Work placements - slavery by any other name

So now the government intends to encourage young people into work by offering them eight-week work placements.

According to Indus Delta (the newswire for the welfare to work industry), they state the new scheme:

“... will now allow young people to undertake work experience for up to eight weeks rather than current paltry two weeks. Under the existing regime, if you tried to do more, you ran the risk of having your benefits docked. The new initiative will be applicable for individuals between 18 and 21 who will be matched by Jobcentre Plus with employers looking for people to do work experience.”

I am pleased the new initiative excites staff at Inclusion, or CESI by its more popular name (for those not in the know, Inclusion run the Indus Delta website), but I fear I cannot build the same level of enthusiasm. To me, this is yet another scheme to take workless young people out of the unemployment statistics and sanitise levels of worklessness.

None of these schemes offer young people any kind of vocational training or any certainty they will be offered a permanent job on completion of their placement.
Now, let’s look at this more realistically. What do you call work where you are punished if you don’t attend, you don’t get paid, there is no security of tenure, the work traditionally tends to be menial, or burdensome, you are unable to join any company pension or health scheme and you have no in-company holiday entitlement?

Isn’t this another type of slave labour – with just a floral hue to make it sound better?

According to the Oxford Dictionary Online, ‘slavery’ means “condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.” Now, if work placements don’t fit this definition of slavery, then what does?

The government need to tackle the whole issue of youth unemployment far more realistically, with initiatives to encourage jobless youths to access far more apprenticeships or training courses. Those wishing to remain in education should be encouraged to do so through the Educational Maintenance Allowance. Additionally, companies could be encouraged to take on younger recruits through payment of a dividend, in the same way long-term unemployed on New Deal programmes were attractive to employers through payments from Jobcentre Plus.

Whitewashing the statistics through miserable halfhearted gestures is not the answer.