Thursday, 10 July 2008
Nottingham Green councillors support Unison picket
Councillors Richard & Sue Mallender will be on the picket line at Nottingham City Council (for whom we we both work), hopefully with other GP members.
Rally for Pat Carmody and the union - Tuesday (15 July),
Up and down the country, the right to organise is under attack. Pat Carmody is a union rep, sacked by call centre company Pell & Bales for writing a four sentence article about union news in a weekly paper - see it below. Union members at P&B have called for support for a demonstration as Pat goes into his appeal hearing...
10-11am. Outside the P&B Old St offices - 211 Old St!
Pat is a union rep at the Old St office of call centre firm Pell & Bales, and has been a big part of building an active union that has campaigned successfully to save jobs and win a 15% pay rise. P&B workers make fundraising calls on behalf of major charities like Oxfam and UNICEF - but the company doesn't always treat staff ethically. Pat has been sacked for putting his name to a factual four sentence article in the Socialist Worker - see the article below - and many believe, in fact, for being an effective organiser. P&B is a small company that cares about its image. Protest can make a difference!
If you can, please also send a message of protest to Pell & Bales CEO Karl Holweger! Write to kholweger@pellandbales.co.uk Please cc: pnbunion@googlemail.com to find out about our ongoing campaign
Support Pat as he goes into his appeal hearing - Tuesday, 10-11am, outside the Old St offices! Right by Old St tube, exit 7.
"Standing up for call centre staff" - 7 June 2008 - the article Pat has been fired for writing
A well-attended meeting of CWU union members at Pell and Bales, a call centre in Old Street, central London, launched a campaign to defend a fellow worker last week. The caller was suspended pending a disciplinary hearing following a complaint made about him during training. For asking some pertinent questions, he was accused of "playing to the crowd" and "scowling at the carpet". Many colleagues have signed a petition calling for the charges to be dropped.
Pat Carmody, CWU member
10-11am. Outside the P&B Old St offices - 211 Old St!
Pat is a union rep at the Old St office of call centre firm Pell & Bales, and has been a big part of building an active union that has campaigned successfully to save jobs and win a 15% pay rise. P&B workers make fundraising calls on behalf of major charities like Oxfam and UNICEF - but the company doesn't always treat staff ethically. Pat has been sacked for putting his name to a factual four sentence article in the Socialist Worker - see the article below - and many believe, in fact, for being an effective organiser. P&B is a small company that cares about its image. Protest can make a difference!
If you can, please also send a message of protest to Pell & Bales CEO Karl Holweger! Write to kholweger@pellandbales.co.uk Please cc: pnbunion@googlemail.com to find out about our ongoing campaign
Support Pat as he goes into his appeal hearing - Tuesday, 10-11am, outside the Old St offices! Right by Old St tube, exit 7.
"Standing up for call centre staff" - 7 June 2008 - the article Pat has been fired for writing
A well-attended meeting of CWU union members at Pell and Bales, a call centre in Old Street, central London, launched a campaign to defend a fellow worker last week. The caller was suspended pending a disciplinary hearing following a complaint made about him during training. For asking some pertinent questions, he was accused of "playing to the crowd" and "scowling at the carpet". Many colleagues have signed a petition calling for the charges to be dropped.
Pat Carmody, CWU member
Brighton Greens pledge to Respect Unison picket line:
Letter from Cllr Keith Taylor Convenor, Green Party Councillors
Sir,
The council's Tory administration and senior officers have got it wrong. ("Strike won't stop meeting" Argus July 10). Chief Executive Alan McCarthy says there was no alternative other than to press ahead with a meeting of full council on July 17 - an official day of union action - as there was urgent business to attend to. He was wrong, and I told him so.
Providing there was all party agreement we could have held an 'urgency sub' meeting of council to agree the pressing items. This would have allowed a postponement of the July 17 meeting to another date. For the administration and the Tories to make light of councillors' genuine beliefs that workers should receive a fair living wage by simply riding roughshod over them is not acceptable. Green Councillors will join the picket lines in solidarity with staff, apart from the two members needed to propose and second a resolution offering support for workers' wage claims. Crossing a picket line is a matter of personal conscience no Greens will do it and we are told no Labour members will either.
We will have to wait to see where Tory and LibDem councillors stand. When it takes the highest paid council worker just over two and half hours to be paid what it takes the lowest paid all week to earn one cannot avoid thinking that top earners don't have as keen an eye as others on either their personal budgets or social justice.
Neither will it escape attention that by pressing ahead with the meeting the Tory administration can dodge answering difficult Green questions over key issues such as the Falmer Academy privatization, the cost of operating new council systems, and the distribution of neighbourhood renewal funding. We will continue to argue for fair pay for staff and fair treatment for the city and its residents, both inside and outside the council's chambers!
Cllr Keith Taylor Convenor, Green Party Councillors
Sir,
The council's Tory administration and senior officers have got it wrong. ("Strike won't stop meeting" Argus July 10). Chief Executive Alan McCarthy says there was no alternative other than to press ahead with a meeting of full council on July 17 - an official day of union action - as there was urgent business to attend to. He was wrong, and I told him so.
Providing there was all party agreement we could have held an 'urgency sub' meeting of council to agree the pressing items. This would have allowed a postponement of the July 17 meeting to another date. For the administration and the Tories to make light of councillors' genuine beliefs that workers should receive a fair living wage by simply riding roughshod over them is not acceptable. Green Councillors will join the picket lines in solidarity with staff, apart from the two members needed to propose and second a resolution offering support for workers' wage claims. Crossing a picket line is a matter of personal conscience no Greens will do it and we are told no Labour members will either.
We will have to wait to see where Tory and LibDem councillors stand. When it takes the highest paid council worker just over two and half hours to be paid what it takes the lowest paid all week to earn one cannot avoid thinking that top earners don't have as keen an eye as others on either their personal budgets or social justice.
Neither will it escape attention that by pressing ahead with the meeting the Tory administration can dodge answering difficult Green questions over key issues such as the Falmer Academy privatization, the cost of operating new council systems, and the distribution of neighbourhood renewal funding. We will continue to argue for fair pay for staff and fair treatment for the city and its residents, both inside and outside the council's chambers!
Cllr Keith Taylor Convenor, Green Party Councillors
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
It's time to fight, and it's time to win! by James Caspell, Green Party Member and Lambeth Unison Representative
Next week will see hundreds of thousands of local government workers undertaking strike action in response to the Government refusing to negotiate over the real-terms pay cut it is trying to impose on its employees.
So why should local government workers go on strike?
In the past year, the average household bill has gone up by £1,300. Food bills have gone up by 9 % and energy bills by 15%. Since 2004, food costs are up by 30%.
Our the employer is offering us a 2.45% "increase" - effectively a pay cut for the tenth year in a row. This means that someone in the same job, on the same pay scale ten years ago was effectively better off in 1998 than they are in 2008.
Local government workers also have the least pay, holiday entitlements, parental rights and sick leave in the public sector.
Some argue that to compare our pay cut with the astronomical bonuses that people are still 'earning' in the city - or executives at the BBC have just been awarded - is the "politics of envy", New Labour's favourite slogan in dismissing the pre-WWII levels of the UK's widening income inequality. It isn't. It's the politics of class.
Last year an extra £1 billion in efficiency savings were made above and beyond the Governments own targets on the back of the hard work of millions of public servants. It is not the case that the government doesn't have the money to award the 6% that Unison is asking for to "catch up and match up" with the pay cuts imposed over the last two years. Meanwhile, even the Governor of Bank of England has admitted that public sector pay increases are not causing inflation.
Only 10% of Unison's local government membership voted to accept the derisory offer currently on the table and whilst no one likes to forgo pay in the short term, workers stand to win up to ten times more financially than we will lose by taking 2 days of strike action.
The strength of the turnout is what will decide the result of the dispute and send a clear message to local govenrment employers on pay, but also demonstrate our strength and ability to win the fight on conditions and opposing privatisation.
We can win; the government is weak and other public sector unions are also striking over pay, building confidence across the movement. Elsewhere, the most militant unions are the most successful in furthering the interests of all workers - such as the RMT - and it is time local government workers learnt from our more active comrades in resisting constant neo-liberal attacks from Labour, Lib Dem and Tory administrations up and down the country.
Next week is an opportunity to say, "Enough is enough". It's time to fight, and it's time to win!
So why should local government workers go on strike?
In the past year, the average household bill has gone up by £1,300. Food bills have gone up by 9 % and energy bills by 15%. Since 2004, food costs are up by 30%.
Our the employer is offering us a 2.45% "increase" - effectively a pay cut for the tenth year in a row. This means that someone in the same job, on the same pay scale ten years ago was effectively better off in 1998 than they are in 2008.
Local government workers also have the least pay, holiday entitlements, parental rights and sick leave in the public sector.
Some argue that to compare our pay cut with the astronomical bonuses that people are still 'earning' in the city - or executives at the BBC have just been awarded - is the "politics of envy", New Labour's favourite slogan in dismissing the pre-WWII levels of the UK's widening income inequality. It isn't. It's the politics of class.
Last year an extra £1 billion in efficiency savings were made above and beyond the Governments own targets on the back of the hard work of millions of public servants. It is not the case that the government doesn't have the money to award the 6% that Unison is asking for to "catch up and match up" with the pay cuts imposed over the last two years. Meanwhile, even the Governor of Bank of England has admitted that public sector pay increases are not causing inflation.
Only 10% of Unison's local government membership voted to accept the derisory offer currently on the table and whilst no one likes to forgo pay in the short term, workers stand to win up to ten times more financially than we will lose by taking 2 days of strike action.
The strength of the turnout is what will decide the result of the dispute and send a clear message to local govenrment employers on pay, but also demonstrate our strength and ability to win the fight on conditions and opposing privatisation.
We can win; the government is weak and other public sector unions are also striking over pay, building confidence across the movement. Elsewhere, the most militant unions are the most successful in furthering the interests of all workers - such as the RMT - and it is time local government workers learnt from our more active comrades in resisting constant neo-liberal attacks from Labour, Lib Dem and Tory administrations up and down the country.
Next week is an opportunity to say, "Enough is enough". It's time to fight, and it's time to win!
35 hour week GREEN PARTY BRIEFING NOTE FOR CANDIDATES from Brian Heatley
Summary
To introduce a 35 hour week along the lines of the French model.
What is the proposal?
To oblige employers to enter into collective agreements with their workforces where the normal working week averages no more than 35 hours over an agreed period, typically one year.
Voluntary overtime remains possible, but average total working time with overtime must not exceed over 48 hours over the period, and must be paid at a premium rate.
Hourly paid workers, especially those on the minimum wage, will be protected from any overall pay reduction caused by a reduction in working hours.
Arguments for the proposal.
This proposal addresses Britain’s long hours culture, where:
- 4 million work over 48 hours a week on average
- two thirds of them have not been asked, as required by law, to opt-out of the EU working time directive
- 60% of those working more than 48 hours say they want to work less
- full time UK employees work the longest average hours in Europe, 43.5 hours as against 38.2 in France and 39.9 in Germany
- long hours are damaging family life and causing stress and illness
- one in three workers don’t take all the holidays they are entitled to because of pressures at work.[1]
Less work means more time for family life and childcare, for activity around the house like cooking and DiY, for life in our local communities and for self expression, sport, exercise, personal interests and leisure.
If unemployment rises, shorter hours will create more jobs; in France up to 500,000 new jobs were created.[2]
Long hours culture particularly discriminates against women in the workplace, since they are less well placed if developing a career necessarily involves long hours, and places greater burdens upon them at home.
Productivity increases with shorter hours – it is higher in France and Germany. Workers are more alert and energetic, and work smarter rather than longer.
Defensive points
Employers will not be able to afford it, and it will damage the economy. There is no evidence of actual damage to the French economy. And some things are more important than work.
It is far too inflexible for small employers. Small employers would receive help to adapt, and they coped in France.
The need for collective agreements gives Trades Unions too much power. It is right that workers are protected by Trades Unions, and if the need for collective agreements gives them a boost that is a good thing.
The averaging provisions allow employers to demand too much flexibility, and some employers simply increase the intensity of work. That is why the detailed arrangements need to be the subject of proper collective agreements.
Suggestions for local action
Contact your local Trades Council to find out about campaigns about long hours in your area (contacts at http://www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/index.cfm?mins=405).
Background
This is existing MfSS policy in WR344 which says ‘We are committed in the medium-term to a reduction in working hours to an average of 35 hours per week. The Green Party will enact legislation in order to bring about this change.’
The French 35 hour week was introduced in 2000 for firms with over 20 employees and in 2002 for smaller companies.[3] It replaced a 39 hour limit. It was relaxed in 2005 in the private sector, to allow up to 48 hours, the EU Working time directive limit.[4] President Sarkozy has opposed the 35 hour week in the past, but public opinion has recently forced him to backtrack.[5] Its effects are widely contested.
The UK has an opt-out to the EU Working time Directive permitting employees to agree to work more than 48 hours. The principal TUC campaign on long hours focuses on ending the opt-out,[6] which we also oppose (WR343).
Further information
For facts on long hours see the TUC website at http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/tuc-11005-f0.cfm. Contact Pete Murry of the Green Party Trade Union Group on yrrumuk@yahoo.co.uk.
[1] Facts from TUC at http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/index.cfm?mins=474&minors=474
[2] An estimate from http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2001/07/feature/fr0107170f.htm, though the extent of job creation is very contested.
[3] See http://www.triplet.com/50-10_employment/50-20_workingtime.asp.
[4] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4373167.stm.
[5] See for example http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,555655,00.html.
[6] See http://www.tuc.org.uk/itsabouttime/endoptout.cfm?theme=itsabouttime.
To introduce a 35 hour week along the lines of the French model.
What is the proposal?
To oblige employers to enter into collective agreements with their workforces where the normal working week averages no more than 35 hours over an agreed period, typically one year.
Voluntary overtime remains possible, but average total working time with overtime must not exceed over 48 hours over the period, and must be paid at a premium rate.
Hourly paid workers, especially those on the minimum wage, will be protected from any overall pay reduction caused by a reduction in working hours.
Arguments for the proposal.
This proposal addresses Britain’s long hours culture, where:
- 4 million work over 48 hours a week on average
- two thirds of them have not been asked, as required by law, to opt-out of the EU working time directive
- 60% of those working more than 48 hours say they want to work less
- full time UK employees work the longest average hours in Europe, 43.5 hours as against 38.2 in France and 39.9 in Germany
- long hours are damaging family life and causing stress and illness
- one in three workers don’t take all the holidays they are entitled to because of pressures at work.[1]
Less work means more time for family life and childcare, for activity around the house like cooking and DiY, for life in our local communities and for self expression, sport, exercise, personal interests and leisure.
If unemployment rises, shorter hours will create more jobs; in France up to 500,000 new jobs were created.[2]
Long hours culture particularly discriminates against women in the workplace, since they are less well placed if developing a career necessarily involves long hours, and places greater burdens upon them at home.
Productivity increases with shorter hours – it is higher in France and Germany. Workers are more alert and energetic, and work smarter rather than longer.
Defensive points
Employers will not be able to afford it, and it will damage the economy. There is no evidence of actual damage to the French economy. And some things are more important than work.
It is far too inflexible for small employers. Small employers would receive help to adapt, and they coped in France.
The need for collective agreements gives Trades Unions too much power. It is right that workers are protected by Trades Unions, and if the need for collective agreements gives them a boost that is a good thing.
The averaging provisions allow employers to demand too much flexibility, and some employers simply increase the intensity of work. That is why the detailed arrangements need to be the subject of proper collective agreements.
Suggestions for local action
Contact your local Trades Council to find out about campaigns about long hours in your area (contacts at http://www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/index.cfm?mins=405).
Background
This is existing MfSS policy in WR344 which says ‘We are committed in the medium-term to a reduction in working hours to an average of 35 hours per week. The Green Party will enact legislation in order to bring about this change.’
The French 35 hour week was introduced in 2000 for firms with over 20 employees and in 2002 for smaller companies.[3] It replaced a 39 hour limit. It was relaxed in 2005 in the private sector, to allow up to 48 hours, the EU Working time directive limit.[4] President Sarkozy has opposed the 35 hour week in the past, but public opinion has recently forced him to backtrack.[5] Its effects are widely contested.
The UK has an opt-out to the EU Working time Directive permitting employees to agree to work more than 48 hours. The principal TUC campaign on long hours focuses on ending the opt-out,[6] which we also oppose (WR343).
Further information
For facts on long hours see the TUC website at http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/tuc-11005-f0.cfm. Contact Pete Murry of the Green Party Trade Union Group on yrrumuk@yahoo.co.uk.
[1] Facts from TUC at http://www.tuc.org.uk/work_life/index.cfm?mins=474&minors=474
[2] An estimate from http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2001/07/feature/fr0107170f.htm, though the extent of job creation is very contested.
[3] See http://www.triplet.com/50-10_employment/50-20_workingtime.asp.
[4] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4373167.stm.
[5] See for example http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,555655,00.html.
[6] See http://www.tuc.org.uk/itsabouttime/endoptout.cfm?theme=itsabouttime.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Take up thy bed and work : Employment and Support Allowance and the new politics of disability.
(This is the text of a speech by Mark Baker of Royal National Institute for Deaf people that he gave to the recent PCS conference in Brighton. He was asked to give the speech as Chair of the Policy Group of the Disability Benefits Consortium. The speech, therefore, was an expression of the consortium's views, rather than RNID's. (ed.))
First of all, let me thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today, and give you a perspective on welfare reform from the viewpoint of the claimant.
If I can just introduce myself – I’ve been working in the disability sector since 1997, and currently chair the policy group of the Disability Benefits Consortium. The DBC consists of over 25 national organisations that represent the needs of people why rely on disability benefits, providing an information-sharing resource as well as a campaigning function. It is this latter capacity that we have been involved in the ongoing programme of welfare reform over the past four years or so, lobbying ministers and meeting with civil servants.
When I first came to Cardiff in the dying years of the Thatcher regime, it was, I have to say, a city showing signs of neglect, with a future based more on hope than expectation. Twenty years on, and the transformation is remarkable – Cardiff has become a modern European capital city with a future to look forward to. But the success of Cardiff must not be allowed to mask the deep scars that remain in many parts of South Wales, scars left by deindustrialization that mark not only the landscape, but the communities and the people that live in them. The policies of successive governments have neglected too many people, leaving them to lives of poverty and exclusion, meaning that pockets of South Wales have some of the highest rates of Incapacity benefit claimants in the UK.
The aims of the ongoing process of welfare reform, we are told, is to give people the opportunity and the practical tools to lift themselves out of poverty and into paid work; And I expect that we’ll hear a lot about the theoretical debate behind welfare reform today – the ideological and scientific approaches and the vision of a flexible, engaging and unified welfare system. I’m here to look at the practical side of the equation, and show the gulf that is emerging between theory and practice – a gulf that too many of the people I represent may fall into.
I’m sure we all recall the clarion cry at the heart of reform - the oft-repeated promise to ‘get one million people off Incapacity Benefit and into work’.
This would be achieved by striking a new balance between rights and responsibilities – a ‘something for something’ culture wherein those who wish to claim from the state have to fulfil a series of duties not incumbent upon others. These include, for most claimants, engaging in work-related activity in the understanding that failure to do may result in the application of (I believe unnecessary) sanctions and a reduction in benefit. In exchange for this, the government is has promised better support, both financially and in terms of help in getting back to work. These, then, are the government’s conditions for conditionality – the carrot by which they justify the stick. We give you more, but we shall expect more from you in return. This, then, is the new politics of disability
Being immersed in the detail of this complex reform over such a period of time can make it difficult to select areas of particular concern, but with so much of the programme already in place, waiting to be launched onto a largely unsuspecting public, I’d like to concentrate on three issues that will affect not merely those people who will be likely to claim Employment and Support Allowance, but also those who are in contact with them, including JCP staff.
The issues are:
The Work Capability Assessment and its effects.
The rates at which ESA will be paid.
Employment services and long-term claimants.
The Work Capability Assessment
The Work Capability Assessment (or WCA) is the name of the new gateway for ESA, and its introduction will have major ramifications for new and current claimants alike. It’s predecessor, the Personal Capability Assessment was widely rated as being one of the most stringent gateways to disability benefits in Western Europe. Well, it just got tougher.
There are welcome improvements. The greater understanding of the barriers faced by people with mental illness. learning difficulties and Autistic Spectrum Disorder is a step forward, as is the combination of mental and physical disabilities. However, pilot studies undertaken by the DWP have shown that there will be a significant disallowance rate – one in eight of those who would have received IB will not receive ESA.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the Government’s target of getting one million people off Incapacity Benefit is starting to look a lot easier.
The most obvious ramification is that there will be people with long-term health conditions and disabilities who will be denied access to ESA. The Government believes that there will be 60,000 more failed applications for ESA per annum than there are for IB. That’s up to 60,000 people every year who will have to claim JSA or Income Support instead.
A further issue concerns those people who are currently claiming IB, but who will either be migrated across to ESA in time, or will be subjected to the new WCA as the gateway to their current benefit. It can be assumed that the 12 per cent disallowance rate can be applied to these people, too. Currently, we have over 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefits – and crudely, 12 per cent of 2.7 million is 324,000. If the WCA were applied immediately to the current Incapacity Benefit caseload, the government would already be more than halfway to its target.
This does rather suggest that there is a policy gulf between getting a million people off IB and getting them into work.
Now, what happens to those people who had been claiming IB, but are found to be ineligible for ESA? The answer, effectively given by Lord McKenzie of Luton in answer to a question by Baroness Greengross last week is ‘nothing’ – they can apply for JSA and Income Support, and can access such support as these benefits provide. According to the Secretary of State James Purnell, these people are now ‘not disabled’ and therefore do not require specialist help. These people, who had been found to be disabled have been magically recategorized as ‘able bodied’, merely by the application of the new assessment.
So, for these people, many of whom will have been out of work for some time, having been on long-term IB with no support in finding work, life will change a great deal. They will have to engage with the harsher regime of life on JSA, but they will not be eligible to receive the support that ESA had appeared to promise. There will be no tailored interventions, no condition management and no return-to-work payments for these people – and given the success rates of JSA, particularly with people aged over 40 with a poor health record, there will be little chance of finding work.
Furthermore, these people will be poorer. And as the first group earmarked for migration is younger people, this may well mean the further impoverishment of young families. For some people, the reality of welfare reform appears to differ markedly from its promise.
The rates at which ESA will be paid.
What about those who are deemed eligible for Employment and Support Allowance?
First of all, they will have to go through a thirteen week assessment phase, wherein they will receive a rate equivalent to that of Job Seekers Allowance. At the end of this period, successful claimants will not have their benefit backdated to the start of the claim, irrespective of how obvious their need might be.
The majority of successful claimants will be placed on the element of ESA that sees the claimant having to fulfil certain conditions – for today’s purposes, I shall refer to it as the ‘conditional’ group – these people will have to engage in work-related activity in order to continue to receive their benefit. A smaller minority of people with more complex barriers will be placed in the ‘support’ category – it having been recognised that they cannot reasonably be expected to engage with the world of work. How will these two groups of people fare under the new system?
In a letter to the 100 MPs with the highest number of Incapacity Benefit claimants on the 3rd of January 2006, then Secretary of State John Hutton promised reform that would “give genuine protection to those who truly cannot work”, and stated that we should not accept “a system that perpetuates hardship”. In the foreword to the Green Paper , he further stated that the welfare state must “focus its energy on tackling poverty and social exclusion”.
As well as these, repeated assurances were given by Ministers on the floors of both Houses that the main phase rate of ESA for those in the conditional group would be “paid above the present long-term IB rate”.
How do these promises measure up?
When the benefit rates were announced in March of this year, they were identical to the recently uprated long-term rates of Incapacity Benefit. The argument for this apparent volte-face being that the statements made were correct, in that the current ESA rates are higher than the rate of IB was at the time. However, we believe that whilst this may be technically correct, the fact that the basic rate of ESA will be paid at the same rate as the long-term rate of Incapacity Benefit currently undermines the argument that claimants will be getting ‘something for something’.
There are other discrepancies, too.
Calculations made by Disability Alliance show that whilst the introduction of ESA may benefit many people financially in the short term, their long-term prospects are bleaker. In fact, only single people in the support group will be better-off in the long-term – and some of those will actually be worse off in the short-term. Everyone else loses, relative to IB, over time. I shan’t explore the labyrinthine details, but these are the general facts.
For most single people in the work-related activity group, after the first year, their income will be £1.85 per week lower than it would have been on IB.
For many couples in the work-related activity group, after the first year, their income will be £12.85 per week lower than it would have been on IB.
For many couples in the support group their income will be £7.85 per week lower than it would have been on IB, for the entire duration of their claim. It’s also worth pointing out that this includes couples who are claiming on the grounds of terminal illness.
I think it’s time that these discrepancies were addressed and remedied. It seems strange that it should be couples who miss out the most – at a time when the government admits that it is failing to meet its challenging and laudable child poverty targets, that the welfare system seems to be driving some of the poorest families deeper into poverty.
Employment training and provision
It’s not my role here to debate the political ins and outs of contracting out the provision of employment support for disabled people. My personal view is that in nearly all cases, excepting only those where highly specialist provision is required, Job Centre Plus does as good, if not better a job than any generalist employment provider could hope to.
However, we are already seeing problems with the way that Pathways to Work is being rolled out across the country, in the way that contracts are written and subcontracts decided. Yes, Pathways has some excellent elements – return to work credit, condition management, tailored action plans, and we are seeing a more flexible attitude being adopted towards permitted work. All of these are good. However, none of them require the intervention of the private sector to make them work.
What concerns me more, though, is the ways in which placing support in the hands of the market will impact upon those people who face the greatest barriers to return to work. The impact, if you will, of economies of scale on the labour market.
Put simply, it does not cost the same amount to get all disabled people work-ready. People with mild musculo-skeletal conditions, or living with stress, debilitating though these conditions are, will not require as much support as, say, a profoundly deaf person who only uses British Sign Language to communicate. It can take a significant investment in terms of time and money to get a BSL-user close enough to the labour market for them to stand a realistic chance of getting a job. The same will go for blind people with no light perception, people with severe mental health disorders, acute learning difficulties or combinations of multiple conditions and barriers.
Now, put yourself in the place of the private contractor. With payment by results, and the only valid result being the numbers of people into work, where are you going to expend your resources?
The answer is obvious. You concentrate your resources on those already close to the labour market, confident that they will requite relatively little investment, and that a plentiful supply of new recruits for the new reserve army of labour is always available.
And it’s not just about cost. At RNID, we invest in getting profoundly deaf people into work, and we know better than most that you can train someone, support them, skill them, lead them to the employer’s door and ring the bell. But that doesn’t mean the door will open, or the candidate be ushered inside.
So again, it makes less sense to plunge resources into those furthest away from the labour market, as the labour market itself is least likely to engage with them. The system appears to disincentivize engaging with those people who need the most support, and instead reduces Pathways to Work to a simple unit / cost equation and the tawdry spectacle of spread-betting on the labour market.
Our fear is that the net result of this will see those people with the least chance of finding work being left on the margins of support – fulfilling their responsibilities, but without the realization of their rights. And for the majority, the longer they remain on benefits, the less money they will have compared to the IB system. It would appear as though reform will function to penalize some people on the basis that their employment service providers have failed them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, then, it seems to me that many of the promises that lay at the heart of the welfare reform programme have still yet to materialize. Instead of being supported off benefit and into work,
Many people will be thrown off one benefit and onto another, with little help to find work as a consequence.
Many people will actually be worse off under ESA than they would have been under the current arrangements.
Many people will not receive the support and assistance they need to gain and retain paid work.
I leave you with the question then, as to how the government’s stated aims can be met by these reforms. Whether the redrafting of the social contract between the state and the disabled individual strikes a fair balance between rights and responsibilities, or whether the government itself is failing in its own responsibilities to provide the very assistance, protection and care that it promised.
First of all, let me thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today, and give you a perspective on welfare reform from the viewpoint of the claimant.
If I can just introduce myself – I’ve been working in the disability sector since 1997, and currently chair the policy group of the Disability Benefits Consortium. The DBC consists of over 25 national organisations that represent the needs of people why rely on disability benefits, providing an information-sharing resource as well as a campaigning function. It is this latter capacity that we have been involved in the ongoing programme of welfare reform over the past four years or so, lobbying ministers and meeting with civil servants.
When I first came to Cardiff in the dying years of the Thatcher regime, it was, I have to say, a city showing signs of neglect, with a future based more on hope than expectation. Twenty years on, and the transformation is remarkable – Cardiff has become a modern European capital city with a future to look forward to. But the success of Cardiff must not be allowed to mask the deep scars that remain in many parts of South Wales, scars left by deindustrialization that mark not only the landscape, but the communities and the people that live in them. The policies of successive governments have neglected too many people, leaving them to lives of poverty and exclusion, meaning that pockets of South Wales have some of the highest rates of Incapacity benefit claimants in the UK.
The aims of the ongoing process of welfare reform, we are told, is to give people the opportunity and the practical tools to lift themselves out of poverty and into paid work; And I expect that we’ll hear a lot about the theoretical debate behind welfare reform today – the ideological and scientific approaches and the vision of a flexible, engaging and unified welfare system. I’m here to look at the practical side of the equation, and show the gulf that is emerging between theory and practice – a gulf that too many of the people I represent may fall into.
I’m sure we all recall the clarion cry at the heart of reform - the oft-repeated promise to ‘get one million people off Incapacity Benefit and into work’.
This would be achieved by striking a new balance between rights and responsibilities – a ‘something for something’ culture wherein those who wish to claim from the state have to fulfil a series of duties not incumbent upon others. These include, for most claimants, engaging in work-related activity in the understanding that failure to do may result in the application of (I believe unnecessary) sanctions and a reduction in benefit. In exchange for this, the government is has promised better support, both financially and in terms of help in getting back to work. These, then, are the government’s conditions for conditionality – the carrot by which they justify the stick. We give you more, but we shall expect more from you in return. This, then, is the new politics of disability
Being immersed in the detail of this complex reform over such a period of time can make it difficult to select areas of particular concern, but with so much of the programme already in place, waiting to be launched onto a largely unsuspecting public, I’d like to concentrate on three issues that will affect not merely those people who will be likely to claim Employment and Support Allowance, but also those who are in contact with them, including JCP staff.
The issues are:
The Work Capability Assessment and its effects.
The rates at which ESA will be paid.
Employment services and long-term claimants.
The Work Capability Assessment
The Work Capability Assessment (or WCA) is the name of the new gateway for ESA, and its introduction will have major ramifications for new and current claimants alike. It’s predecessor, the Personal Capability Assessment was widely rated as being one of the most stringent gateways to disability benefits in Western Europe. Well, it just got tougher.
There are welcome improvements. The greater understanding of the barriers faced by people with mental illness. learning difficulties and Autistic Spectrum Disorder is a step forward, as is the combination of mental and physical disabilities. However, pilot studies undertaken by the DWP have shown that there will be a significant disallowance rate – one in eight of those who would have received IB will not receive ESA.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the Government’s target of getting one million people off Incapacity Benefit is starting to look a lot easier.
The most obvious ramification is that there will be people with long-term health conditions and disabilities who will be denied access to ESA. The Government believes that there will be 60,000 more failed applications for ESA per annum than there are for IB. That’s up to 60,000 people every year who will have to claim JSA or Income Support instead.
A further issue concerns those people who are currently claiming IB, but who will either be migrated across to ESA in time, or will be subjected to the new WCA as the gateway to their current benefit. It can be assumed that the 12 per cent disallowance rate can be applied to these people, too. Currently, we have over 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefits – and crudely, 12 per cent of 2.7 million is 324,000. If the WCA were applied immediately to the current Incapacity Benefit caseload, the government would already be more than halfway to its target.
This does rather suggest that there is a policy gulf between getting a million people off IB and getting them into work.
Now, what happens to those people who had been claiming IB, but are found to be ineligible for ESA? The answer, effectively given by Lord McKenzie of Luton in answer to a question by Baroness Greengross last week is ‘nothing’ – they can apply for JSA and Income Support, and can access such support as these benefits provide. According to the Secretary of State James Purnell, these people are now ‘not disabled’ and therefore do not require specialist help. These people, who had been found to be disabled have been magically recategorized as ‘able bodied’, merely by the application of the new assessment.
So, for these people, many of whom will have been out of work for some time, having been on long-term IB with no support in finding work, life will change a great deal. They will have to engage with the harsher regime of life on JSA, but they will not be eligible to receive the support that ESA had appeared to promise. There will be no tailored interventions, no condition management and no return-to-work payments for these people – and given the success rates of JSA, particularly with people aged over 40 with a poor health record, there will be little chance of finding work.
Furthermore, these people will be poorer. And as the first group earmarked for migration is younger people, this may well mean the further impoverishment of young families. For some people, the reality of welfare reform appears to differ markedly from its promise.
The rates at which ESA will be paid.
What about those who are deemed eligible for Employment and Support Allowance?
First of all, they will have to go through a thirteen week assessment phase, wherein they will receive a rate equivalent to that of Job Seekers Allowance. At the end of this period, successful claimants will not have their benefit backdated to the start of the claim, irrespective of how obvious their need might be.
The majority of successful claimants will be placed on the element of ESA that sees the claimant having to fulfil certain conditions – for today’s purposes, I shall refer to it as the ‘conditional’ group – these people will have to engage in work-related activity in order to continue to receive their benefit. A smaller minority of people with more complex barriers will be placed in the ‘support’ category – it having been recognised that they cannot reasonably be expected to engage with the world of work. How will these two groups of people fare under the new system?
In a letter to the 100 MPs with the highest number of Incapacity Benefit claimants on the 3rd of January 2006, then Secretary of State John Hutton promised reform that would “give genuine protection to those who truly cannot work”, and stated that we should not accept “a system that perpetuates hardship”. In the foreword to the Green Paper , he further stated that the welfare state must “focus its energy on tackling poverty and social exclusion”.
As well as these, repeated assurances were given by Ministers on the floors of both Houses that the main phase rate of ESA for those in the conditional group would be “paid above the present long-term IB rate”.
How do these promises measure up?
When the benefit rates were announced in March of this year, they were identical to the recently uprated long-term rates of Incapacity Benefit. The argument for this apparent volte-face being that the statements made were correct, in that the current ESA rates are higher than the rate of IB was at the time. However, we believe that whilst this may be technically correct, the fact that the basic rate of ESA will be paid at the same rate as the long-term rate of Incapacity Benefit currently undermines the argument that claimants will be getting ‘something for something’.
There are other discrepancies, too.
Calculations made by Disability Alliance show that whilst the introduction of ESA may benefit many people financially in the short term, their long-term prospects are bleaker. In fact, only single people in the support group will be better-off in the long-term – and some of those will actually be worse off in the short-term. Everyone else loses, relative to IB, over time. I shan’t explore the labyrinthine details, but these are the general facts.
For most single people in the work-related activity group, after the first year, their income will be £1.85 per week lower than it would have been on IB.
For many couples in the work-related activity group, after the first year, their income will be £12.85 per week lower than it would have been on IB.
For many couples in the support group their income will be £7.85 per week lower than it would have been on IB, for the entire duration of their claim. It’s also worth pointing out that this includes couples who are claiming on the grounds of terminal illness.
I think it’s time that these discrepancies were addressed and remedied. It seems strange that it should be couples who miss out the most – at a time when the government admits that it is failing to meet its challenging and laudable child poverty targets, that the welfare system seems to be driving some of the poorest families deeper into poverty.
Employment training and provision
It’s not my role here to debate the political ins and outs of contracting out the provision of employment support for disabled people. My personal view is that in nearly all cases, excepting only those where highly specialist provision is required, Job Centre Plus does as good, if not better a job than any generalist employment provider could hope to.
However, we are already seeing problems with the way that Pathways to Work is being rolled out across the country, in the way that contracts are written and subcontracts decided. Yes, Pathways has some excellent elements – return to work credit, condition management, tailored action plans, and we are seeing a more flexible attitude being adopted towards permitted work. All of these are good. However, none of them require the intervention of the private sector to make them work.
What concerns me more, though, is the ways in which placing support in the hands of the market will impact upon those people who face the greatest barriers to return to work. The impact, if you will, of economies of scale on the labour market.
Put simply, it does not cost the same amount to get all disabled people work-ready. People with mild musculo-skeletal conditions, or living with stress, debilitating though these conditions are, will not require as much support as, say, a profoundly deaf person who only uses British Sign Language to communicate. It can take a significant investment in terms of time and money to get a BSL-user close enough to the labour market for them to stand a realistic chance of getting a job. The same will go for blind people with no light perception, people with severe mental health disorders, acute learning difficulties or combinations of multiple conditions and barriers.
Now, put yourself in the place of the private contractor. With payment by results, and the only valid result being the numbers of people into work, where are you going to expend your resources?
The answer is obvious. You concentrate your resources on those already close to the labour market, confident that they will requite relatively little investment, and that a plentiful supply of new recruits for the new reserve army of labour is always available.
And it’s not just about cost. At RNID, we invest in getting profoundly deaf people into work, and we know better than most that you can train someone, support them, skill them, lead them to the employer’s door and ring the bell. But that doesn’t mean the door will open, or the candidate be ushered inside.
So again, it makes less sense to plunge resources into those furthest away from the labour market, as the labour market itself is least likely to engage with them. The system appears to disincentivize engaging with those people who need the most support, and instead reduces Pathways to Work to a simple unit / cost equation and the tawdry spectacle of spread-betting on the labour market.
Our fear is that the net result of this will see those people with the least chance of finding work being left on the margins of support – fulfilling their responsibilities, but without the realization of their rights. And for the majority, the longer they remain on benefits, the less money they will have compared to the IB system. It would appear as though reform will function to penalize some people on the basis that their employment service providers have failed them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, then, it seems to me that many of the promises that lay at the heart of the welfare reform programme have still yet to materialize. Instead of being supported off benefit and into work,
Many people will be thrown off one benefit and onto another, with little help to find work as a consequence.
Many people will actually be worse off under ESA than they would have been under the current arrangements.
Many people will not receive the support and assistance they need to gain and retain paid work.
I leave you with the question then, as to how the government’s stated aims can be met by these reforms. Whether the redrafting of the social contract between the state and the disabled individual strikes a fair balance between rights and responsibilities, or whether the government itself is failing in its own responsibilities to provide the very assistance, protection and care that it promised.
Saturday, 5 July 2008
GREEN PARTY TRADES UNION GROUP CONFERENCE 12 July 2008 Brighton
GREEN PARTY TRADES UNION GROUP
CONFERENCE
“Can Greens and Trade Unions work together?”
12 July 2008
(10am-6pm)
Friends' Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton, Sussex BN1 1AF (10 minutes from Brighton BR)
TEL (01273) 770258 website http://www.brightonquakers.co.uk/
SPEAKERS
Caroline Lucas MEP,
Tony Kearns (CWU),
Brighton Unison Speaker
Workshops
a.Migration/ Population policy and International relations (J.Healy)
b.Future strategies for links between Greens and TUs (P. MacCafferty)
c.Disability rights against workfare, (A.Wheatley)
Admission £8 / £4 concs
Gptu contact yrrumuk@yahoo.co.uk
CONFERENCE
“Can Greens and Trade Unions work together?”
12 July 2008
(10am-6pm)
Friends' Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton, Sussex BN1 1AF (10 minutes from Brighton BR)
TEL (01273) 770258 website http://www.brightonquakers.co.uk/
SPEAKERS
Caroline Lucas MEP,
Tony Kearns (CWU),
Brighton Unison Speaker
Workshops
a.Migration/ Population policy and International relations (J.Healy)
b.Future strategies for links between Greens and TUs (P. MacCafferty)
c.Disability rights against workfare, (A.Wheatley)
Admission £8 / £4 concs
Gptu contact yrrumuk@yahoo.co.uk
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