THE Coalition’s Duncan Smith, an ex-army officer, is proposing to discipline the unemployed with forced slave labour, as part of the Coalition’s plan to destroy the Welfare State.
The Coalition is planning to get rid of over 500,000 public sector workers with its savage cuts programme, and unemployment is set to rocket to three million and over, as the cuts and the 20 per cent rate of VAT slash spending power.
Duncan Smith, Cameron and Clegg are proposing to use mass unemployment to impose slave labour pay rates on the working class and reduce the mass of workers to be the ‘working poor’.
The content of the Big Society is mass unemployment, and slave labour.
Councils who are about to sack hundreds of thousands of workers are to be told that they can take on the unemployed for nothing, as a gift from the Coalition government.
Employers will be planning to sack workers in order to take advantage of the Coalition’s slave labour option.
Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are to be forced to work for nothing, for month-long periods, or lose their meagre Jobseekers Allowance.
This is at the same time as Kenneth Clarke is proposing to organise widespread prison labour. He has a ‘vision’ of factory prisons, to allow big employers to exploit prison labour for ‘wages’ capped at the minimum wage, further undermining trade union conditions of work and rates of pay.
The ‘Big Society’ will see the UK turned into one big workhouse where the working class are pauperised to pay the bill for the capitalist crisis.
Duncan Smith is to launch next week a Welfare Reform White Paper outlining how he will replace all benefits with a ‘universal credit’, which will be means-tested, and for which current benefit holders will have to apply. They will also have to agree to 12 week periods of work for no wages, if they are deemed fit for some kind of work.
‘The message will go across, ‘play ball or it’s going to be difficult’, Duncan Smith told the media yesterday.
Other Tory leaders added: ‘The goal is to break the habit of worklessness,’ to give the unemployed ‘an extra push into work’.
However, capitalism is in crisis. There are no jobs, and unemployment is rising rapidly. Not even university graduates can get jobs. Thousands of graduates are begging for internships – that is unpaid work!
For the twenty years after the end of the Second World War British unemployment was around 250,000 a year.
Mass unemployment developed from the 1980s onwards as the historical bankruptcy of British capitalism emerged.
Today British capitalism is on its knees and cannot sustain the working class and youth.
The Coalition cynics say that unemployment is the fault of the unemployed, and that living on the Jobseekers Allowance of £60 a week is not out of necessity but is a ‘lifestyle choice’. This is cynical nonsense.
The Coalition wants to use mass unemployment to break the working class. The trade unions must send their own message to Duncan Smith and Co. This is that they will not be allowed to bully the unemployed, and that the TUC will be calling a general strike to bring the Coalition down, to go forwards to a workers government and socialism, and jobs for all at trade union rates of pay.
