"New Deal" placements
What are they and how are they operated?
At the heart of New Deal, placements have some of the characteristics of conventional jobs, but there are some very clear differences.
Pay
In a conventional job, the employer pays the employee a wage or salary while the government (unless it is also the employer) simply collects the taxes. The contract that the employee enters into with the employer carries many implied legal protections according to the laws of the nation in which the job exists (and, in some cases, let's not forget the European Union), as well as those duties outlined or implied in the contract. While employees sometimes have grievances about their situation, they nevertheless have the choice of whether to sign the original contract or not and they also usually have the option of terminating the contract within a reasonable notice period (usually one month). Furthermore, because employers pay for the services of their employees, there is some incentive for them to treat those employees with respect. It doesn't always work like that but those employers who treat me with respect invariably get more out of me than those who ignore me or treat me with contempt. Those bosses who indulge in Bullying are the worst of the lot.
Unemployed people in Britain (including criminals who have been released from prison after serving their sentences) are sometimes told to go on placements. These last for six months for those under fifty and for three months for those over fifty. (I don't know what the length is for somebody whose fiftieth birthday occurs during a placement.) Upon reaching sixty, people are given pension credits and no longer classified as unemployed, giving them exemption from New Deal.
In a placement a placement agency, acting on behalf of and paid by the government, actually pays the employer (I've heard quoted a figure of 47 pounds per week, plus a one-off payment of 200 pounds up-front, but I can't corroborate these figures) to use the services of the unemployed person, who is in turn paid more money than they would normally get on unemployment benefit. However, that extra amount is modest (a little over fifteen pounds per week) and doesn't necessarily even cover the extra costs incurred (if one were to buy takeaway food, for example) even apart from travel costs, which are payable separately but always subject to a fixed deduction of four pounds per week although nobody knows why. This fixed deduction means that I choose to walk to the placement, even if it takes me an hour, rather than get a bus. It is yet another illustration of how a placement differs from a conventional job, where I wouldn't get any expenses but I would be paid enough to easily pay for the bus fares out of my salary without worrying about the cost.
No choice
So it is that in a conventional job situation, the employer and employee reach a mutual agreement before contracts are signed. In a placement, the employer can refuse to take an unemployed person, but the unemployed person has no real choice. The placement agency can take the unemployed person's feelings into account but if there is nothing suitable, the unemployed person ends up being forced to take an unsuitable placement or have their benefit cut. I've never got as far as finding out what this threat actually means exactly but I'm not planning to push it to the limit. I don't see any point in dying for the cause. I may have to apply for hardship payments, but I can't find much information on the internet about them. Perhaps the government feels that if such information became widely known, some people would opt for them just to be rid of the aggravation. Even though I have no wish to test the system for myself, I'd like to know more about hardship payments to give myself and others a better understanding of the system.
While some employers (usually those who only have one placement vacancy) are fussy about who they give placements to, others are not because even taking unsuitable people earns them money. Given all that, it is no surprise to find that unemployed people are put on placements to which they are ill suited. Furthermore (and whether they can do the work or not), they are sometimes expected to work in the most appalling conditions. We're not talking about a third world country here, we're talking about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, once the ruler of the largest empire in history and still one of the richest nations on Planet Earth.
The placement agency ultimately doesn't care whether unemployed people are given placements relevant to their abilities just as long as they are sent on placements somewhere, otherwise the placement agency won't get their commission. And because unemployed people have no choice, there is no incentive for the placement agency to look for better quality placements. It's back to the old Stereotypes, so on that basis unemployed people don't deserve any better. Unfortunately, if people aren't given suitable placements, they don't derive any benefit from them and the whole system may actually hamper their chances of finding proper jobs, as my own case shows.
Sexism in reverse - alive and well
Since most placements involve manual labour and since, in general (but not in all cases), men are better able to do these jobs than women, I used to wonder if any available office placements were mainly allocated to unemployed women. Eventually, I asked somebody at the placement agency if women were more likely to get office placements than men. Now, this man was more sympathetic to my cause than a lot of the people I've had to deal with, but his response was unequivocal. He said that women are better at multi-tasking than men, so of course they're going to be given the available office placements. He didn't mention physical strength, but I'm sure that's also a factor. So that's two stereotypes that I have to overcome to get an office placement - physical ability and multi-tasking ability. I'm certainly not saying that women should be expected to carry out tasks they can't do (they shouldn't) but I know from experience that some women are better suited to manual labouring than I am. It seems that while most people accept that a lot of women aren't suited to such work, far fewer people recognise that able-bodied men aren't always suited to manual work either.
Fiddling statistics
Placements are mostly low-grade manual jobs, many of which the government encourage charities to set up for the express purpose of keeping unemployed people busy while providing extra income for the charities. This enables the government to fiddle the official unemployment statistics (because people on New Deal placements don't count as unemployed) while also claiming that they are giving large sums of money to charities. See my page Lies, big lies and statistics for more on the subject.
If the work created can be counted another way (such as helping to save Planet Earth), they'll count that too. So during my period at a waste-recycling centre, I was not included in the official unemployment statistics, while the government counted the money both as a charity donation and as environmental spending to save Planet Earth.
Although I only had to do this for three months and younger people only do it for six months (after which we again count as unemployed), there were plenty of others waiting, many unwillingly, to take their turn. (First-timers are usually willing to give it a try, as I was on my first placement.)
Now we have Flexible New Deal instead, and I wait in trepidation to see what this brings me.
Contracts to placement agencies
It appears that the government awards contracts to whichever placement agency offers to provide New Deal services the most cheaply in each area, not taking customer complaints into consideration. This confirms what I've long thought - that unemployed people are unimportant to the government. Perhaps they forget that such people also have votes, but in any case they aren't going to take much notice of any adverse OFSTED report, even if they get one. Actually, I suspect that OFSTED aren't expected to look too closely.
From an article on demoralising jobless training courses, it appears that people in some parts of the country have an even worse time than I do in Leicester. And I'm certainly not looking forward to Flexible New Deal. Whatever the intentions, it will just be another fiasco.
Watchdog
OFSTED is the official government watchdog that supposedly checks up on the placement agency and all its competitors. Its main job is to check up on schools, colleges and universities, but they occasionally say something about New Deal.
Charities
Some of the work created by the charities in collaboration with the government would not be commercially viable and the charities would have to shut down those operations if New Deal were abolished. You can therefore assume that charities, now so heavily dependent on these schemes for funding, will be among the strongest opponents to such abolition. Those schemes that would be commercially viable in any event presumably undercut genuine employers, so reducing the number of bona-fide jobs that those employers have to offer.
Because placements are often given to people unsuited to them, good employers are mostly not interested in the system. As I've already explained, most placements are with charities, sometimes called voluntary organizations, that can never get enough funding or genuine volunteers to satisfy their insatiable desires, but there's nothing either voluntary or charitable about the system from the perspective of unemployed people forced into what is really just a slave labour scheme. Yes, folks, placements are purely and simply a slave labour scheme designed as punishment for being unemployed; see my page Slaves and criminals for more on the subject. It's easy to see why good employers rarely bother with placements. If they have a vacancy, they want to be reasonably sure that they'll hire somebody who can do the job. This is particularly important where temporary jobs are concerned, since even if an employer is prepared to spend money on staff training, it only makes sense to do so with permanent staff.
My experience shows that employers are taking a huge gamble if they go for a placement. While conventional recruitment agencies, paid for their services by employers, have a vested interest in finding suitable staff for their clients, a placement agency paid by the government has different masters and, consequently, different priorities. A placement agency offers unemployed people the chance to find their own placements but I figure that if employers think that I'm worth it, they'll employ me anyway and in any case I wouldn't know how to look for a placement and the placement agency didn't offer advice on the matter. Having seen what I've already seen, if I learn about an employer who takes people on placements, I'd have serious doubts about their credibility as an employer. That won't necessarily stop me from taking a job with such an employer, but if I know before I apply that they take placements, I doubt if I'd apply in the first place. On that basis, I'll never voluntarily apply for a proper job with any charity.
Holidays
In Britain, there is a legally enforceable minimum requirement for holiday entitlements that applies to conventional jobs. The rules cater for part-time workers as well as explaining that the total includes public holidays such as Christmas Day.
On placements, the rules are very different. Public holidays are allowed, together with any other days where the workplace is shut down (even this crazy government can't force unemployed people to work when the regular staff aren't working) but otherwise no holidays are allowed. Unemployed people have to ask permission for any other activities including job interviews, sorting out housing issues or whatever and that permission may be refused. Why don't they allow (say) 5 days for a three month placement or 10 days for a six month placement? The rules are clearly set out this way because the government regards unemployed people with contempt. Even if they can't trust the individuals to ask for their holidays for legitimate reasons, they ought to be able to trust the employers.
If holiday entitlements were allowed, we'd expect to have to include job interviews within that allocation. On that basis, it would be reasonable for an employer to refuse permission for an unemployed person to use up their holiday entitlements too quickly, but that would be less of a problem than the current system, in which any request for a day off can be refused. It is therefore ironic that on the only occasion that I needed a discretionary day off, I needed it at such short notice that I simply telephoned to say I wouldn't be in, leaving the message on an answering machine. Fortunately, my explanation was accepted but if there had been any dispute, I would have opened my e-mail account and / or got supporting evidence from other people.
You can get the sack
Yes, this is one aspect of placements that doesn't differ from jobs. You're unlikely to be sacked for poor performance, especially if you're obviously unsuited to the job and you were given the placement despite the employer knowing that fact, but you can be sacked for misconduct of various types. If so, your benefits will be affected.
A good idea in theory
Being willing to try anything once if I think there's a chance that it might be worthwhile, I was originally keen to try New Deal. I didn't know much about it, but at that stage I saw no point in spending three months in an office. The idea behind New Deal seemed to be to give unemployed people a chance to explore other careers that they could not otherwise explore. I knew that I couldn't work fast enough to keep up with a standard production line as I explain in Career options in factories and warehouses. I also knew that I couldn't lift heavy weights. So I wasn't really sure what to try but I suggested light warehousing work, if it existed. I was actually sent to a flat-pack furniture assembly factory, which wasn't what I asked for and which I was completely unsuited to. Nevertheless, I somehow survived the three months and vowed that, if I had my way, I'd never do New Deal again unless I could be very clear about what sort of placement I'd be on. Of course, I was eventually forced back on to New Deal when it became compulsory for all unemployed people under sixty. By this time, I'd firmly established in my mind that I could only be effective in a desk job so I made it very clear that this was what I wanted. I knew that such a placement wouldn't be likely to do me any good but at least I would be in a familiar environment where I wouldn't be a complete embarrassment and wouldn't come to any harm. It shows how little I thought of New Deal by then that this was the height of my expectations. I didn't get such a placement. I was constantly threatened with a return to the flat-pack furniture assembly factory, where they apparently made it clear that such a return wouldn't do them or me any good, but they'd still take me if they were asked to.
I eventually ended up working in a condemned shed at a waste-recycling centre. I wasn't pleased with this although at the time (not having been told about the impending relocation of the operation to a former farm near Ragdale, a village located a few miles away), I decided that it couldn't be any worse than the flat-pack furniture assembly factory. It was much worse as I explain in my page devoted to Waste recycling.
Disease and injury
Sick days are allowed and, as I discovered, often caused by disease or injury directly resulting from either appalling working conditions or unsuitable work or both. My health record as an adult is excellent; indeed, I think that a doctor in Swindon who I last saw circa 1970 (about an in-grown toe-nail) still has my registration as I've never seen any need to register with a local doctor anywhere that I've moved to since. Sure, I've suffered from colds occasionally but who hasn't? While on contract in Spennymoor in 1986, I got a bad cold and the landlady registered me temporarily with a doctor up there, but I wouldn't have bothered if left to my own devices. But I don't get many bad colds. However, I knew I definitely would get one at the waste-recycling centre due to the appalling conditions.
It took me less than three weeks to do so while working in a shed condemned more than two years previously, with almost no heating, poor lighting and a pair of wide front doors that were permanently open during working hours. In a bitterly cold winter spell, several layers of clothing couldn't keep me warm as I shivered while feeding paper through the shredder. I was particularly vulnerable as my job involved little physical activity (and remember, that's why I was doing it). We know that the way to keep warm outdoors is to keep moving. The condemned shed was at outdoor temperatures although I was protected from any wind and rain. Other people's jobs involved moving heavy stuff around and they were therefore more resistant to disease. If I'd done those jobs instead of shredding paper, I think I'd have acquired some kind of injury that would keep me off work for longer than the nasty cold did. As it was, I only took one day off sick but I wasn't really in any condition to work for about three weeks.
After the placement, the letter
Upon completion of a placement, one inevitably receives a letter offering follow-up advice. Here's the text of the letter I received in March 2008, with the telephone number and the sender's name removed.
Make sure employers know just how much you have to offer
Dear Mr Harris
If you're 50, or over, then you'll have gained a lot of skills and experience. We can help you highlight these skills to employers - even if you've been out of work for a while.
We'll help you find a job that suits you
Just arrange an interview with one of our specially trained Jobcentre Plus advisors. Your advisor will take the time to find out what skills and experience you have and where your personal strengths lie. Then they'll match you up with the jobs that are most relevant to you.
Hundreds of jobs in your local area
Jobcentre Plus has hundreds of jobs across a range of sectors in your area, which means we could have something that's just right for you. What's more, your advisor can tell you how to apply for jobs and how to present yourself to employers in the most positive way.
Extra help if you need it
Should you need extra support, our advisors can help you find it. They'll tell you who can help if you have health concerns, or if you need to develop new skills. If you wish to consider other options, such as volunteering, or self-employment, they can help with that too.
Call today
With our help, you can put all of your wisdom and experience back to work and make a real difference. Call [...] now to arrange a personal interview with one of our personal advisors. Lines are open 9am - 5pm, Monday - Friday.
Yours sincerely,
[...]
Of course, if it were really like that, I would be very happy. Sadly, it isn't, as you might guess from my page about Career advice. I learned no new skills. Their advisors are inadequately trained. They won't take the time necessary to find out what skills and experience I have and where my personal strengths lie, whether because of inadequate training or inadequate staffing levels or both. Advisors can tell me how to apply for jobs and how to present myself to employers in the most positive way, but it's about all they can do and I don't need constant reminders. As for the "Yours sincerely" sign-off, there was nothing sincere about this letter. So I didn't call [...] because it would have been a waste of time. Actually, I am required to see advisors at periodic intervals anyway, so I can't escape from their so-called advice.
An idea
If unemployed people must do some kind of work in return for their benefit payments, there is a more sensible way of doing it. Instead of a full time placement, let's just have one day a week, every week, year round except during the Christmas period. It would still allow unemployed people to do their training, job hunting and all the basic functions of life.
The government wouldn't like such an idea because people would remain on the official unemployment statistics for the duration of their time on unemployment benefit. Never mind that some of those people would find it easier to re-train, thereby making it more likely that they find gainful employment. But if the scheme were introduced, those that show no interest in re-training could be made to work for two days a week instead of one.
Frank Field
I like these responses to Frank Field's proposal to scrap New Deal.
The answer is to put a group of incognito politicians or journalists through this country's unemployment system and pathetic training programmes which defraud the taxpayer. Only the people who have experienced it know how bad the schemes are.
The New Deal has seen youth unemployment rise by 20% and the true number of unemployed is probably even greater as numbers disappear from the official count after being drafted onto dead end work experience schemes. The New Deal is a revolving door into perpetual poverty, it should now be scrapped.
Sadly, most of the other responses are based on ignorance. I wonder what will happen if Andy from London becomes redundant and fails to find work again quickly? Will he still utter these words?
The answer is disagreeable but simple - abolish state hand outs - all of them: jobseeker's allowance, income support, the whole lot. This is the fourth strongest economy in the world. You can find work if you want to.
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