Today, 8th July, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced that £2bn will be set aside to fund jobs for six months, paid at the level of the national minimum wage, for people aged 16 to 24 who are in receipt of Universal Credit and “at risk” of long-term unemployment.
Staff in Jobcentres up and down the UK remember the programmes introduced when the Coalition government came to power in 2010, and the further programmes unveiled after the 2012 welfare reforms, which increased the number of punitive benefit sanctions and extended their duration.
Programmes such as sector-based work academies and the mandatory work activity were not paid, except that people received their benefits, so it amounted to free labour for some employers with little guaranteed benefit for those who participated.
Today’s announcement is in a different direction and reflects memories, amongst the Tory elite, of the seemingly endless headlines about their ruthless handling of vulnerable and desperate people claiming benefits.
As well as community campaigns to bring shame on employers who benefitted from the free schemes, in order to force them to withdraw, trade unions such as the PCS played a role by raising questions in parliament and presenting evidence that these schemes didn’t work and that staff in Jobcentres were being given quotas to fill, with sanctions for claimants who refused.
Insofar as that is the case, today’s announcement represents a small victory for those trade unions, community campaigns and socialists who fought bitterly against sanctions and “workfare”, i.e. welfare that was tied to working for someone else for free.
However this should not obscure what is really happening. The announcement is a subsidy to the bosses. Employers will be seeking to maximise the amount of labour they receive (and therefore profits they can make) whilst minimising costs. We should also not ignore the fact that the national minimum wage is not sufficient to live on.
Included within the announcement of the £2bn is also an indication that employers who participate in the scheme and agree to create a minimum wage job funded by the state will also be able to top up the wages of the workers who get jobs out of it. So the opportunity is there for unions to organise these new workers through a targeted, high profile campaign.
Such a campaign must unite workers brought in for six months on the minimum wage with those workers around them. If previous programmes can be used as a yardstick, it is likely that the new jobs will be created in workplaces where workers are already clustered around the national minimum wage. There is a clear chance to fight to raise all wages.
Stop redundancies and closures: nationalise to stop job losses
Campaigns as described above will almost certainly be multi-union campaigns. In truth they should involve the Trades Union Congress (TUC) as well, as a way to coordinate between different unions. Rishi Sunak’s announcements today highlight a difficulty here.
Alongside the national minimum wage jobs announced, Sunak also announced 30,000 traineeships. Socialists in PCS remember the creation of traineeships in 2014 and the joint statement between the TUC and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) which welcomed them.
In order to unite in such an opportunist manner with the representatives of the bosses, the TUC had to ignore its own conference policy and the long-standing opposition of young trade unionists to unpaid work, which is what traineeships amounted to.
Only through the utter weakness of the trade union leaderships have traineeships survived since 2014. They are now being tripled in number.
Workers are now being faced with mass redundancies. The announcements in airline after airline, including more than 10,000 job losses in British Airways, show that the bosses will act ruthlessly to protect their profits. Many of the areas facing redundancies are highly unionised and have fought protracted industrial campaigns to defend pay and conditions.
These redundancies will not be halted by Sunak’s announcements and they certainly won’t be halted by a supine TUC left to its own devices. Socialists who hold leading positions in the trade union movement must work together to put maximum pressure on the TUC to organise and coordinate campaigns that could defeat such redundancies.
One of the key demands has to be for the taking of companies threatening redundancies, or threatening closures likely to devastate communities, into public ownership. Broad Left Network supporters are pushing for the PCS leadership to adopt this position, and to take it to the TUC Congress, in whatever socially-distanced or online form that this will meet.
Potential for a serious campaign in Universal Credit: socialist leadership needed
Alongside campaigns of solidarity to those areas facing massive redundancies, and continuing campaigns against Tory abuses of the unemployed – which means revisiting the arguments against sanctions with our brothers and sisters in DWP, we cannot be blind to the huge potential for recruitment to and organising of the union in the civil service.
Sunak has recently announced an additional 13,000 new work coaches in Jobcentres. Welcome though this is, it is not being announced out of the kindness of the Chancellor’s heart. The government are applying a plaster to the gaping sore that is Universal Credit because of the tsunami of redundancies they fear from August onwards.
From August, employers will have to make a contribution towards the 80% of wages being paid to furloughed workers by the government. This is likely to provoke layoffs, as the bosses yet again seek to preserve their profits.
Additional work coaches will increase the support available to claimants. In ordinary times this would have been face to face support, but we continue to fight for workers and claimants to be protected from the Covid-19 pandemic by allowing for interaction to be online or by telephone, and only face to face where there is no alternative.
Workers across Universal Credit, both in the Jobcentres and the Service Centres, where the benefit is processed and put into payment, have been under huge pressure for years. This pressure led to a brief industrial campaign for 5,000 additional staff in the Service Centres alone, which saw strike action in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Stockport.
With no support from the leadership of PCS, the campaign ultimately withered; members in those sites gained concessions but judged that they could not win the overall demands around staffing, workloads and union rights without other Service Centres being organised to take action too. The union’s leadership, outside of the minority who support the Broad Left Network, did not put any work into developing that broader campaign.
Increase still further the number of claimants to Universal Credit, however, reinstitute the “claimant commitment”, increase the number of interactions required between claimants and DWP and even restore the sanctions regimes – as DWP is trying to do – and the pressure on UC staff will increase dramatically.
Moreover, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis, DWP moved thousands of workers from other areas such as Debt Management, Dispute Resolution and NINo sections to support Universal Credit and New Style JSA. That is not a long-term solution. Eventually the work done by those sections will need picking up. This too will increase pressure.
DWP have already shown they are quite prepared to resort en masse to agency jobs – that is, people brought in via agencies like Brook Street, who profit per person they send. They have announced an initial tranche of several thousand permanent work coach jobs, but they are also likely to try handling additional work via fixed term jobs. Almost inevitably, due to the intricacies of training and consolidating staff on UC, this will not stop pressure reaching boiling point at Jobcentres and Service Centres.
The leadership of the union must be ready for that. The old, lazy attitude that if any site approaches the leadership with a request for a strike ballot they will support it must be cast aside. The DWP Group Executive Committee, led by ex-left organisation PCS Left Unity, must either prepare a campaign to unite old and new staff behind demands for permanency, workload protections, sufficient staffing, limits to telephony and improved trade union rights or they should stand aside for those who will.
PCS Broad Left Network 