Make the unemployed work for free – A Solution ?

The failed neo-liberal British government is following the path that the conservatives followed in Australia in attempting to “manage” the unemployment that their flawed policy regime created…

The scenario is this:

1. British government introduces austerity policies which deliberately create unemployment. Jobs vanish because aggregate demand contracts. People stop spending and firms stop investing because the fear of unemployment rises.

2. The same government then claims the solution to the rising unemployment is a Community Action Programme (CAP) – which advertises itself as providing “support” for the “Very Long-Term Unemployed”.

3. The CAP’s client base rises dramatically as a result of the austerity program which created the unemployment problem in the first place. The austerity program ensures that many of those that enter short-term unemployment transit as time elapses into long-term and then very long-term unemployment, thus, keeping a regular clientele for its CAP.

4. Faced with an explosion of people to be managed the British government then decides that those receiving jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) – the only thing between starvation and penury – are clearly unmotivated and need to work. Just the terminology is the same – the unemployed became jobseeekers!

5. Solution – force anyone on JSA for more than three years to work for no pay for 6 months. Refusal to work for the benefit which is well below the minimum wage then leads to cancellation of the said benefit…

via British solution to unemployment – make them work for free | Bill Mitchell – billy blog.

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