http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21490542

I'm getting pretty sick of this 'workshy' BS

It was never true in her case anyway, she was working for noting in a museum, so they sent her off to work for nothing for Poundland instead. By what insane version of reality is this 'better'?

Make it a mandatory condition of being an MP. Five years shelf stacking should make you much more qualified to be an MP.

When I was at college, I used to work in Tesco filling shelves on the late shift (18:00 to 22:00, which in the 80s, when shops closed at 17:00 was late! ) and one of the other people working there was a chartered accountant, his business wasn't running too well at the time and he supplemented his income by stacking shelves.

Yes but that was as a student. If you had already done shelf stacking to help get you through college should you have to do more unpaid shelf stacking to teach you about daily work? It might be relevant for someone who has never worked but for someone who as lost their job it seems like profiteering at the expense of the state who still has to provide minimum subsistence income all while the company benefits substantially.

I am firmly of the opinion that if you are doing a job, you should get paid. There is a big difference between the amount you get from the Job Centre and how much you'd get if you were an employee stacking shelves. Even if you were working for a company on a trial basis, your take home pay would be far greater that if you were out of work. As far as this kind of job placement is concerned, I would expect the person on the placement to be paid in line with the other employees, or certainly get their "on trial" rate.

To argue contrary to that, you are arguing for a revolving door of free labour which takes the place of actually having to employ someone, train them and ensure they stay loyal to the firm.

This also brings us to the thorny issue of internships. Many of those are unpaid and unless you have a family rich enough to fund you through your internship you are excluded from many of the top jobs. Then you hear of people doing numerous internships and still no full time job.

I believe unpaid internships were also recently ruled to be illegal.

The fundamental point is this : If you are doing a job someone else would get paid for, you should get paid just as much to do it. If you want the unemployed to contribute back to society in kind for their benefits, get them doing something that benefits society. Stacking shelves in Tescos definitely does not contribute to society in any meaningful way, only to the bottom line of Tescos as a corporation. I'd saying working in a museum or library (such as there are left) would be much more of a contribution to all of us as a whole. And I as an intelligent adult find the notion that someone could somehow learn some great insight into the working world by doing a boring menial job for less money than the laws of the country state is reasonable wage to do so to be incredibly insulting.

Many of the people on these schemes have already worked for years but have been made redundant through no fault of their own. Many others are graduates whose education includes aspects such as working to deadlines or in groups and frankly know more about working to achieve a goal than the managers of the shops they are forced to work in. let alone the staff around them. The idea that they somehow gain anything from this tedious busywork is bordering on idiocy, only beaten by the idiocy of people who believe it when they're told it by the likes of IDS.

Agree that IDS is an idiot.

This person was probably learning more and being useful more in their own environment. A geologist in a natural museum makes sense. A geologist in a supermarket stackin shelves does not. I hated this idea of "back to work" schemes and agree the pay should reflect the job.

Jobseekers allowance is around £100/wk. Minimum wage is around £6/hr. That woman should have done no more than 16(ish) hours work a week which is around 2 days. From the sounds of things, she was working full time.

I was talking about the chartered accountant, who didn't find it was beneath him to go shelf filling after spending a day in the office...

It is the attitude, that shelf filling etc. is "beneath one," because they have been trained for something "better". Get over it! Work is work, money is money.

Whether it is exploitation and slave labour, when they are forced to do it to continue to receive their benefits is another matter.

It's not the case though is it? Because they're not actually getting any money for doing it. In fact some of them are actually out of pocket, because they get the same benefits but have to pay for transport to their 'placement'. All so they can learn that some jobs are menial, tedious and repetitive. Wow, what a boon to society that is. And as for 'work being work', I suggest someone used to shelf stacking might struggle to do a week as a chartered accountant, much more so than vice versa as in your example. Not all work is equal, which is why not all work is equally paid. And even on the pure terms of the case in question, why is it better for her to be working in Poundland than volunteering in a museum? 'well done for taking some initiative and finding a useful way to spend your time while looking for employment. Now stop doing that and go do this sh!t job or starve'. What a wonderful message to send.


Er... that's what a lot of them have been told (even though it's not true). One of the factors in the student winning the recent case is she was never told she had the right to refuse.

The scheme is not based around sound logic, nor are the justification they put out for it valid. It is a simple act of ideology, based around an ingrained hatred of the 'feckless poor', when in this case the girl sounds like she was anything but feckless.

Yes but the chartered accountant doing it as a way of making additional money. That was his choice. It also can be less stressful than accountancy. When I was an accountant I used to do bar work as well, apart from the extra money it was a way of socialising and getting paid. I think that such workfare should only really apply to those who have never worked. Most would be quite happy to do some shelf stacking or other job if they could.

This is what the Tories want to do with the unemployed. I believe it's certainly their model. When John Major banged on about returning to "Victorian Values. We all laughed and japed about men being able to visit prostitutes on the "bettering society" excuse and shoving kids up chimneys.

In hind sight, the notion of the workhouse was clearly something which was missed. And yet here we are. IDS had implemented the workhouse ethic.

So is it better to let someone claim a benefit with no intention of getting a job or encourage and give them some knowledge of what work is about and get something on a cv. And thus increase their employability.
Does the state have a right to expect you to do something for the money it gives you?

Do you actually think someone who already has a degree has 'no knowledge about what work is about'? What about the people I referenced earlier, who had long previous employment records anyway but found themselves unemployed in the current recession?
Do you actually believe somebody with a degree would see any benefit at all from having 'Stacked shelves In Tescos for three weeks' on their CV? More than the qualifications they've needed to get to university and the fact that they then stuck at a complex difficult task for three whole years and came out with something at the end of it?
Do you actually think an employer would think better of something useless that they have been forced to do (this scheme) rather than something they got off their arse and did themselves (volunteering in a museum, which is what the girl in question had to give up doing to go stack shelves)?

'Yes miss Jones, we know you've got a degree and have shown initiative with your voluntary work but we can't possibly employ you unless you've also spent a short time doing a task a chimp could be trained to do while being paid a pittance'.

if it was targeted at a specific demographic - people who had left school at 16 and never done a day's work since - then fair enough, the reasoning you suggest might pass. But it isn't targeted as the case in question shows. People are put on it for whome it is of no benefit at all. Why? because in fact it's not about the things you suggest anyway, it's a stunt by a government that feels it has to be seen to be tough on 'shirkers' to appease it's core voter demographic even though it has no clue how to actually improve the unemployment problem in the UK and probably wouldn't care even if did.

Good grief. If a platitude that doesn't even bear a moment's analysis is the best defense of this scheme people can come up with, that alone is damning enough.


Absolutely. How does stacking shelves in Tescos while the state still pays you the same money it would have paid you anyway accomplish that? I'm all for the unemployed being put to productive use but I don't see how the current scheme at all helps the people who are actually paying for the benefits in the first place. How does ever so slightly reducing Tescos labour costs benefit me as a taxpayer?

If they had a three week placement doing a decent job for a decent pay, that might show them that work has value, that work is better than being on the dole, that work is intrinsically good. But they aren't getting any of that. They're getting shoved into an awful job that nobody else wants to do for (effectively) no pay at all. How is that supposed to make them want to change?