A terrific defeat for Workfare

Cait Reilly, a hero to anyone that values their own labour rights.

On February 12 2013 the DWP and the Tory led coalition government suffered a terrific defeat at the Court of Appeal as their Workfare (mandatory unpaid labour) schemes were declared illegal.

The case was brought to appeal by 24 year old geology graduate Cait Reilly and 40 unemployed HGV driver Jamie Wilson who claimed that mandatory placements on Workfare schemes breached laws banning slavery and forced labour.

Cait Reilly had been forced to stack shelves at Poundland for no pay under threat of sanctions, what made this worse is that she had to give up the voluntary work she had been doing on her own initiative, in order to boost profits for the US based private equity group Warburg Pincus, the owners of the Poundland chain.

Jamie Wilson was thrown into destitution after his benefits were stopped when he refused to take part in a mandatory labour scheme that would have meant working without wages, 30 hours a week for six months.

I have been a longstanding critic of these schemes from two perspectives:

Immorality: In my judgement (and now the judgement of the law too) these schemes are utterly immoral because compelling people to work without wages or labour rights undermines the statutory minimum wage, endangers our hard-won labour rights and is frighteningly close to the concept of slavery. ("Mandatory unpaid labour" would seem to be a pretty good definition of the word slavery).

Economic illiteracy: Forcing people to work for no wages is an example of economic illiteracy because it completely ignores the concept of aggregate demand. The whole foundation of the capitalist system is that workers have wages to spend, if they don't have any wages they can't afford to buy the capitalist output. This is the reason that Henry Ford famously priced his cars cheaply enough that his workers could afford to buy them. Yes, productivity would be increased through the government supplying a steady supply of wageless, rightless workers to boost the profitability of corporate interests, however the loss in aggregate demand as these companies lay off/stop hiring paid workers in favour of unpaid rightless workers would more than cancel out these increases in corporate productivity, especially if the involved company is also an industrial scale tax-dodger too.

The Court of Appeals ruling leaves the government's malicious work-for-your benefits corporate welfare schemes in ruins. If they can no longer force people to work for free (at places like Poundland, Argos, Marriot Hotels, Weatherspoons, Tesco, Topman, Topshop, Serco...)  these companies will have to turn back to the traditional model of actually paying people for their labour, rather than relying on free-labour handouts from the state.

The legal team representing the pair stated that this ruling should mean that anyone that has had their benefits stopped for refusing to take part in these mandatory unpaid labour schemes should be able to claim back their benefits.

I'm delighted that the judges at the Court of Appeals finally saw sense and wrote the death warrant for these immoral and economically illiterate corporate welfare schemes. Given the massive scale assaults on our rights and liberties by the establishment, it is always a pleasant surprise when organs of the establishment decide to "piss on the bonfire" that the government have been making out of our rights and liberties.

I would also like to congratulate Cait Reilly and Jamie Wilson for standing up against the might of the DWP and the coalition government and winning. Not only did they face down the power of the state, they also had to deal with a chorus of malicious headlines in the right-wing press lambasting them as "workshy scroungers". In my view they are nothing of the sort. Boosting corporate profits (for wages or for none) is not the only definition of work. By bringing this case and fighting it all the way to the Court of Appeal these two brave individuals have worked extremely hard to protect our hard-won labour rights and prevent the government from deliberately undermining the statutory minimum wage.

I believe that Cait and Jamie are now owed a debt of gratitude, not only by the many thousands of people that were cruelly sanctioned into destitution for refusing to, or being unable to, participate in these mandatory unpaid labour schemes, but also by all of us that value our hard-won labour rights and believe that corporations must be made to pay at least the statutory minimum wage in return for our labour.

NOTE: I don't just complain about the government's unemployment strategies, I have also drawn up a number of proposed reforms to the system, which you can read in my article explaining the 

"Back to Work" Jobs Guarantee.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE   

The Back to Work Jobs Guarantee 
  
   A letter to fans of Workfare
  
A coalition of LTBs
    
The Atos "disability denial factory"
 
Gaming the Work Programme
    
Iain Duncan Smith's callous contempt for the dead 
    
  "Lord" Freud: Risks, corpses and slums
  
The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"