Can There Be Democratic Slavery?

      Currently this government is doing a great job in helping their millionaire corporate friends to cut their labour costs, all part of the drive for a low wage economy. The new legislation that will come into force on April 2014, will take workfare, (unpaid forced labour) to a new level of exploitation. Job centres will be able to hand out tougher community service orders than the courts. What will your crime have been? Why the heinous act of being unable to find work. They say that slavery was abolished, but what do you call being forced to work without pay, for a rich multi-national company such as G4S? The simple truth is that those who call this society a democracy are liars or fools, or perhaps both.

       This from Boycott Workfare:

       Currently EOS, Maximus, Learn Direct, Reed in Partnership, ESG, G4S (tax dodging supremos) and Interserve (they rely on prayer & financial support from Christians) are all inviting bids from voluntary sector ‘partners’ to provide Community Work Placements in a ‘real working environment’ for up to 30 weeks, for up to 30 hours per week. In other words, forced unpaid labour for people who have not found ‘sustained employment’ while on the Work Programme.

     The criteria for being sent on a Community Work Placement are ‘lack of motivation‘ (for example a reluctance to be exploited in no pay, low pay jobs) and/or ‘lack of work experience‘. Claimants will have to do these placements alongside ‘supported job search’: the exhausting and pointless process of endlessly looking for non-existent employment opportunities. As blogger Johnny Void says: “This new scheme represents 780 hours unpaid work, over two and a half times higher than the maximum community service penalty that can be handed out by the courts.  And this is just for the crime of being unable to find a job.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the full article HERE:

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THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE OUT.

      Ian Duncan Smith's new super plan to penalise the unemployed is now about to be rolled out. It's modelled on that righteous authoritarian dictate, “three strikes and you're out”. Your crimes could one or all of the following dreadful crimes, refusing to take a job offered by your “Job Seeker Advisor”, failing to apply for a job when told to do so, failing to turn up for a placement interview.

      For the first offence you could lose three months Job Seekers Allowance, a second offence and it is six months lose of JSA, and wait for it, a third offence and you lose your JSA for three YEARS. Another little bit of their authoritarian mind set is that you have no right of appeal, your Job Seeker Advisor's word is final.

      This type of planing chooses to ignore the fact that there are 500,000 listed vacancies in this country while there are over 2.5 million unemployed. It also chooses to ignore that with their policies of cuts, we are going to see another 500.000 public sector workers dumped on the unemployment queue, plus the knock-on effect in the private sector.

      A Job Seeker Advisor will be able to strip “errant” unemployed of their JSA with no right of appeal, and no doubt the Advisor will be under pressure to meet targets. Cameron's millionaire poodle, Clegg says that the plans will bring 300,000 households back into work. Even assuming his figures are anyway near accurate, what he fails to mention is that figure will be more than replaced by the public sector pay-offs.

     There are thousands of reasons why people become unemployed, the biggest one is lack of decent jobs, nothing in the millionaire's plans go any way to solving that problem. Forcing people to go about picking up litter 30 hours a week for no pay does not create jobs. It could of course reduce paid employment as councils struggling to cut cost now find that they can have the streets cleaned for free, will start to pay off those who are paid to do this work.

     All of these plans are driven by an ideology, there is nothing wrong with the capitalist model, your poor because of you own lack of effort, the unemployed are lazy shirkers and if you are not working you deserve nothing. This is the type of society they are intent on forcing on the people of this country, there is no room for sharing, helping those less fortunate than ourselves, services based on needs. Everything must create a profit for the millionaire class and that profit as usual will come from the working class, who will have no say in how our society is run. Our lords and masters will be the corporate world, it is not a pretty picture if you are a member of the working class. Only by realising this is a class war, and at the moment we are loosing, can we hope to reverse this trend and push society in the direction of an all inclusive sharing society where needs over ride profit and mutual aid is the basic principle.

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