There appears to be two different argument that the tories use to justify workfare, switching from one argument when it is shown to be discredited to the other and back again.
The first argument is that the the unemployed should give something back to society as payment for the benefits that they receive. The second argument is that by doing workfare they maintain skills that are useful for a future employer.
For the first argument, if an unemployed person is doing something that is worthwhile, and worth doing, or a role that is normally a job that someone is paid to do then surely they should be paid to do that job. If poundland needs the job done then they should pay someone to do it, or if they can’t afford to then what is the tax payer doing subsidizing a failed business.
For the second argument, if it was actually the case that the placements were in positions that were appropriate to help enhance the skills of the person in question there might be an argument for it. Still wrong but it certainly would make a lot more sense than the large number of placements doing dead end jobs in retail multinationals like Tescos, Asda, Sainsburys etc.. To pull an unemployed Geology graduate out of a volunteer role in a museum which helps maintain her skills and force her into a job stacking shelves at Asda is madness.
What is the point in going to University and racking up all that debt if the result is a minimum wage job where there is little scope for career progression. Most of the workfare roles can be done by someone who left school at 16 without any qualifications. There is no point in making the UK a high skills society if there are no high skilled jobs for graduates to progress into. I thought the tory solution was to create a dynamic high skill economy, but instead we’ve got a low skill economy with high skilled graduates. We then force the graduates to do unpaid work in roles that should be paid position performed by the unskilled. We don’t have a shortage of unskilled unemployed people.
The whole system is perverse. Students are encouraged to study technical subjects like engineering, mathematics, and science because these are believed to be the skills the country needs to have a productive economy. But apart from the some of the mathematics graduates who end up working in the City, studying any of these subjects is pointless when the only jobs the economy is generating is casual, part time minimum wage jobs in retail. Because of the lack of ambition of successive governments the government is now actively destroying the ambition of the youth of today.
The reason the tories keep repeating these arguments is because they need to hide the fact that it is their policies that are destroying large number of jobs and the unemployed are the easiest scapegoat.
