Forced to work, what could go wrong?

[Dropship]

Me and other people were put on something like that in Leicester 20-odd years ago, our only "crime" was to be longterm unemployed.
It was called the 'Project Work' scheme and we were told our dole would be sanctioned (reduced) if we refused to do stuff like helping in charity shops, doing conservation work, refurbishing buildings, collecting rubbish etc and it was a bloody disaster because none of us wanted to be there.
As a result, there were rumours of hands in tills, sabotaging of equipment, obstructions placed on railway lines, injuries and damage by the slap-happy use of spades and pickaxes etc.
They tried to make me join the team refurbishing a friggin Hindu temple but i refused pointblank to go, so they sanctioned my dole for a few weeks as "punishment" but I stood my ground and they gave in and sent me to a charity shop instead, but I soon got so sick of the miserable old cows behind the counter and the young airhead manageress that I asked to be switched to a gang that was weeding grass verges and woods out in the fresh air.
One of our team brought a gun and the air was filled with the crackle of gunfire from in the wood (dunno if they were blanks), and the white-faced supervisor was going around asking "Did anybody hear that??"
"Hear what?" we innocently replied..

 

[LadyOnArooftop]

Slightly off-topic, but some young people are desperate for work experience...
There was a YTS youth training scheme in the late 80s. Young people were taken off the dole, placed in a factory, shop, office whatever for a year and the government paid their wages. The idea being that when the year was up the company would employ the youngsters. But of course when the year was up, invariably they were let go to return to the dole queue, and another youth was taken on by the same company under the YTS scheme.

 

[Kev45]

My first two jobs were YTS, nowadays, it is called Workfare etc. I was exploited in both jobs, as were most school-leavers on YTS and other schemes back then. But we were desperate for work, any work at all, because we didn't know any different. We were usually given the menial tasks to do and not a lot else in the way of learning a trade or skill. It did teach me discipline though, getting up early etc and the benefit of a routine in everyday life.

Unemployment was estimated at well over 5 million, although Thatcher diddled the books and claimed it was nearer three, and a new kind of underclass was created by the state solely reliant on welfare. The price worth paying by a government who created crime riddled cesspits in once fully employed working class towns and villages, as manufacturing declined, and those jobs outsourced to Asia.

At times (most times) there simply were no jobs for unskilled labor. I used to queue with everyone else, and before the Jobcentre even opened, and a woman took a shine to me and would show me jobs before they had even been pinned up on the boards. Then in an interview there would be 20 other people waiting, eyeing up the competition, for some shiit job that paid a pittance. Thinking back now it isn't even with nostalgia, it just reminds exactly how shiit it was lol and not much has changed at all for young people today.

 

[Wojcik]

It sounds similar to the Workfare scandal from 2012. It was so bad that even Tesco dropped out of the scheme, as it was literally forced slave labour, covered up by the Tory government at the time on how it would help people get back into work. But the real story here was how these big businesses and corporations saw this as an opportunity to exploit not only the unemployed, but also those who were on sick benefit.
A family friend of mine, who is a chronic schizophrenic, was forced onto one of these schemes that had him work for his benefit, five days a week, eight hours a day, working in Currys. Now they were warned that he was unable to function in that environment, but they insisted that he had to work, otherwise they were going to freeze his benefits. So of course he had a mental breakdown and there was a phone call to pick him up.

Iian Duncan Smith and the DWP have yet to pay the price for their sins and crimes against the individuals they've tortured through their abusive policies. If anyone should be liable for this scheme, then it's the politicians who have caused serious harm to people during their reign of terror.

 

[Dropship]

In my final months at school in the 1960's, a "Careers Officer" used to pop in now and again to fix us up with jobs to go to, but when he asked me what I wanted to do I said "Dunno".
As a result I left school with no job to go to, unlike most of my classmates who'd been "fixed up".
My old man was a chronic workaholic and wanted me to be like him, so he used to hammer on my bedroom door at the crack of dawn yelling "Get out of bed and look for a job you idle bleeder, they're crying out for people at the glue factory!", but I thought "Oh stick it" and turned over and went back to sleep.