My immediate response is to boycott the likes of Poundland and Tesco who "support" this scheme. The latter have asked the government to reform this scheme because of the number of complaints and negative comments on Twitter etc.

and was recently approached by my local Jobcentre to try this, so I had a lad on a three week placement that has just finished. Not sure I'll do it again. Even before this media storm it was leaving a bad taste in my mouth, especially when I discovered that the lad in question had only been unemployed for a few months after I had been told that it was a scheme for the long term unemployed to get some experience to put on their CVs. Furthermore, there was no supervisory element from the JC - no follow up with me or the placee on how it was going, not even rudimentary H&S checks to make sure it was a safe working environment and so on. I suspect a box got ticked towards a target and that was job done as far as they were concerned.

(One point worth making is that this was over and above my budgeted headcount - we weren't using "free" labour to do a job that would have been paid otherwise.)

this vacuous shower of far right, bullying bastards does is any surprise now. They make terminally ill people work. It's so extreme it's beyong satire.

Luckily, for those of us in Scotland we have an alternative. We'll be shot of them by 2014.

...and look at this objectively, calmly and rationally and keep a sense of perspective. No, it's no good, I can't. I get too wound up into a froth of outrage at what this shower of blank-eyed glove puppets which passes for a democracy will perpetrate on the low paid and disadvantaged with whom they have no contact whatever. I see Sainsburys, Matalan, Waterstones and some other smaller retailers have told them to stick the scheme where the sun doesn't shine but let's face it, the only reason Tesco have questioned the scheme is that they've been blitzed with complaints from customers, not from any moral or ethical concerns. Democracy? Cackocracy, I'd say

- the power of media coverage (ie journalists doing what they're supposed to, not chasing celebrities around) is still heart-warming;

- it shows something I've thought for some time is a real an un-investigated problem, namely the separation (by layers of management or layers of civil servants) between those who make decisions and those who are actually at the sharp end. I think it's unhelpful (and frankly unrealistic) to just dismiss this as the work of "evil Tory b'stards" genuinely intent on making disabled people suffer even more; it's far more likely that they simply haven't considered the real impact of their policies at ground level. They rely on their minions to do this: it's a whole other debate as to why that hasn't happened (is it the ministers' fault or the civil service or a mixture?). However, the upshot is that the layers of civil servants in government, and the layers of middle management in private companies, are what makes this sort of thing happen*;

- at a macro-economic level, if we all keep going relentlessly for those retailers with the lowest prices, this sort of thing is surely a near-inevitable by-product? To what extent do we need to reconsider our own shopping habits?

* For avoidance of doubt, I don't mean that those layers need to be removed, I just mean that the separation by layers mans that two-way communication becomes more important, which is more time-consuming, but everyone needs to allow for that to happen if that structure is to work well.

Plenty more of this. The boom times were built on a mirage but the accountants who run the corporations have projections to meet and personal bonuses to fill. They will lean heavily on their politician employees to divert more and more of the resources of the state towards them.

Not going to be much of a 'debate' I suspect - anyone in favour of workfare has already been damned beyond the pale.

Far better paying people to do nothing, trapped in poverty and benefit dependency eh?

Speaking from experience working for nothing was more demoralising for myself and people I knew than not working at all. Feeling that you're not good enough for a paid position whilst you're working alongside people being paid to do the same as you really does not help you get out of the poverty/benefit dependency.

for someone who needs to make a change in their life (unemployed, changing jobs, whatever) can't be a bad thing - especially if it perks up your CV

but from the sound of it, the Reilly/Poundland situation in the OP was hardly that - just a no-skill, minimum wage job that was being done for free - "we get a new one to sweep the floor every six weeks"; that's not acceptable

who are doing a kind of apprenticeship. It's unpaid and it's solely designed to give them an advantage on their CVs.
It's normally used to give University Students experience in the Banking,Accountancy and Marketing sectors,for example.
Some companies do offer a kind of minimum wage. We are offering Practical trade experience which the two lads learn a lot and they take advantage of this. It's usually the best best Ranked students (Motorcycle mechanics) who are offered this. Other students are placed in local garages and it's at the discretion of the garage whether they are paid or not .
While our lads don't get paid a salary we (the School) make sure their lunches are paid for and they are always included in Rounds of Coffee,Soft Drinks etc as ,to be honest,it's the least we can do.
The British example above, sounds like Slave Labour to me. The Case of the Voluntary worker shows the Country at its worst.

badly implemented (isn't that always they way?).

The idea to introduce long term unemployed into work through a scheme that allows them time to adapt without pressure seems sensible to me.

The reality of people being used as a source of free labour with no end term commitment from the organisation and no supervision from the government agency who are responsible is doomed to fail.

We should resist letting political dogma get in the way of creating jobs for people. Employment will not grow without a healthy private sector creating work. And not all people who earn bonuses sell their souls for their bonus. Often the bonus relates to them doing the right thing not just fiddling the books to make bad things look good. An example of the right thing would be growing sales which leads to growing production which would create work.

Voluntary work was something that I did off my own back when I was a job seeker. Although I did end up being employed by the organisation where I volunteered, my unpaid work there was never intended as means to an end and nobody coerced me into doing it. The staff at the Job Centre didn't seem to mind as long as I was able to demonstrate that I was actively looking for paid employment.

In the future, through a combination of bad luck and rotten genes, I will be disabled and probably unable to work effectively in any capacity. I really worry about ending up in a situation where I will be forced to work, as I fail to see how this will be anything other than degrading, liable to shorten my already truncated lifespan and likely to see me expending what little energy I may have on a job, with no quality of life beyond it.

I hope that something will take me out before I get this helpless as I see dwindling levels of political sympathy for the disabled on either side of the house.

My work as a volunteer was driven by a belief that the strong in society should stand up and project the weak. It seems that the wealthier the upper echelons of the UK get, the more ruthless and inhuman they become.

I think that this isn't as black and white as it may appear.

Part of the outrage is LargeCo, who make a huge profit, 'exploiting' cheap labour.
The other question is that assuming that these people are still getting all the allowances and benefits to which they are entitled, is better to pay them to do nothing and stay home, or actually do something?

I'm torn. I share the outrage to the first scenario, and yet my answer to the second seems to be in direct conflict to the first.

There's theory floating around over here that there are a lot of labour intensive projects that need to be done. Not higher level skills, but things like road repair, upkeep of the local community, that kind of things. What's the issue with asking those who get unemployment or other benefits to pitch in and do the work?

Is when private companies who are paid by results have a ridiculous conflict of interest in throwing people off incapacity benefit.
All this achieves is to (on the whole) put incredible stress on already sick people who lose large amounts of money and are supposed to be able to compete with abled bodied people for jobs that don't exist.
The fact that so many people being thrown off the sick are winning on appeal clearly shows that the private companies are not intersted in doing the job correctly and I believe that Private Eye has shown their success rates are lower than before.
This is an attempt to largely shift the sick onto a cheaper benefit and should be viewed with utter contempt at a time when billions of pounds worth of tax evasion is slyly condoned by the government and the tax authorities.

What kind of person comes home from work and thinks "I have done some great things today. I've suggested that terminally ill people with more than six months to live should be forced to chase jobs. Brilliant!"

I mean who are these people?

And, lo, the Chattering Classes rise up as one to condemn the shameless exploitation.

The Big Companies should sack their PR advisors. If they had any sense, they'd have labelled these posts as "Internships"..

No we are not Mr. Cameron. I find it rather perplexing that Ian Duncan-Smith and his department have taken months of research to then impose legislation that is obviously not thought out and will be detrimental to the daily lives of a major percentage of families and people throughout the country. The benefits caps are going to have a catastrophic effect on the social thread of this country. The French, God bless 'em, would've been rioting in the streets months ago. As are the Greeks. We just carry on watching telly and drinking tea as though nothing is happening.

Personally I think David Cameron and his lot, incl. Oliver Letwin for God's sake, have a hidden far to the right of right-wing agenda and I hope that they lose the next election and are never voted into government again.

I find he idea of encouraging people who are unemployed to go back to work, possibly even volunteering to do jobs in the wider community that need to be done, in some ways a good thing. It can give a renewed sense of purpose and self-esteem and can help provide skills and confidence that will be useful in looking a for paid work in the job market.

On the other hand, I find the idea of coercing people to do unpaid work for companies who are in a position to pay them for it to be little short of a form of indentured labour, and morally very questionable indeed.

It strikes me that this system appears to be mostly good for employers and for the government (to help them massage disastrous unemployment statistics). The benefits (for want of a better word) for those at the sharper end are rather more mixed. Still, Mr Cameron has tried to claim an almost universal buy in to his scheme. You have to wonder how wide that buy in is, if the risible way he's managing NHS change is anything to go by (http://eoin-clarke.blogspot.com/2012/02/full-story-of-camerons-visit-to-... makes very very interesting reading if you're interested in just how he's trying to paper over cavernous cracks).

But hey, no one's really poor any more. Well, no one important, anyway.*

* with apologies to the late Douglas Adams

What exactly is this agenda then?

Are you aware that a large majority of people in Britain support the benefits cap? Why do you imagine this might be? They can't all be nasty Daily Mail readers, can they?

Do you think that when the Welfare State was established, it was envisaged that people would be able to make an economically rational decision to stay on benefits rather than take work they felt was beneath them?

On my second signing on session (bear in mind that I had had one, two month period of unemployment in the previous twelve years and had been successfully self employed for five years), I was asked to consider applying to work in a supermarket.

I politely pointed out that I had never worked in a comparable industry to retail since I was 22, that my CV and work experience would probably not make me the most attractive option for the store manager and that as it was only my second occasion signing on, I perhaps should be given more of a chance of searching within the industry which I have a wide range of skills and experience in. I also pointed out that it was a bit rich of them to try and force me into supermarket work given that I had yet to receive a penny of any benefits yet.

I was delayed in the office and made to attend another meeting where my negative attitude to work was greatly condemned by "some prick."

The fact of the matter is, the focus of this debate appears to be aimed at some, semi mystical "wont work" individuals, when a huge part of the problem is both scarcity of work, and the sheer bloody minded incompetence and box ticking of the DSS...

I am glad to say that after some considerable struggle I find myself working once again in my industry. But the fact that I am doing that is in spite of my dealings with the DSS.

I agree it is very difficult to find appropriate work - particularly when so many of us end up with specialisms that may not be hiring at any particular time. I've been made redundant 3 times and am currently out of work. It's fair to say that it'll be a cold day in hell before the Job Centre has any work for me that uses my skills or experience.

It seems to me that there is no invisible hand that's going to magic up the right job for me or others. My rational choices, it seems, are:

- to do something that might once have been considered 'beneath' me, either by taking a job that requires less experience/fewer skills than I have or seeking an entry level job in an industry I like the look of;
- to beg, borrow/steal/sell stuff to raise the funds to start my own business
- to retrain in order to do something new

My ancestors responded to the decline of agricultural work by upping sticks and moving from their homes in Somerset to where the jobs were - then South Wales. Farmers got jobs in the mines, in the steel industry and on the railways. Hundreds of thousands of people did this and, with no Welfare State, it must have been a fairly stark choice. These days, we have much more of a safety net to help those in dire need. But I personally think that that safety net should not simply allow people to put off the difficult decisions they need to make in order to find work.

Whether we like it or not, corporations exist to make profits for shareholders. I personally think that's a good thing and that the profit motive is what drives most of us. There would be no point asking loss making companies to help out by providing work experience, although arguably we spent the 60s and 70s doing just that supporting uneconomic heavy industry.

I don't think of it as 'unpaid' work personally. You're getting benefits in return for working, instead of benefits in return for either looking for a job (which can itself be a full time occupation) or in some instances sitting on your fat arse waiting for the world to offer you a job to your liking. You're also getting experience and opportunity, both of which can be a barrier to getting work.

If Tesco and others are half as rapacious and greedy as some here think, having had a chance to sample the goods, they will snap up good people - they'd be economically irrational not to.

"There would be no point asking loss making companies to help out by providing work experience, although arguably we spent the 60s and 70s doing just that supporting uneconomic heavy industry."

We've just given the banks £1.2 trillion of direct and indirect aid, most of which will never come back and we've poured £325 billion of QE into their balance sheets. Where it is staying. Except the bits they funnel off into their own pockets (a very great deal)

At least the utterly miniscule amounts by comparison we put into the nationalised industries actually got spent in the economy.

Anyway you might not disagree on any of that its just a personal obsession...

On the other point - Why do Tesco's need even more state support anyway? As Drakeygirl pointed out, their wage bill is massively subsidised by the taxpayer already and their record on paying their whack of corporation tax is atrocious.

I absolutely don't agree with people sitting round doing nowt when there are things that could be done and experience of the world of work would be useful - it should be built into retraining certainly - but there is plenty that actually NEEDS doing all around us without propping up somebody's profits. And the blurring of the political parties, the state and the corporate world is getting scary enough already.

For not having a job when we have 3 million unemployed unless you have evidence that that individual is deliberately not even trying to find one. To demonise them for being caught by a situation that they certainly didn't cause is just unfair and wrong. Even if every vacancy were to be filled by the ranks of the unemployed it would still leave most on the dole. The workfare idea seems to be predicated on the idea that, if only people weren't sitting on their arses all day, new jobs would suddenly appear. The reality is that, not only is this demeaning to the exploited unemployed, it can actually stop the recruitment of real, paid staff. Why pay when the govt provides free workers?

Whenever I go for a job below my level of experience and skill, I get told I'm overqualified too. It's not easy is it.

But I think there is a problem with allowing people to think that the jobs should come to them. This mentality has only existed in the last half century - before that, people either moved to where there were jobs or starved. Nobody wants to see a return to that era, but I think 'supply side' initiatives, like advertising jobs in Job Centres that are a bus ride away can only help.

We think we're hard done by in this country. You should talk to some of the people who come here to work about the conditions they're used to in their countries of origin. The argument that there are no jobs that gets trotted out falls apart somewhat when you look at how many jobs immigrants to the UK manage to find. Over 90% of the rise in employment between 2010 and 2011 went to non-UK nationals for instance. I can't remember the last time I was sold a sandwich, coffee, burger - or had a card through my door for cleaning, man with van, painting etc etc by a Brit.

I really don't buy the 'free workers' argument. I've met and/or worked with the senior management from many large and small retailers and never have I come across the attitude that cheap or free labour is any kind of answer to any problem they have. Most want to find good people, train them, promote them and see them thrive. It takes a lot of effort to build a motivated, customer friendly workforce and few employers would want to risk that by relying on poorly motivated and resentful short term labour, no matter how cheap it was.

Anything else is exploitation however it is tarted up.

Like some of the posters on this thread I've sampled the trials and tribulations of unemployment as well as dipping my toes in the water of self-employment. I used to have a strong work ethic which has slowly been eroded over the years. On one occasion when I was unemployed the only way of preserving my dignity was to take a deep breath and walk away from the JobCentre, taking a low-paid job and supplementing the income with self-employment, sometimes working 18 hours a day - no such thing as minimum wage or Family Tax Credit then to supplement my wages.

I don't have much sympathy with employers as I occasionally found at job interviews while unemployed that private businesses were quite happy to offer me work while encouraging me to falsely claim unemployment benefit, which I declined, so it's no surprise to me that businesses are ready to exploit Workfare which is a legalised way for them to do the same thing at no expense to themselves.

Although I think volunteering can be A Good Thing I would suggest that even the voluntary sector which pre-existed the current workfare programme is under threat. A disabled relative with learning difficulties who required a mentor to assist with volunteering experience found the scheme set up to help disabled people volunteer shut down in the area due to lack of funding, and subsequent independent applications to volunteer generated zero interest from local charitable organisations.

So the Government's thoughts of finding work placements for the disabled are at the very least deluded, with those clearly able to work already being employed.

I'm guessing you don't believe that it works the other way round - you should only get 'paid' benefits if you do a fair day's work?

In reality plenty of careers start with unpaid internships or work experience, giving employer and employee the opportunity to size eachother - and the industry - out. I wonder how much Henry Hepworth is currently earning for his time at The Word for instance. Yet the experience he's getting - and I don't recall seeing the position advertised widely - will help him enormously should he seek a career in the media.

And whilst I accept that it's hard, I don't think it's impossible. I tried and tried to get into publishing, television, advertising and journalism and miserably failed. Years later, I met people of my generation in each industry and asked them how on earth they'd managed when there just didn't seem to be any jobs. Turned out of course that they'd all got them through unpaid internships. Whilst it would have been hard, completing a 2-4 week unpaid internship in the Summer holidays would not have been impossible, even starting out with nothing and knowing nobody in London, as I did.

on a voluntary basis. I should have made myself clear, sorry for any misunderstanding. Although as illuminatus eludes to above and you seem to agree with, it sure does help if you are in a privileged position.
However I stand by my statement when it comes to coercing those in society who often, through no fault of their own, find themselves on the receiving end of typically right wing rabble rousing designed to do nothing but pander to some of the more base instincts of self satisfied, Daily Mail reading bigots.
If there is work available then to ask for it to be offered to the unemployed on a proper basis (A fair days pay for a fair days work)strikes me as the only decent way to break the dependency on benefits. I suppose it all comes down to whether or not we wish to live in a civilised society where those less able to cope with life are given the opportunity to take their place within it on a decent basis or whether we wish to continue with the beggar your neighbour attitudes of the past thirty years cause that's worked out so well for so many of us huh.

here : http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/vulnerable-man-lauds-volunteers-who-'keep-him-going'-201202214918/

here.

Key points as far as I'm concerned.

An acknowledgement of the problem:

The mistake behind workfare is to assume that everybody who is unemployed is idle. Yes, some are. But many are either looking for work, or reskilling to work in jobs that require new skills.
An example might be of a computer programmer who is an expert in the Java programming language. Suppose some new advancement means that her Java skills are no longer in demand on the market. A good path for her might be to teach herself a new language, to build on her existing skills and eventually find a new, skilled job. This would be vastly better for her and the rest of us than if she ended up working an unskilled job flipping burgers at McDonald's. But it is very possible that workfare would do the latter, failing to distinguish between our actively unemployed programmer, and the idle unemployed people it is aimed at.

and a proposed solution:

There is a solution that could appeal to a broad base of people and fix most of the broken incentives that unemployed people face:
1) Abolish the National Minimum Wage so that unskilled jobs can be created. This will allow more "first foot on the ladder" jobs to be created and give unskilled people a way out of unemployment.
2) Replace benefits with a tapering income subsidy, similar to the government's Universal Credit, which would supplement the incomes of people on low wages. This should be generous, to persuade some supporters of the minimum wage (who, wrongly, think that it creates some kind of minimum living standard for people) to accept abolition of the minimum wage.
3) Reduce the income subsidy over time — say, a year — so that the initial safety net provides security to people who have been recently made unemployed but does not allow for long-term dependency on welfare.
Workfare is a misguided, statist attempt to fix a problem made by government. By adding even more planning and state control to people's lives, it will end up causing more problems than it solves. Unemployment can be addressed, but only by removing government barriers to work, not by adding on more layers of state involvement in people's lives."

The Adam Smith Institute is my go-to source for discussion fodder as the discussion pieces, be they apposite or ill-concieved, are usually interesting. Its now sadly moribund Irish equivalent - the Open Republic Institute - proposed income subsidy some years ago and it's now part of proposed social welfare reforms here.

I do think that the balancing act between an educated and an affordable workforce has become an overly complex situation and a whole bureaucratic industry in itself. Though I do think that people don't clearly understand how much of that bureaucracy is delivered by huge corporations who are determined to keep things as complex, opaque and expensive as possible... I work with government IT (private sector) - I hope I am not personally doing evil but evil I have certainly seen done.

The thing is that companies have moved out of vocational training to a quite incredible degree, and expect far more of the state education system to cover those gaps. If they can't get an off the shelf UK workforce they buy in a cheaper one, on price not quality in my experience. They're also increasingly dodging corporation tax, the percentage of the tax take coming from individuals rather than corporations has gone up a great deal in recent years.

The point I am making is not that private enterprise is inherently evil - despite being an old leftie git I really don't believe that - but the state does have a role in protecting the workforce as well as supplying it.

Remove the minimum wage to create a raft of unskilled entry roles, and thats ALL you will have (apart from a layer of senior management employees who will immediately give themselves colossal payrises at teh expense of the owners) and in pretty short order. The asset strippers who run all the big companies nowadays - and have made millions gouging the state and flogging it off - will see to that pretty sharpish. I've seen it happening all around me.

If an absence of vocational training in second-level schools is a factor in outsourcing indigenous workforces, then do education authorities need to revisit curriculums? Could it presage, may the saints preserve us, the rebranding/repurposing of comprehensives into a new wave of secondary moderns and grammar schools under a different nomenclature?

It could be argued that reduced wages for entry-level positions are an incentive for employees to train and develop on the job and be sufficiently upskilled to seek promotion or new opportunities elsewhere but your own experience suggests that firms no longer put the resources into staff development. In an age of lifelong learning, I've learned that there looks to be much less support for employee/unemployed self-improvement in these islands. I guarantee you that the Germans would not be so short-sighted...

from across the political spectrum, the Coalition are
still at it, blaming widespread concern about their policy on the Socialist Workers Party...

... have been redefined at "anyone who doesn't like Dave and co very much."

Pathetic.

There was something in the comments above that bugged me about the whole 'we all know people who sit on their arses and don't work...' style comments, although it's taken a wee while and a quiet Sunday morning to prompt another post.
The official unemployment rate took a significant spike upwards in 2008 as the effects of the credit crunch and recession took hold. The latest published rate is 2.67 million (8.4%) which means that according to the offical count around one in 12 people who would otherwise be economically active are out of work. This does not include the underemployed. A quick Google search brought up TUC figures, published last month, saying that on top of the official unemployment figure there are another 2.26 million 'economically inactive' people, and a further 1.35 million who work part time but really want to work full time.
Add those figures together and you get more than 6 million folk in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland & Wales who need a full time wage and don't have one. This has been the gathering state of play since the spring of 2008, four years ago.
The workfare stuff - and I mean decent, mentored, structured schemes with training spin-offs that can actually get long-term unemployed folk back to work – was probably appropriate through much of the 1990s and up to early 2008 when unemployment was either falling, or bumping along at a bottom rate of 5%, or even lower, and there were jobs to be had. The idea that the economy tanks, we have official unemployment heading for 9% - and perhaps more than 6 million folk who need full time work but can't get it - and these folk would be helped by stacking shelves at Tesco for free is not just risible, it's offensive.