This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Tuesday 7th February 2012 at 10.55pm
Unemployed (again)
In light of various changes happening in the UK at the moment - increasing unemployment, hardening attitudes to joblessness, changes to benefits - and given my previous posts on forcing people to work, I think it's time I revisited the issue. (As is the case for all of my blog posts, I ask you to remember that I'm ignorant and uninformed - I'm a mathematician, not a political/sports/music/food writer, and this is a channel for some of my usually unthought-through thoughts!)
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I don't agree at all with the government's proposed changes to the disability living allowance; I'm also against the cap on benefits. Benefits should be assigned according to need, and thus cutting off payments at a certain point implies that either the person didn't need all that money in the first place, or that in the future that person won't have enough money to get by. If we seriously think that some people are getting too much help from the state, then for crying out loud look at some data and decide which of the allowances is too generous.
And when I say "look at some data" I don't mean data on which benefits we can persuade the right-wing press to hound large segments of the public into hating, like DLA. I mean that, for example, families with n children are (I think) paid n times as much in child benefit as families with 1 child. Having lots of children is one way in which people might move beyond the proposed £26,000 cap. And it's possible that if I have 8 children, I don't need 8 times as much in child benefit payments as if I have one child - those eight children can hand down and share toys, clothes, and so on. I'm not saying we should make child benefit decrease with the number of children, I'm just saying it's one example amongst many where we could look at the facts and figure out whether or not the current system could be improved.
This article by John Harris takes a look at some anecdotal evidence from a town struggling to cope with the crash. I think it's a good start to the Guardian's attempt to sidestep prejudices by talking to actual people who have been hit hard over the last few years.
It also brings up the point that the public's perception of the unemployed is that many of them aren't doing enough to find work. It even interviews one man who insists on taking the blame for his own previous unemployment. This is what reminded me of my own take on joblessness a while back. To a certain extent events have conspired to change my mind, and I regret what I said, or at least the way that I said it. In rosier times my attitude has been that generally there are jobs available if you really want them, which is more or less what Maria Miller (work and pensions minister) said recently. But it's become clear over the last year that whether or not that was ever the case, it's not now - there just aren't as many jobs as there are people willing to do them. Even if we had a perfect system whereby visitors to the job centre could be matched with available work instantly, we would still have plenty of people sitting around sewing cross-stitch tapestries or whatever it was I so sensitively howled last year.
On the other hand, as the article points out, something does need to be done to address the public perception of jobseekers as not-try-hard-enoughers. Ideally this something would also give the real not-try-hard-enoughers - and claiming that all jobseekers try their utmost to find work all the time is like claiming that all students put in 100% effort throughout their degree - a kick up the backside and a helping hand. My "forcing people to work" proposal was one attempt at this, but obviously I now realise it was flawed in several ways, not least in that it's already being applied and (according to reports) exploited by large multinational corporations. As an alternative solution many countries have a limit on the term over which unemployment benefit is paid, so after perhaps two years without a job one is no longer entitled to any money, which seems a rather brutal policy - I hope the UK wouldn't even think of imitating it, but it does highlight the fact that we aren't going to find easy answers elsewhere.
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