Fighting Poverty Pay!Newsletter of the Fight Poverty Pay Campaign. No.11
January 2001
NEW DEAL
THE NIGHTMARE CONTINUES
Labour declares New Deal a success. But their own figures expose the truth. Young people are being forced into low-paid, crap jobs or possible destitution on a massive scale. This 'success' is now to be extended to cover almost anyone not in full-time work.
254,000 young people (18-24) have supposedly been taken off benefits and into jobs since the introduction of New Deal in April 1998. Throwing large statistics around is easy. What this figure actually represents is a vast number of individuals forced into insecure jobs for poverty wages or senseless schemes under threat of benefit cuts.
The New Deal for Young People unemployed for 6 months consists of a Gateway stage, where the claimant is advised on steps to take to find work, followed by one of four 6 month options. Over 25s, who've been unemployed for 2 years, get similar advisory interviews followed by one of two 6 month options or training. The options are compulsory for the young, but not (officially, at least) for the over 25s.
By far the most popular option is training and education. You carry on getting JSA while learning – all right, provided you can find an organisation offering the training /course you want. Otherwise expect some mind-numbing course from the Job Centre.
The Environment Task Force or Voluntary Sector options, which mean slaving for benefits maintaining tow-paths for example, or in Charity shops, each attract about half as many as the Training and Education option.
The option least popular with the young, and also open to the over 25s, is subsidised employment. Imagine working for someone who's being paid to employ you! An employer receives £60 for having a young person work a 40 hour week and £40 for a 30 hour week. For over 25s they get £75 or £60. A recent survey showed that average earnings in this option were £3.50 per hour for under 25s and £3.80 for over 25s. Over half the employers said they'd only taken a New Deal placement for the wage-subsidy. One in three engagements was terminated before the six months was out.
The other option for over 25s is so-called Work-Based Learning for Adults. You get benefits + £10, but it's paid by a Trade and Enterprise Council. (Remember, if you come back to JSA off one of these schemes, you are a new claimant, and thus entitled to a 13 week permitted period to look for work in your chosen field).
The threat of a scheme can put you under pressure to take a crap job or just give up claiming your rights. This was the choice of some 112,000 18-24 year olds until July 2000, who just seem to have dropped out of the statistics for unknown destinations. 74,000 of these left after their Gateway stage, i.e. directly before the schemes. Three times as many over 25s preferred staying on JSA to taking one of the options after the Advisory Interview Process.
If you've missed out 'till now, don't worry, you will be dealt with, says David Blunkett. From April this year over 25s unemployed for 18 months (previously 2 years) will be targeted as well as 150,000 lone parents. People not in receipt of JSA are now on the agenda, starting with the partners of the unemployed. New Deal advisers are also set to visit shelters and shop doorways to try to get the homeless into the workhouse. Labour's Social Exclusion Unit argues that hostel places could be made dependent on participation in New Deal schemes. This plainly goes hand in hand with Labour's anti-begging campaign. Forcing people to sweep streets (as apparently planned in Oldham) under threat of freezing to death is obviously much more desirable than allowing them to beg and 'sully' the Town Centre shopping experience!
The New Deal is Labour's mechanism for reducing wage-costs by prompting the unemployed into taking low-paid jobs, and thus undermining the floor of all wages. It also serves to discipline those who don't play their part in the low-wage economy. As such it is reminiscent of the Workhouse of the last century. No deal with New Deal!
GET BACK TO SCHOOL!
Labour has a vision of a 'skills economy'. Apparently some 7 million of us don't fit in with this vision and need a bit of help with our reading, writing, maths and other 'basic' skills. Of course, help is of no use without compulsion, so they've decided the unemployed should sit tests. Those refusing this 'help', well suspension beckons, cuts in benefits!
They'll help you into your grave this lot!
PENSIONERS FIGHT BACK!
On 7 November over 2000 people brought traffic to a halt outside Parliament in protest at the Labour Governments disgusting attitude towards pensioners. Angered by the disgraceful 75p a week increase, pensioners demanded the restoration of the link between pensions and average earnings. Gordon Brown ignored their demand in his pre-budget statement the next day.
He proposed that the basic state pension would increase by £5 a week for single pensioners from April with a further £3 rise next year, 2002. Jack Thain, Gen. Sec. of the National Pensioners Convention protested,'even the £5 increase is not what you think it is , £2.50 of it is part of the inflation figure, so we have effectively only got a rise of £2.50'. For couples the corresponding increases would be £8 and £4.80. This means the minimum income guarantee was increased up to £92.15 for a single pensioner and £140.55 a week for couples. The winter fuel payment was increased by £50 to £200 for all pensioner households.
Although this is quite an achievement for protestors, the fact remains that poverty-related, and thus preventable, deaths among pensioners are on the increase. Last winter more pensioners died from cold than during any winter since 1976. Almost 55,000 people, the majority pensioners, died from cold-related illnesses between December 1999 and March 2000.
Labour's refusal to link pensions with average earnings condemns pensioners to further poverty and just as the unemployed, the humiliation of means tested benefits. Jack Thain again:
'More pensioners will have to endure the stigma of being means tested for the minimum income guarantee under Brown's new policy. The form-filling and probing of their financial affairs will rob them of their dignity.'
END MEANS-TESTED BENEFITS!
DATA FASCISM AND MEANS-TESTING
Whatever benefit you're claiming, you'll doubtless have to plough through mountains of forms before you actually get any money in your hand. And then they repeat the process after 3 months, under the guise of 'Making sure you're getting the right money'. Legislation passed earlier this year apparently allows them to pry into our bank accounts. This just legitimises previous intimidation and snooping.
Most of this data-circus is justified by a casual reference to so-called Benefit Fraud, in other words claiming more than the paltry and ever-decreasing amount they think you need to live on. (A quick word to all you grasses here – you are scum!) The supposed danger of some 'crime' to their society has always been a good excuse for abolishing what few civil liberties the capitalist state has spat on our plates. The computerisation of data-storage and processing adds a new dimension to DSS snooping; the spectre of technological fascism.
The Law and Rights?
It's no business of theirs who you live with, who your landlord is or what their details are.They trample on our dignity coming round inspecting our homes for evidence of a partner or checking our identities. What right have they got to do this?
It always pays to ask exactly this when they shove their forms under your nose. You can protect yourself against sanctions by demanding an extension of the time-limit given for providing the information. They have a duty to inform you in plain terms of your rights. In any request for information from a JSA claimant they'll probably be relying on Jobseekers Allowance Regulations 1996 (SI 1996 No.207 reg. 24) which states:
'A claimant shall furnish such certificates, documents and other evidence affecting his continuing entitlement to Jobseekers Allowance, whether that Allowance is payable and, if so, in what amount as the Secretary of State may require.' What a vague load of crap!
The Secretary of State, however, doesn't bother to say how a specific piece of evidence (e.g. my co-tenant's identity) affects my entitlement to benefits. The eternal chorus that 'failure to supply this information may affect your entitlement to benefit' isn't good enough. Ask for a satisfactory explanation.
The Data Protection Act (1998) should protect people, e.g. your co-tenant, landlord, against having information about them passed on. The protection, however, is non-existent when a government agency is collecting the information.
Section 7 of the Act provides the right to demand access to all data held on you by a data-carrier, in this case the Employment Service or Benefits Agency. As reported in Fighting Poverty Pay!, May 98, this can make very interesting reading. Write and tell them you want to see everything they've got on you!
The various benefits services seem very keen on asking people for personal budget statements with a breakdown of their weekly spending. This is to pressurise you into changing your lifestyle so you can 'exist' on a low wage or less Housing Benefit. The day when they tell us what we can spend our dole-pittance on may not be far off.
They've already done it with the racist vouchers scheme for Asylum -Seekers. For the moment we just need to emphasise that the law says we need a certain amount to live on, enough said.
Part of their strategy involves casualising their relationship to us. The language gets vaguer – something may affect your entitlement, you will provide such certificates – and the practice gets more despotic. Insist on knowing and claiming your rights. It may only be a modest weapon for the moment, but it could slow the present tendency to transform unemployment rights into charity.
The Means-Test
The structural basis for all this snooping is the fact that these are means-tested benefits. It is worth remembering that when the Means-Test was introduced in the 1930s there was massive opposition from the Unemployed Workers Movement. Extensive rioting against the Means-Test in Belfast was the first and only time Republicans and Loyalists fought side-by side against a common enemy. Similar rioting in Birkenhead and London, coinciding with large protest marches, provided a stumbling block to the introduction of this insulting and disenfranchising practice. Most of this resistance was organised by the National Unemployed Workers Movement which had to fight not only the Labour Government but large sections of the Trade Union movement as well. Their struggle has many lessons for today. (For a brief look at the NUWM see 'Labour, a party fit for Imperialism' by R.Clough, available for £2.50 incl. p&p. from the FPP address.)
We can expect more snooping in the coming year. The Queen's speech heralded anti-fraud legislation before the election. The former deputy director of MI5 and the former head of investigations at Customs and Excise have been recruited into the DSS flying fraud squad. Chillingly, this echoes remarks made by AEEU boss Sir Ken Jackson to the Sun newspaper in January 2000: 'lets turn the spooks on the spongers ..... with the Cold War over MI5 could use their skills to trap them'.
Questions in Parliament on Dec 18 indicate special attention is to be paid to recipients of Disability Living Allowance, as if they didn't get grilled enough already.
Roll on the police state!
DUDLEY WORKERS FIGHT HEALTH PRIVATISATION
Dudley hospital workers, after finishing a three week strike over the Xmas period, are now preparing for their ninth! bout of strike action against the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
The Dudley Hospital Health Trust plans to hand its 4 hospitals, including non-clinical workers such as porters and cleaners, over to a private consortium, Summit Healthcare, on a 40 year, £80m contract. The consortium, which includes Siemens, Building & Property and McAlpine, plans to close one hospital with the loss of 70 beds and get rid of 170 full time jobs.
The workers, mainly low paid women, are determined to fight to save their jobs and are demanding that they stay employed by the NHS. They are fighting not just the Dudley Health Trust, but the alliance between the Labour government and their union, UNISON.
Before the Xmas strike the government offered a deal to renegotiate the terms of the workers transfer under PFI, It was conditional on the workers giving up their right to strike against the transfer of their jobs to the private sector. At a mass meeting UNISON leaders argued it was the best offer they could get, that the strike action should be suspended and that the deal should be accepted!
The mass meeting overwhelmingly rejected the offer.
SUPPORT THE DUDLEY HEALTH WORKERS !
WEALTH GAP WIDENS UNDER LABOUR
New figures from the Office of National Statistics show that the wealth gap between Britain's richest and poorest families is now wider than at any time since Thatcher was in power. In fact the figures show that the gap has widened every year since Labour came into office. The statistics show that the spending power of the poorest 20% is continuing to fall compared to the spending power of the richest 20%.
In 1996 the gap in disposable income (cash left after taxes and household essentials are taken into account) between the top and bottom 20% of households was £625 a week. In 2000 it had risen to £788 a week.
In terms of the wage relation between employer and employee, a recent survey by the T&GWU revealed that there are 6,375,000 workers in Britain being paid under £5 an hour. Of these nearly twice as many are women as men.
In contrast, the average earnings of fat-cat top bosses rose by 20% in 1999 to £717,000 per year, with Sir Clive Thompson of Rentokill weighing in at a round £950,000.
Bowing and scraping a living
Anyone doubting that this system produces gross inequalities should look no further than Buckingham Palace. The £250 million wealthy Queen, who receives £7.9m a year from the Civil List, gets away with paying her employees wages so low they have to be topped up with benefits. A basement porter receives some £2.90 an hour, brought up to the minimum wage of £3.70 through free accommodation. Staff are issued with leaflets on how to claim state benefits when they join the royal household. One worker recently commented publicly 'claiming benefits while working for the Queen is now as much a part of the job as bowing and curtsying.'
More fuel for the great royal debate: 'hang `em or shoot `em?'
JUSTICE FOR SIMON JONES CAMPAIGN
More than two and a half years after Simon Jones was killed at work, the Director of Public Prosecutions has decided to charge Euromin, the company Simon was working for and its general manager with manslaughter. Simon was sent to work inside the hold of a ship with no training and was dead within two hours of starting work.
Since Simon's death his friends and family have campaigned for the events surrounding his death to be the subject of court action. Their campaign has involved shutting down Euromin's docks, occupying the employment agency that sent Simon to work for Euromin, occupying the Department of Trade and Industry on the day that Simon's case was being debated in Parliament, shutting down Southwark bridge outside the Health and Safety Executive, winning a judicial review challenging the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to prosecute, and this September picketing their headquarters in London. These actions, of course, had no influence on the decision to prosecute, which, in the words of the DPP was 'reached without unnecessary delay'! This is only the sixth time that any company director has been taken to court for the charge of Manslaughter by Gross Negligence. (Source: Schnews, c/o On-the-Fiddle, PO Box 2600, Brighton, BN2 2DX).
UNEMPLOYED FIGHT BACK IN ARGENTINA
Since 1993 unemployment in Argentina has risen from 9.3% of the workforce to 15.4%, with 14.5% classified as under-employed. The government had predicted a 3.5% growth in the economy in 2000 but has now admitted it will in fact decline by around 0.7%. In protest against this prolonged economic recession and deteriorating social situation that has already lasted two years, the unemployed and poor have taken action, blockading roads in various parts of the country.
Resistance has taken place in the capital Buenos Aires and in at least five other provinces around the country.
Action has taken place in the La Matanza district of Buenos Aires, where around 2,000 unemployed people blocked National Route 3 demanding work or benefits, and the delivery of food supplies which had not arrived for several months. Other road blocks took place on National Route 4 to the south and west of the capital, and National Route 11 in Resistencia where hundreds of unemployed and homeless families demanded housing and work.
The actions are sometimes spontaneous, although they have generally been organised by the Argentine Workers Federation, the Combative Class Current, and other organisations in areas of high unemployment.
(source: Cuban Weekly Review-Granma International, Nov.12, www.Granma.cu)
DEATH IN DHAKA
At the end of November a fire swept through a textile factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing at least 37 mainly women workers.
Since 1998 over 200 people have been killed in textile factory fires in Bangladesh. Safety conditions are almost non-existent, survivors of the latest tragedy reported that the main gate of the factory had been locked. One survivor, 'suddenly saw the fire on the third floor and ran for the exit,but it was locked. Then I jumped from a window and landed on heaps of other injured.'
Around 3,000 textile factories employ nearly 2 million workers, over 90% of them women. Clothing is the countries biggest export. And yes the factory was producing towels for the European and US markets.
BOYCOTT TOMMY HILFIGER PRODUCTS
Tommy Hilfiger, the boss of the multinational 'fashion' group recently appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show in the USA. She asked him if it was true that he had made statements such as,'if I'd known African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish and Asians would buy my clothes, I would not have made them so nice. I wish these people would not buy my clothes as they are made for upper class white people'. His answer was a straight YES!
Oprah immediately asked him to leave.
We agree and say Boycott his racist products!
WORLD POVERTY
A report released last year by the International Labour Organisation shows-
- A quarter of the worlds population of 6 billion lives on less than $1 a day.
- During the past 5 years the worlds poor have increased by 200 million.
- In the developing world, nearly a third of the population has no access to fresh drinking water.
- More than 40% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia live in poverty and this proportion is rising.
- Out of the worlds 150 million unemployed, no more than a quarter have some form of unemployment benefit.
LABOUR AND UNISON UNITE IN SCOTLAND
Low paid council workers, members of UNISON, in Scotland have stepped up their industrial action against Labour councils in pursuit of a 5% pay rise. After three one day strikes supported by over 70,000 workers, selected groups of workers in key areas like computer and revenue staff have now gone on indefinite strike.
The Labour Party's Convention of Scottish Local Authorities spokesman Pat Watters, has already threatened strikers with mass sackings and lied publicly about what their pathetic offer meant to the workforce. Dundee's labour council went further and took strikers to court to stop them withdrawing their labour.
UNISON have stepped back from escalating the action putting their relationship with Labour before the interests of the low paid. As an unnamed UNISON official was quoted in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper,
'There is no way that we are having another winter of discontent in Scotland just before a general election'.
With friends like these...!
UNISON SET TO EXPEL B.A.B.C. ACTIVISTS
In June 2000 an internal Brighton Benefit Agency Fraud Dept newsletter, Newsflash, was leaked to 'Brighton Against Benefit Cuts' (BABC). The newsletter mocked and belittled named claimants, found their shabby clothes amusing and described as 'nutters' those with mental handicaps.
BABC activists immediately 'blew the whistle' on the activities of the Fraud squad, distributing a leaflet to claimants and complaining to the Council's Chief Executive. The response of Brighton & Hove UNISON, some of whose members, including their 'education officer', were involved in the production of the newsletter, has been to attempt to expel two BABC activists who are members of the branch !
Demonstrate outside UNISON meeting-Brighton Town Hall Wed 17th Jan 1.30pm. Further info,c/o 4, Crestway Parade, Brighton, BN2 6LX. 01273-540717
LIFE'S A LOTTERY
As part of Labour's crusade to put even those not signing on into the bliss of waged labour, Cheetham Job Centre was offering a Christmas hamper in a raffle on Dec 21. Tickets were only available to those applying for jobs. Jennifer Wall, office manager at Cheetham Hill, reckoned that only 10% of the areas unemployed were signing on (and thus in reach of her benefit sanctions). The chance to win some food was supposed to act as bait to lure these people into the Job Centre. When there's no stick to hand, a carrot, or a potential lottery carrot, will have to do!
CWU 'LOOKS AFTER' ITS MEMBERS
Low paid postal workers feeling the crunch after Xmas need have no fear, their union the CWU is on the case. A letter sent out to members in the new year entitled, 'I hope you had a wonderful Xmas', begins, 'However if, like most of us, you're counting the cost right now,CWU have negotiated'- a pay rise! no, then maybe a new year bonus,no 'a special deal with Hamilton Direct Bank that could just be the answer' Yes a 'typical' loan of £5,000 will only cost £108.51 per month. Total repayments £6,510.60. What was that about the union is strength!
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