THE news this weekend that the private companies are bidding for 40 new welfare contracts represents another stage in the Tory-LibDem coalition’s relentless drive against the unemployed.
These contracts, worth between £3bn – £5bn, are being parcelled out to private companies under the governments’ new ‘work programme’.
These companies will supposedly be paid by the number of jobless they get into work.
At a time when unemployment is racing towards the three million mark and youth unemployment is the highest that has ever been recorded – nearly one million young people between the age of 16 to 25 are out of work, a staggering 20.6% of the youth population – the question is how are these private companies going to make their money.
At a time when even the suspect official figures show that far from growing the UK economy is in fact shrinking and the number of jobs declining, they clearly are not going to make it by helping the jobless back to work.
The jobs in the private sector simply do not exist to take up either the huge numbers of youth out of work or the 150,000 public sector workers who are being given the chop in the next few months as the savage cuts in services begin to bite.
A clear indication of what the targets these private companies will in reality be asked to achieve was given by a whistle-blowing Jobcentre Plus adviser last Saturday.
He revealed that Job Centres are being issued with targets for the number of people they are required to remove from the Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) payable to those out of work and looking for employment.
According to him, a ‘culture change’ was brought in by the government last summer, a change that involved the entire ethos of helping the unemployed back into work and ensuring that they received their benefit entitlements, being overthrown.
This ethos of public service has been junked on instructions from the government and replaced with one of getting as many people as possible off JSA – not by finding them jobs but by the most obscene tricks and subterfuge that strike at the most vulnerable sections of the working class.
Targets are set for each office on the number of claimants they have to remove from benefit each week.
Tricks include staff being urged by their managers to make those with reading and writing difficulties being instructed to make complex written job applications in the sure knowledge that they will fail.
Other trivial ‘offences’, like being five minutes late for an interview, also incur sanctions with claimants’ allowances being stopped for six months, forcing them to go onto hardship payments of about £30 a week.
The total number of claimants whose benefits have been stopped has risen dramatically in the last year to 75,000, a figure set to soar when the coalition carries out its stated plan to privatise the entire benefit system and let the private ‘providers’ run the whole system.
Their profits will depend not on finding non-existent jobs but by driving the unemployed off benefits altogether and dumping them in the gutter and leaving them to starve or sending them to the equivalent of the 19th century workhouse.
The working class and youth will not stand by and passively accept starvation as a price to keep the capitalist system and its bankers in profit.
The urgent demand of the hour is the removal of this government through a general strike and its replacement with a workers government that will nationalise the banks and put an end to the capitalist private ‘providers’ who seek to make vast profits out of the human misery of unemployment.
