“By late Autumn the Government's Department of Work and Pensions plans to introduce a new Universal Jobmatch website for anyone seeking a job. The US company commissioned to deliver this service is Monster Worldwide, an online recruitment and technology service company infamous for numerous losses of personal data through hacking, including the US equivalent of Universal Jobmatch, usajobs.gov.
Millions of part-time workers and unemployed receiving welfare benefits will be mandated to register, thereby bypassing all semblance of consent, letting Jobcentre staff and external contractors have full access to all of their user activities, including reading correspondence with employers, viewing full content of CV's, pending and submitted job applications, jobsearches done and saved, feedback from employers, interviews offered and personal profiles. Jobcentre staff will also be able to attach job vacancy details to a user’s account, which they must apply for.
All of this is being driven by the plan to make all welfare benefit and related services digital by default and mandated for under the Welfare Reform Act (2012), coupled with the introduction of Universal Credit.
These welfare reforms come with unprecedented coercive powers, such as “claimant commitments”, including the core mandatory requirement to give evidence of spending a whopping 35 hours per week doing Jobsearch activities, with non-compliance leading to loss of welfare payments through sanctions of up to 3 years and or the imposition of mandatory unpaid work(fare), for showing a lack of effort. Based on the evidence we believe that the unemployed and part time workers receiving welfare benefits will be mandated to register.
This snoopers’ charter of a service will be integrated with many central, local government and private sector databases, covering wages paid, hours worked, credit ratings, electoral role and tax liability to name a few.”
http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2012/looking-for-a-job-goes-orwellian
There are many worrying things about this proposal (which is already being put into practice), but for me, the key sentence is this: “the core mandatory requirement to give evidence of spending a whopping 35 hours per week doing Jobsearch activities, with non-compliance leading to loss of welfare payments”. What this means is that, if you’re a Jobseeker, you’re going to have to spend 35 hours a week chained to your computer to retain your benefits; effectively, a form of house arrest.
Can anybody enlighten me as to what possible good can come of stripping the most powerless, the most defenceless, the most vulnerable, and the most demoralised people in our society of what little autonomy and dignity they have left and treating them like political criminals? Just what is it supposed to achieve?
Millions of part-time workers and unemployed receiving welfare benefits will be mandated to register, thereby bypassing all semblance of consent, letting Jobcentre staff and external contractors have full access to all of their user activities, including reading correspondence with employers, viewing full content of CV's, pending and submitted job applications, jobsearches done and saved, feedback from employers, interviews offered and personal profiles. Jobcentre staff will also be able to attach job vacancy details to a user’s account, which they must apply for.
All of this is being driven by the plan to make all welfare benefit and related services digital by default and mandated for under the Welfare Reform Act (2012), coupled with the introduction of Universal Credit.
These welfare reforms come with unprecedented coercive powers, such as “claimant commitments”, including the core mandatory requirement to give evidence of spending a whopping 35 hours per week doing Jobsearch activities, with non-compliance leading to loss of welfare payments through sanctions of up to 3 years and or the imposition of mandatory unpaid work(fare), for showing a lack of effort. Based on the evidence we believe that the unemployed and part time workers receiving welfare benefits will be mandated to register.
This snoopers’ charter of a service will be integrated with many central, local government and private sector databases, covering wages paid, hours worked, credit ratings, electoral role and tax liability to name a few.”
http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2012/looking-for-a-job-goes-orwellian
There are many worrying things about this proposal (which is already being put into practice), but for me, the key sentence is this: “the core mandatory requirement to give evidence of spending a whopping 35 hours per week doing Jobsearch activities, with non-compliance leading to loss of welfare payments”. What this means is that, if you’re a Jobseeker, you’re going to have to spend 35 hours a week chained to your computer to retain your benefits; effectively, a form of house arrest.
Can anybody enlighten me as to what possible good can come of stripping the most powerless, the most defenceless, the most vulnerable, and the most demoralised people in our society of what little autonomy and dignity they have left and treating them like political criminals? Just what is it supposed to achieve?
