Last week, Chancellor of the Exchequer (the one in charge of the government's money) Gordon Brown made a speech which included this:
Too often there are workers without jobs side by side with jobs without workers [hang on, didn't Norman Tebbit use that phrase?] Tottenham, for example, has 3,500 men, 4,800 adults, unemployed while neighbouring districts have seen over sixty thousand vacancies in the last six months, with many more in the wider London economy.
Labour shortages exist today in large numbers in retail, hotels and restaurants, transport and communications and in every region.
To match the unemployed to vacancies we have introduced intensive area-based initiatives in difficult areas: fifteen employment zones 63 action teams Which have helped nearly seventy thousand people into jobs so far.
And building on this, we are piloting the step up scheme in fourteen areas, with another six starting in December — obliging the long-term unemployed to accept a guaranteed job which will offer, instead of the dole, secure waged employment. In London and selected cities, we are matching this new regime with mandatory work preparation courses for the long-term unemployed.
Some years ago, he and Tony Blair made a deal that Tony would support Gordon for the leadership when the time came. Blair ratted on that, and now Brown – the man without the job he was promised – is taking it out on the jobless.
Because he is a man with a job that, while very well paid, will pale into nothing compared to the seven figure salaries for part-time work that will be offered him the second he retires.
And he's saying that he's about to force other people to take whatever McJob someone is prepared to make available through a Job Centre. [Which have recently been rebranded, at huge public cost, as… wait for it… Job Centre Plus]
Has he, I wonder, examined just what those vacancies are and why they're not being filled?
'Waged'? Is it a coincidence that the jobs he mentions – retail, hotels and restaurants, transport and communications i.e. call centres – are the crappiest, lowest paid ones going? Is there the slightest doubt in anyone's mind why there are vacancies there, particularly in London?
When I got this job, I noted that it paid two and half times what an exactly equivalent one advertised that week at the JC did. Fuck off. Never mind being able to buy somewhere on that, you'd need Housing Benefit in order to rent.
Or the series of DTP jobs I also asked about then. 'Blah, blah, blah…' fine, I can do that '… needs fluent Arabic [or Urdu or…]'. Ah. Coo, I wonder why they're unfilled after three months…
A few months back, they introduced some terminals which enable you to search anywhere in the UK for jobs in the JC database. Extending the search to everywhere within the M25 (the motorway around London) I would typically find just three to five jobs I could plausibly go for. And he wants to be able to force people to accept anything.
'Secure' jobs? Well, the people forced into them won't be able to leave without losing benefits for months.
Someone do a 'Back to the Floor' on him, please, and get him to take anything he's offered and see how he does.
Oh, those work preparation courses? Don't make me laugh. Because they changed the name of the scheme – clearly people had caught on with the previous name – about eighteen months ago, I agreed to a month or so of one of these. What a fucking waste of time.
The course had been contracted out and of couse the lowest bid had won the contract. Unfortunately, that didn't leave any money for any, you know, content. By arranging to sit in the right seat with the ancient PCs, I worked on my MCSE – Minesweeper Consultant and Solitare Expert – skills and my Warlords scores were polished, but that's about it.
As far as job search went, they didn't even have the money to get more than one newspaper plus some free sheets. They used to beg us to bring in some other publications. "Internet jobsites are free to search…" "Yes, but we're not allowed to have access to the internet."
It's almost tempting to start a company to exploit this shit.