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Tories and unemployment benefits
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pooley
pooley
501 posts

Re: Tories and unemployment benefits
Aug 19, 2008, 18:11
PMM wrote:
I used to be exactly the kind of person you're referring to pooley.

I'm currently a productive member of society. In fact, I want to work more than I do, but I don't like doing promotional work for myself.

I did spend a long time on the dole, and then on the sick. I'm talking about maybe ten years. When I left school, I had sporadic short term shitty jobs, but the longest lasted for only 18 months. That was working as a postman. Getting up at 4 am every morning was playing havok with my drinking, and I stopped hearing the alarm clock go off. Many of the jobs I had were casual labour, for far less than minimum wage. In some cases my "Employer" didn't even pay me. Hardly the greatest incentive for me to pull out all the stops and give my best.

Things do go hand in hand. If you have a problem with substance abuse, you tend to think of your life being very chaotic. In fact it's really very structured. I structured my life around my fortnightly giro and hand-outs from my mum, and structured each day around getting drunk and/or stoned, and playing computer games.

I was bored and lonely beyond words. Much of what I was doing was because life without drink or weed was even more boring than life with it. I knew I had a problem, and didn't want to spend my whole life stuck in that rut. Yet I lacked the vision/courage/whatever to get out of the routine for a very long time.

As to forcing me to work???

You take someone with personal problems and no self confidence, and you force them to do something they don't want to do. That person has to work with people that treat them as scum (ever done agency work and worked alongside wholly employed staff?), doing a job that is meaningless and unfulfilling. What do you think will happen?

The process of climbing out of the holes we dig for ourselves has to be self-motivated. For example, there's no point sending an alcoholic for alcohol treatment if he doesn't want to stop, because he'll just relapse as soon as you put him back into the outside world. Far better to concentrate your resources on those that want to be helped.

In my case, it wasn't about money. But it was about self-worth. I started working a few days a week in a charity shop. Voluntary. For nothing. But something that meant something to me, personally. If you'd forced me to work in the charity shop, I'd have told you to fuck off, or at best I'd have turned up, and done as little as possible all day, just because.

The voluntary work led to a job as a charity shop manager. The volunteers were often a pain in the arse. If I'd had someone there because they were being forced to be there, they'd have been a far bigger pain. I think that if I were running a litter picking crew, I'd want pickers that were motivated, not pickers that I had to cajole and nag and keep an eye on all day in order to get anything done.


I don't think you are one of the people I am talking about. You seem to be getting out there, doing stuff, being productive.
The idea that when the country is so fucked, NHS cash starved, etc etc , that people can take take and give nothing back is vile.

Also, it was mentioned a while back that there are more jobs than people - but if you take the number of single parents, disabled, people who cant work of the figures, my understanding is that the figures go down to 80,000ish. Not a great deal more than the jobs available.
Without being too right wing - you have to give something back- Taking money without contributing is no longer an option.


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