Workfare: you win some you lose some

The court declared that the Department of Work & Pension’s workfare scheme was unlawful, because it was not being operated as described.

Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Mark Hoban, Esther McVey – every Minister involved has claimed that there is no question of JSA claimants being forced to work for commercial organisations against their will by having their benefits sanctioned if they refuse a placement.

This was evidently not true – many people sent on workfare said it was not true, though only Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson so far have been brave enough to take the DWP to court.

The court decision yesterday proved the Ministerial and DWP claims untrue and therefore unlawful, and yet the Department of Work and Pensions claim they won (and also said they were going to ignore the court’s decision to deny them leave to appeal).

Another question that should be asked is: can it be shown that Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Mark Hoban, or Esther McVey, have misled Parliament in giving evidence that has now been proved untrue?

So if the court found what they were doing to be unlawful, how could they have “won”? [As we find out in March: because they intend to pass legislation to make their unlawful actions retrospectively lawful.]

A day’s work for a day’s pay

The Department of Work and Pensions say

“We will be contesting these cases vigorously. These schemes are not slave labour. They play an important part in giving jobseekers the skills and experience they need to find work. It is entirely reasonable to ask jobseekers to take real steps towards finding work if they are claiming benefits.”

Jamieson Wilson, 40, is a mechanic. He has been unemployed (according to the AP story) since 2008. His Job Centre decided that the entirely reasonable way of “helping” him with the skills and experience he would need was to spend six months doing 30 hours a week unpaid work … cleaning furniture.

Cait Reilly, 23, is a geology graduate who had arranged voluntary work for herself in a local museum. She had been signing on since August 2010. Her local Job Centre had not expressed any criticism of her efforts to find paid work, helpful or otherwise, but in January decided to “help” her with two weeks unpaid work, five hours a day, sweeping floors, cleaning shelves, and stacking goods for sale, at the Poundland near where she lived.