The Workfare slavery debate.

A lot has been written about the Tory obsession with making the unemployed "work for their benefits" under Workfare schemes. There are many valid criticisms of Workfare, here are 10 of the best.

• Many of these workfare placements described by the Tories as "valuable work-experience" involve nothing more than months of menial tasks like shelf stacking and floor sweeping with no real training at all.
• Many unemployed people have been forced to give up education, training or skilled work in the voluntary sector in order to stack shelves at places like Poundland on Workfare schemes.
• Future employers are hardly going to be more impressed by a period of mandatory unpaid menial labour at Poundland or Argos than by the use of initiative to undertake training or find skilled work in the voluntary sector.
• Early evidence shows that very few workfare trainees get taken on full time at the end of their mandatory period of unpaid work, often to be replaced by another mandatory Workfare placement.
• The provision of an unlimited supply of workfare labourers actually gives companies the incentive to sack their paid low-skilled employees, thus exacerbating the unemployment situation.
• The main beneficiaries of these workfare schemes are certainly not the unemployed, they are the corporations provided with free rightless labour at the taxpayers' expense.
• The other main beneficiaries are corporations like A4E, G4S, Serco and Atos who have landed lucrative government contracts to administer these schemes. Some of whom have engaged in fraud in order to soak up even more taxpayers' cash.
• Apprenticeships are already a proven system for providing "work experience", the £millions that have been poured into parasitic companies like A4E to administer workfare schemes would surely have been better spent funding apprenticeships with small and medium enterprises, with a view to providing long-term employment opportunities for skillful and dedicated youngsters.
• If the work is worth doing, then surely it is worth paying someone to do it.
• Mandatory unpaid labour schemes like Workfare can be seen as a deliberate attempt to undermine employment law and the minimum wage. Hardly surprising given the Tory contempt for the value of labour.

The problem is that many of these criticisms are completely overshadowed by allegations that Workfare is a form of slavery. The main problem with the allegation that Workfare is a form of slavery is that it gives Workfare apologists a point of attack. They can take the upper hand in the debate by feigning moral outrage that such "work for your benefits" schemes are nowhere near as harsh as the traditional forms of slavery; American cotton plantations, Japanese prisoner of war camps, Soviet Gulags or modern day sex-workers trafficked into Britain from Eastern Europe.

My position is that it is fair to compare Workfare schemes with slavery, after all "mandatory, unpaid labour" would seem to be a fitting description for both mandatory Workfare schemes and of the previous examples that are unquestionably considered to be slavery. The difference of course is in severity, Workfare victims are not treated as the legal property of the slave owners, as in the US cotton plantations. They are not provided starvation rations, viciously beaten and eventually worked to death as in the Soviet Gulags and Japanese prisoner of war camps and they are not held captive like modern day slaves working in the UK sex trade.

If we use sexual assault as an analogy, there are many grades of sexual assault, from drunkenly groping a co-worker at the office Christmas party to appalling sexual abuse inflicted upon very young children in the production of child-pornography films. The argument that Workfare is not a form of slavery because it demeans the victims of "real slavery" is akin to the argument that getting groped by your boss shouldn't be referred to as sexual assault because it demeans the victims of "real sexual assault".

Obviously the argument that getting groped by your boss is not sexual assault because it isn't severe enough is absurd and wrong. I've been drunk many hundreds of times and have always kept my hands to myself so other people, especially people with big responsibilities should be able to control themselves too. The argument that unwanted sexual contact is not sexual assault because it wasn't as severe as others have suffered is unsustainable, therefore the argument that mandatory unpaid labour is not a form of slavery because it isn't as severe as others have suffered is also invalid.

My view is that describing mandatory Workfare placements as slavery is not wrong, since mandatory unpaid labour would seem to be an almost perfect description of slavery. However it is an unhelpful tactic because it gives Workfare apologists the opportunity to create an argument based on the appeal to emotion strategy, which is a very persuasive argument to people that are not versed in analytical thought.

The typical workfare apologist has to resort to appeal to emotion tactics because when it comes to evidence and socio-economic arguments, they don't have a leg to stand on. Take Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith who stated that "those who oppose this process are opposed to hard work". This is a clear example of the appeal to emotion strategy. He disparages opponents to his schemes as lazy, workshy parasites, rather than people with legitimate concerns about the state forcing people to work for free, with no labour rights in order to boost corporate profits.

Giving Workfare fans the opportunity to raise a strong appeal to emotion argument by invoking comparisons to slavery allows them to completely sidestep more rigorous criticisms (as listed above) and put up a smokescreen of moral outrage.

My advice to those that wish to voice their opposition to Tory mandatory unpaid labour schemes is to avoid comparisons to slavery and to stick to facts and analysis. This way the Workfare apologist is left with fewer options; they can try to counter the facts and analysis (extremely difficult given the growing weight of evidence), they can simply remain silent or they can try to raise their own independent appeal to emotion by castigating "the unemployed" as feckless workshy scroungers. If they resort to name calling and generalisations about the unemployed out them as unthinking reactionaries using using obvious appeal to emotion tactics and counter their ignorant assertions with facts.

A famous quote says "Do not argue with idiots, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" however if you feel as strongly as I do that these Workfare schemes are a combination of blatant attacks on labour rights and taxpayer funded corporate handouts, then it is important that our voices are heard and that the argument is won. Therefore we need to avoid getting bogged down in emotional arguments and attempts to define "slavery" and stay focused on the facts and rigorous analysis.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE

The Tory contempt for ordinary working people
               

The Beecroft Report; nothing more than a corporate wishlist
                         

A letter to fans of Workfare
                         
Gaming the Work Programme 
                          

Austerity and the Double-Dip

 

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A letter to fans of Workfare

Introduction: Workfare is a UK government scheme designed to force unemployed people to work for their benefits on unpaid "work experience" schemes at corporations such as Poundland, Superdrug, Argos, Primark, Tesco and WHSmith.

Dear Workfare supporter,

To be blunt, you are an economically illiterate moron. Your vindictive attitudes against the unemployed make you think that forcing them to work for their benefits is fair, but it is not. If the job is worth doing it is worth paying somebody to do. 

It doesn't matter how much reactionary rhetoric you spew about the unemployed, how often you call them "scrounger" or complain that they are getting "handouts", your bile doesn't make Workfare any less wrong or any more economically literate. You boast that the "lazy scroungers" will get "valuable work experience" from these schemes, however many people that have been forced onto Workfare schemes were made to quit their education, training or voluntary sector work in order to do menial tasks for no pay at places like Poundland, thus reducing their employablity and taking menial work that the company should have been PAYING SOMEBODY ELSE TO DO.

Would any sane employer really consider six months mandatory unpaid menial labour sweeping floors, opening boxes and finding things on shelves at Argos to be better qualifications than the same time spent in the voluntary sector learning new skills or in education or training? Who are the employers that would rather have an employee that was forced to do unskilled work for six months ahead of someone that showed the initiative to find skilled work in the voluntary sector or to improve their skills base with training or education? 

It seems that the only employers likely to value experience of shelf stacking and floor sweeping above skills and qualifications are exactly the same companies that the government are providing with an unlimited supply of free labour to do such menial tasks, all paid for at the taxpayers' expense.

Upon closer inspection Workfare isn't a scheme to stop lazy unemployed people from getting handouts at all. It is a scheme to give handouts to the corporate sector in the form of free labour without employment rights. Anyone with a low-mid skilled job should be very concerned about the Tory government's plans to expand Workfare. After all it would be against their employers' financial interests to keep a pool of paid employees with labour rights when they could just lay them off and replace them with a stream of workfare slaves, who don't need to be paid and can be sacked at will.

Even the name Workfare is deceptive. When spoken it is an Orwellian construct that sounds like "work-fair", extremely misleading when in reality it is a massively unfair scheme. Is there any better word to describe forced, unpaid labour than slavery? It took the working classes centuries of class-struggle to negotiate decent pay and labour rights, yet these hard won rights are being unfairly undermined by schemes like Workfare, supported by a crowd of cheering reactionaries like you. The Tories and their financial backers rely on the support of unthinking reactionaries in order to continue their divide and rule class warfare against ordinary working people like you. 

Your tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the "blame the victim fallacy". The real people to blame for the scale of unemployment are the politicians that believe the neoliberal theory that competitvity can be achieved through deliberately creating and maintaining a vast pool of unemployed people in order to increase job competition and drive down labour costs. The whole idea is as pathetic and as economically illiterate as Workfare. Maintaining a standing army of unemployed people may reduce wages and create private sector profits, but these profits are eclipsed at the national scale by the increased cost of welfare for this vast pool of unemployed labour (which has to be recouped through taxation) and from the stunningly obvious fact that national productivity is reduced if millions of workers have no jobs. If you must get angry at the unemployment situation, perhaps getting angry at the people that have been deliberately mismanaging the economy over the last three decades in order to create a surplus of labour might be a tad more rational.

As it is now there are millions of unemployed people chasing hundreds of thousands of jobs, in many areas there are hundreds of applicants for every menial low paid job. Once you recognise this, you must recognise that it is the system, not the unemployed that are to blame for high levels of unemployment. It will only be when the public put pressure on the state to abandon the defunct neoliberal pseudo-economic theory of the necessary unemployed, that full employment will return. If this ever happens then feel free to return to getting angry at the people that still choose to be unemployed when there are plenty of jobs to go around, until then, use your brain and direct your anger at the real culprits.

Think of it this way: The vast majority of unemployed people are just ordinary working people without jobs. They are not getting "handouts" because they paid for their benefits through National Insurance contributions when they did have jobs. Yes there are some feckless "scroungers", but they are massively outnumbered by the unemployed that have worked and would rather return to work for a decent wage rather than live on the pittance that the state provides for those without work. These people will not benefit from several months of unpaid "work experience" stacking shelves at Superdrug. They would almost certainly benefit from retraining, help with their CV, advice on good interview technique or help identifying the transferable skills they posses much more than being treated like feckless workshy scroungers to be exploited as a free source of labour for cost-cutting corporations.

The only beneficiaries from Workfare are the corporations that want to cut costs by replacing paid labour with free labour and companies like A4E, Atos, Serco and G4S that have landed lucrative government contracts to organise such schemes. It doesn't matter that you resent the fact that someone you know doesn't have a job, because you work hard and they don't. If they are forced to work for their benefits at Primark, the work is simply being denied to someone that would have happily done the same work for minimum wage. Thus there is another unemployed person somewhere else for some other reactionary halfwit to get wound up about.

Let me reiterate; if a job is worth doing, it is worth paying someone to do. For every unemployed person that gets forced into one of these corporate welfare schemes, there is one less low-paid, low-skilled job in the economy, thus one more unemployed person elsewhere.

If we allow the government to carry on undermining labour rights and the minimum wage like this in order to give "handouts" to the corporate sector, eventually millions will be forced out of their jobs to be replaced by Workfare slaves. Vindictive people like you, that support these schemes are actually supporting the creation of unemployment. Thus the people to blame for unemployment are not the "lazy scroungers" that are unemployed, it is the lazy thinkers and reactionaries that buy into the Tory blame the victim fallacy and support this kind of barmy, economically illiterate scheme without thinking through the obvious consequences.

Yours Faithfully

AAV

Next time you see someone supporting Workfare and mouthing off about "scroungers" feel free to link to this article instead of typing out a long comment trying to explain what an economically illiterate reactionary they are being.

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.