When is a Welfare State no longer a Welfare State?

With the proposals oozing there way into the media about the unemployed in the UK being made to work to earn their unemployment benefits has the Welfare State come to an end?

Should people who have been on long term unemployment benefit be made to sweep the steets, tidy the municipal parks and gardens or scrub grafitti off of the walls of the local car park?

If people are going to be "employed" to do these jobs would they not be able to expect all the perks and benefits that current roadsweepers and Council gardeners get?

Also just how many hours should they be expected work? With the national minimum wage for people over 22 being £5.52 an hour is it just a matter of divinding their weekly benefits by that figure to get an amount of hours?

Also and maybe more importantly with the global downturn and increased job losses happeing and expected in the UK is now the right time? With everyone being told to tighten their belts and Government departments being told to expect no further increases in public spending how can a Government afford to even contemplate this?

BBC News >> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7516551.stm

I'm personally not sure, depending on what time of the day, which way the wind is blowing and whether I've got a soap box handy I find myself either congratulating the Government for the proposals or contemplating finishing the job started by a few Catholics over 400 years ago.

If you can work why not? And yeah I would expect them to earn minimum wage + benefits for an amount of hours they choose, with a max of 40 hours.

If only 10-30% of the people will find a better suited job because they're forced to work anyway then it won't cost that much more.

I've no problem whatsoever with getting people to earn unemployment benefit if they are to be paid the minimum hourly rate... and provided we all see a drop in our NI contributions.

My problem will come when they expect people to work a full week for the fifty-odd quid that is the current base rate for unemployment benefit. If it were me, I'd rather not claim at all and make my living breaking and entering the homes of Daily Mail readers... with the current clear-up rates for burglaries only being around 5% (and dropping) it's a fairly risk free way to grab a couple of hundred quid in one night's work and an afternoon in a car boot sale.

You could build a special place for the unemployed and other undeserving poor to work unencumbered by family distractions - like this which would be much more efficient.

I don't think this kind of thing is specific to the UK. It seems a number of countries are finding that welfare programs, no matter how many people are actually in need of such aid, tend to eventually get abused by people that don't really need the aid. It sucks that such programs, as well intentioned as they are, are inevitably self-defeating. Nobody works so nobody pays into the system to help those that actually can't work.

As an aside, the shining star of socialism, Cuba, has recently decided that equal pay doesn't work.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas...s.ap/index.html

Welfare programmes and bosses pay both suffer from some abuses by undeserving freeloaders. This is an attribute of any system that is lightly policed - but not a reason to brand either as "not working"

Unless you favour a monitored police state, then there will always be abuses. The question is: is it beneficial as a whole to society to have a welfare system or not?

On the contrary... A greater percentage of UK citizens are in work now than EVER before... by the UK govt's own figures released just recently, over 20,000 million pounds (40,000 million US$) went unclaimed in state benefits in the past ten years. It is clear, then that not only is the system far from self defeating or counter productive, it is also a long way from being out of cash.

It is a myth, perpetrated by right wing UK tabloids, that the country cannot afford it or that the majority of claimants are undeserving or workshy layabouts. It is also a myth that the ideals of social democracies are failing because of this... if anything, such ideals and methods are increasing, proving very popular and on the whole, succeeding.

Which is why most Brits won't take this sort of thing as anything but a bit of populism aimed at stealing some Tory thunder... The welfare state is alive and well.

Are these people going to be doing makework stuff or are they going to be doing a job that would otherwise be done by someone else? i.e. are they going to be taking someone else's job?

I suppose arrgh that's something else what will rear it's head if this comes into being. I think to begin with they won't be taking other peoples jobs, but once the streets are clean, the gardens are watered and the grafitti is gone and there is a ready supply of people who are working 2 hours a day to get their Giro it won't be long before we see the Council workforce diminish.

I'll be very surprised if it ever comes about... the Tories used to rant on about workfare when they were in office, but nothing ever came of it.

The reason being.... it costs a truckload more money to equip, manage, supervise, train and transport people who don't want to be there, than it does just to give them a 50 quid giro once a fortnight and send them on their way. By the time this gets through to the "working end" of the policy making process, it will have turned into another "back to work" scheme where the long term unemployed will be offered meaningless part time "training" places for a set number of months, with employers getting the cost of the wage subsidised by the DHSS.

Back in Thatcher's Britain, as a young man, I was one of the 6.5 million unemployed, and I ended up on such a scheme with the (now pretty much defunct) Manpower Services Commission. It was 12 months of labouring for the council, was 25 hours a week, and managed by a separate department of the local authority. Everybody on it, didn't really want to be there, including the manager and supervisors, so nobody really did anything but sit around and read porn mags from an old tea chest in the bait cabin.... during the summer, I didn't even turn up for a whole month and nobody noticed, let alone said something or dock my pay (which was the going hourly rate for council labourers)

Despite having my head set alight once, is was one of the best "jobs" I ever had.

That really is the point. It's either going to be a waste of time, or the state doing something the private sector could do better. What government can do is help people stay afloat when they can't find work and, sometimes, help them find work.

From my own experience, a lot of the problems people have with finding work are to do with depression and low self esteem after losing a job. The type of people who staff job centres aren't equipped to help with that, and the way the system works seems to be designed to make you feel worse. Increasing benefits, and making them unconditional, might go further to getting people to re-engage with society and find a job then this sort of punitive measure ever will.

Sure they work. Some people that need the help get it. Maybe the system breaks down when some significant portion of the resources you invest in it doesn't get to where it's needed. You can see examples of this with a lot of large charities. It's good that people want to help out and donate to the charity, but exactly what percentage of what's donated actually gets to people that need the help?

When a society is affluent more resources can be poured into social services. It doesn't matter if x percentage of resources are wasted as there is more where that came from. When things get tight, and resources are more limited, reality kicks in and welfare programs get re-evaluated. Resources aren't unlimited.

It's been a few days so I'm going to double-post rather then edit. It's likely nobody will see the new edit if I did that. If a mod feels a need to merge I don't have a problem.

It didn't seem worthwhile to make a new thread so I figure this is as good a place as any to post this.

France's parliament has passed a law which effectively ends the country's compulsory 35-hour working week.

The new law will allow companies to strike individual deals with unions on working hours and overtime.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7522659.stm

Is this becoming a trend among socialist countries? Recently Cuba decided that equal pay doesn't work, the UK is wanting to put it's unemployed to work, and now France has decided people may need to work more in order to be competitive?

I for one would love to see people who get any kind of assistance from the government earn it. I see too many people where I live who don't have any ambition, they have no drive, no desire. Why is this? Because they know their money is going to be there on the first of the month. They know they can buy food, beer, cigarettes, whatever and they don't have to wake up and go to work like us shleps. Now we're looking at third and fourth generation welfare families who abuse the system because it's all they know. They're nothing but a waste of my money if you ask me. They should have to go out and actually do something for the money. I work a full time job, a part time job, and I do some work on the side for more cash so I can pay my bills, and afford the things I have. It irks me beyond belief when I see someone in front of me at the store who has two cartloads of food like steak, shrimp, and other things I'd like then when the bill comes, they whip out that little card that the government issued them. These are people younger than me, who look able bodied, yet I am the one scrimping and saving to break even? Screw that! Get off your fat arse and go to work!

This post has been edited by hm3buzz: Jul 24 2008, 05:55 AM

The French were always odd about their working hours, so this is more about changing cultural attitudes than socialist ones... The European Working Time Directive governs the maximum hours a person can work in a week, and that makes it illegal for any European to work more than a total of 48 hours a week (including overtime).

The French are at the lower end of the average working week in Europe at under 35 hours, but it almost certainly wont rise above the EU average of 40 hours a week.... excluding Britain, most Western European counties have about a 38 hour average working week.

On the whole, since 1970, Average EU working hours hav