when you have been unzipped from the neck down.
Cut to my first day at Penguin and my indomitable mentor - Maria Garbutt-Lucero - had trained me to use the relevant software, given me press releases to write, and taken me to see Nick Hornby. Everything was a joy, even when publicists handed me back press releases to ask me if I would, "kill the Helvetica and put this in Times New Roman, please".
Penguin's request that I stay for an extra week added to my Jobcentre's argument that I was unavailable for the treasures that East Anglia was about to spring upon me.
"Can I sign on in London? If you tell me there's work, I'll become available and come home."
Yet each Jobcentre employee I spoke with had a different answer when it came to the rules.
Some suggested that my whole claim was doomed, but most gave me nudge-nudge recommendations and advised that I declare a 'holiday.' But it was too short notice and I was terrified by the Department of Work and Pensions' 'abandon hope all ye who scrounge' campaigns.
Eventually there was some business involving a declaration of illness and a form named after an E number. A voice said, "It's just this once. You can't take another work experience placement." I had no idea what had taken place or if it was legitimate, but I had money in the bank.
"Don't do this again."
Translation: Next time, lie to us from the start.
Since then, Penguin has been the brightest star on my CV and I've been able to rent and work in London.
Read more from Sarah Woolley at xoJane.com
Follow Sarah Woolley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@Sarah_Woolley
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It's a scary thought that if my father were alive today, undergoing chemo, he would have to take work placements because of the new rules about life expectancy above 6 months. Which is of course barmy because it's often difficult to determine how long one has.
Presumably if a person can stretch out an arm and manages not to soil underwear too often then they are fit for employment! Annoyingly, around my neighbourhood several proven cheats who have been prosecuted in the recent past have had their benefits reinstated. The whole system is a shambles. No known local criminals or shirkers here have been asked to work for nothing. I know, I live amongst them! Part of the incentive and experience of working is that at the end of the week/month you have money!
The trouble is that workfare and many other schemes are too bureaucratic. Sure, they deal with most people but it's the people who are putting in a sincere and arduous effort to start a career or just get work whose circumstances will vary enormously and insight and imagination are necessary, not procedures.
I recently accompanied someone to a job centre looking for a post as a nurse. It was one of the most foreboding, miserable places to enter considering it's there to encourage people back to work. The last time I went to one, years ago for some National Insurance advice they were friendly and very helpful.
Not now. They have become an extension of IDS himself. Cold, indifferent, negative, misanthropic, their staff victims of the low morale IDS instills.
I noticed that employees were a lot more courteous if you had a 'proper' voice and looked 'respectable. I once asked a Jobcentre employee if she could stop talking to people there like rubbish, without eye contact. Because if she didn't like her job there, I would take it. Gladly.
It really does seem that the work schemes are in place for making deceptive numbers. The idea of addressing individual needs is completely lost.
On the bright side, one of the most useful services, when I was unemployed: The Citizen's Advice Bureau. Amazing, selfless people. I'm sure the government are scheming to cut them to shreds.
Go for your appointment,blag a bit then back to cash in hand work.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/figures-for-benefit-fraud-misleading-government-statistics-contradicted-1460573.html
Even when I had a sympathetic adviser, I was terrified that I would be 'caught' and the actual rules are so hard to come by. Even if you are internet savvy.
Poor you stuck in Suffolk with those carrot crunches, how did you ever cope?
I am from Suffolk, born just up the road from you and work in Singapore and still live in Suffolk.
I know, lucky me!!!
Hard work and not worrying about job centers and this good given right to the benefit society makes that happen.
Some times, we have to take the bull by the horns and get on with our lives even in the adversity that you were suffering, which i know about to a certain extent.
I lost my mother young.
Got smash up on a motorbike, therefore after two years and four ops later had to leave my first profession as a soldier in the Signals, that's communication's.
Seems us Suffolk types are stronger and more willing to get on with it and dare i say, never had to go to the bright lights of London to feel i had arrived.
Good luck, but really no need to be so condescending about Suffolk people, is there?
Suffolk people are polite hard working folk in the main who don't ask for much and don't feel that the world owes them a living.
One of my waitressing jobs ended with me arriving to work to find the pub had burned down :S
I would be interested if you could tell me where in the article I bad mouth Suffolk people? Or where I say that my way is the path everyone should take? London has given me job opportunites that allow me to look after my family. That feels like a miracle.
And I don't the world owes me a living. I think sometimes vulnerable people need to have money for food. And I see myself as a very deserving candidate given the effort I put into job hunting.
Fact: I have never turned down a job. In Suffolk or London.
Really good luck with writing the blog, i have no wish to be rude towards you.
Whilst reading i got the point that Suffolk did not hold what you needed to get on, fair point.
But when you answered another guys response to your original piece, you mentioned ''Soo Suffolk,'' like Suffolk will not go the extra yard to help you at the Job center but perhaps other centers do, or will.
I am lucky, i have not dealt with Job centers for a long time, however it sounded at time's whilst reading your piece, that the problem was with being in Suffolk and that London had all the answers, that was my point which i made very poorly i expect.
I am an engineer, not known for my English, but Maths i suppose, its a man thing.
Good luck with your job and writing here on the post.
Suffolk has helped me, so I don't feel that Suffolk was a problem. It's my community, but it's job centre in Ipswich is doing it's population a diservice.
Thanks for the good wishes!
When the system is so unhelpful to people who go out of their way to find opportunities for themselves, it's no wonder people actively lie to the JobCentre, which makes IDS hypocritically pushing graduates into dead-end workfare positions at Poundland to “earn” their benefits all the more galling.
Foor fair. So Suffolk.
I already had a few days’ work experience lined up when I signed on, and when I told them that they just seemed fairly incredulous that I had dared to ask for benefits while *ahem* "working" (I stress, this stint was unpaid) for a week. If I remember rightly they just told me I wasn't eligible for the allowance, and that I should sign on again when I'd finished.
Eventually I just stopped telling them what I was up to on the other two occasions I'd arranged work experience. To be fair to the majority of the staff at the Woodbridge JobCentre, I got the impression they knew what I was doing, and turned a blind eye because they a) realised how ridiculous the rules on independently finding work experience are, and b) consistently seemed pleasantly surprised that I was arranging a lot of interviews for myself (90% of which were outside of the gaping void of job opportunities that is south-east Suffolk) and could put together a decent CV without their help (again, tying in with the earlier comments about JobCentre staff having very little experience of the realities of job hunting themselves).
Round of applause, DWP!
I was "unemployed" for about 2 years (or I now know the term "underemployed"), but I took any job that came up, all short-term, minimum wage temp work.
So I'd get work for a few weeks, then back off to the job centre to re-apply for JSA. By the time they got round to organising my payments, I'd got another (short term, minimum wage) job again, and so didn't get any JSA. Or I'd get a job with not enough hours for a full time wage; a few shifts in a pub, a day or two a week at a garden centre.
Long and short of it is, I would've been financially better off not doing anything. I would've got more benefits and not had the costs of travel to work. I never actually received a penny of JSA in two years (tell a lie, I think I got about £40?).
When I first spoke to my Job Centre about internships they asked me what one was and just seemed amazed that I had a CV and was organising my own interviews.
I'm glad I did. Aside from anything, in the months I was claiming they didn't have anything to send my way. Which I don't mind. I just wish they would support people making an effort to get out there.
can encourage and support those who actually find any work they can. I would
suggest some kind of subsidy, or even a bonus for finding and taking a job.
People and companies would find ways of exploiting
this, but they already exploit benefit systems through inaction and low wages.
At least people would be putting some effort into something.
You’re right, they have such low expectations
of claimants that they seemed genuinely surprised that I had a CV and had clearly
been looking for work.
I had one job where I was commuting from London
to Brighton to do a soul destroying call-centre job (so bad that a guy that
started with me walked out after 2 hours, and the worst job I’ve ever had) for
a net wage of about £80 a week. If they’d even shown some recognition that I’d
taken the only job I could get, and gone well out of my way to find work, and
perhaps contributed to travel expenses or something, it would’ve felt worthwhile.
I know that if I lose my current job, I certainly wouldn’t rush to find work in
the way I did last time, because with the system as it is, there seems very little
point.