The Government is pushing ahead to reopen Jobcentres to the public at a reckless pace. This drive is to get back to business as usual as quickly as possible and put our members including the security guards and cleaners as well as the public at risk by doing so.
Ministers are clearly linking the public access to the jobcentres with the return to conditionality in the DWP that had been suspended from March because of the crisis and to focus all efforts on paying benefit to the millions of new claimants.
We now have the spectacle of installation teams rushing around to all the jobcentre sites poorly putting in low screens before even beginning the risk assessment process. It is this process that should properly examine the control measures that would need to be put in place and what would be necessary and crucially whether it is even safe to open jobcentres to the public again.
No regard is being paid to what should be the paramount concern which is the health, safety and wellbeing of all those who work in the jobcentres and the public who need to use DWP services. The re-imposing of the lockdown in Leicester shows that the pandemic is far from over. It is ironic that a jobcentre in Leicester was being targeted as one of the first to re-open!
A fighting lead by the GEC should include demanding that contracted out staff, such as security and cleaners who are being put in the front line of danger, are brought in-house. Such a stance would attract a whole new layer of members in to PCS from all DWP staff areas.
Management’s haste to install screens is ironic given the bitter screens dispute a number of years ago when management were removing our screens to create the DWP.
The government want to get back to the normal DWP regime for claimants rather than just focussing on getting payments out to the public and support to try and find work.
It is clear that a lead needs to be given from the Group leadership at national level. We need to go back hard to senior management in the DWP to demand that the Jobcentre doors remain shut. The safety of our members and the public needs to be paramount. It is completely unnecessary to bring claimants back into jobcentres to deliver support to them.
We need to build and organise collective resistance at workplace level to back up these demands. We should take every opportunity to organise members’ meetings safely. Every site should have an agreed muster point in the site risk assessment that is large enough for all staff to assemble safely using 2m social distancing so could be an ideal place close to the office to safely organise members meetings.
It is legitimate to request time to discuss health and safety plans with our members . Meetings can be held in the sites where there is room to do this safely in the workplace or do it by skype where there is not the room to physically gather everyone together. The key thing is to have a collective discussion with our members to agree opposition to management plans in a united way across the membership in our jobcentre sites.
We have produced a motion for branches, regions and sites to use channel the anger in a systematic way to demonstrate the willingness to fight and put pressure on the DWP to halt their plans. At the same time we need to push the DWP GEC leadership to take a lead on this issue in resisting these changes collectively and giving full support to jobcentre members.
Not only can we campaign collectively to demonstrate the anger at these plans we also need to make it clear to management nationally that it is unacceptable for them to push to put our members into serious and imminent danger by planning to reopen jobcentres to the public.
We have legal protection under health and safety legislation, including using Section 44, to immediately stop work and proceed to a place of safety in the event of being exposed to serious and imminent and unavoidable danger. The risk can be removed simply by shutting the doors to protect everyone working in the jobcentre. But as we know, our best weapon is acting collectively and using our industrial power. We can use Section 44 to build our members’ confidence to act, showing them that it is management who are acting unsafely.
The department should not be driving to penalise the public for not wanting to put themselves at risk by travelling to a jobcentre when they can access full support from experienced jobcentre staff over the phone to help them find work. We are in a recession so the emphasis of DWP work needs to be to fully pay benefits and help support claimants in this challenging economic climate.
It is unacceptable that ministers and senior management are looking at how pressure is brought back to bear on claimants to prove what efforts they are making to find work when we are in a recession and pandemic,
There needs to be full recognition of how difficult it is for anyone to find work at the moment and the battle many workers across numerous sectors are having to remain in work and fighting the offensive from the bosses to make them pay for the coronavirus crisis.
All the support that we need to give the public we could give over the phone and digitally and it is unnecessary to see anyone face to face apart from the most urgent cases who have no other means to get support, who we are already seeing.
We have an opportunity as a union to build further links with claimant organisations and unite the opposition to the Tory Government’s plans across claimants, communities and our members working in jobcentres. This is something we can also organise campaigning with the wider PCS membership and wider trade union movement.
There is a real opportunity here to mobilise members and show that it is the BLN supporters who have the ideas and strategy to work with branches to take on the DWP.
PCS Broad Left Network 