I was applying for a job today

[Stephen Morgan]

or, another day on the Work Programme.

The Work Programme doesn't involve work, rather it is a scheme run by the government, or rather by contractors for the government, allegedly aimed at getting people into jobs. I've known people who've been on it and its predecessor, the New Deal, for several years and the only one who got a job was hired by the contractor running the programme.

In fact, these contractors consistently achieve worse results, in terms of getting people into work, than the jobcentre working without contractors. There are some beneficiaries, though (beneficiaries, not "beneficiaries", being the official label for what have also been known as "clients" and so on). The founder of one of the main companies, A4E (formerly A4E Work, formerly Action 4 Employment), now lives in a massive Georgian mansion worth nigh-on ten million pounds, every penny extracted from the taxpayer. Dole scum, she is.

The Work Programme is a requirement for those on Jobseekers' Allowance and certain other benefits for more than six months. So, now I find myself on it. Happened to catch a glance of some of their paperwork the other day, they get £350 for signing me onto the programme. That's Framework, a subcontractor for A4E. A4E presumably skim a bit off before passing the money onto Framework, which is normally a charity dealing with the homeless. They will be collecting extra cash every time I go in, presumably less than that £350 (which is rather more than a month's dole money, incidentally). Theoretically they're meant to find you work, but as I say that's not something I've ever seen happen, and provide training and work placements, which are unpaid labour. However I already do voluntary work and the Open University, so I'm just a cash cow for them. Odd that A4E are back in the picture. They already lost the local contract once when they were found to have fraudulently overbilled.

Which I wouldn't mind. From the point of view of effective public administration it's obviously not wise to lavish money on private contractors for doing nothing, but on the other hand it does mean I don't actually have to do anything different, which is nice and unburdensome.

Today, however, I was required to go to an "ASDA jobs event". ASDA are opening a new shop in the town, which has so far shut down the local bus station and is currently rendering the main road through town unusable so the council can generously lay down pipes and cables for them. Rather than extracting the customary "section 106 planning bribe" for this inconvenience and expense they decided to let ASDA keep their money, after having generously handed over a prime town centre plot which was previously a profitable council-owned carpark and the only bus station in the area. And that after the council's own report said there are too many supermarkets in the town.

But I digress, the point is that they're opening soon and the jobcentre and now Framework are to a certain degree insistent that the jobseekers they have on the books apply for ASDA or else. The jobcentre ran a three day course at the local college, mostly useless stuff about interview techniques according to a friend of mine who was there, but culminating in doing the usual online application to ASDA. The Framework bods think it was all a way for the college to grab some money of the government. Today Framework were running the aforementioned "ASDA jobs event", and they'd signed me up. Not sure what I was expecting, but I was expecting something. Maybe a code you put into the website that gets you to the top of the list due to a jobcentre/ASDA deal of some sort. Or special training as to how one should sidle through the multiple choice questions to get the automated system to choose you first. Something, anyway.

What I got was "here's a computer, which can be used to apply for the job on their website". Yeah, thanks. I could have done that at home. The first thing I notice was that you have to create an account, a requirement which is somewhat famous as the ultimate in bad ideas in website design. Okay, they're not trying to sell me something, but is needlessly inconveniencing people applying for jobs with your company a wise corporate policy? Anyway, fine, I signed up. Name, e-mail address, postcode, so forth. Fine. Then I went through the same information for the actual application, fine.

Then there's the stupid questionaire. Yes, I do feel that customers sometimes need putting in their place, and I feel that potential employers ought to know I feel that way. Right, 42 stupid questions, the inversion of the meaning of life. Oh, look, it keeps loading the same page with "click here if this page doesn't close" on it as an infinite loop. Goody. Just what I was hoping for. There's meant to be some sort of numeracy and literacy questions here, surely.

Ask the staff. Turns out being at Framework is a good idea, because he has the phone number of the head of HR at the soon-to-be-built local shop. Who comes round personally, from the office twenty seconds walk away... to see if he can make the website work. But he's deciding on the hiring, I'm here, could I not have a word with him, perhaps skip the numeracy test by demonstrating some deft mental arithmetic? No? No. Has to be done on the website. Application won't go through otherwise. So he phones head office. They don't answer. Apparently the entire server array is based in America because ASDA is currently owned by Wal-mart. Also, it seems the head of ASDA lives near here, at least half a county from the nearest ASDA. Until now, anyway. So, he says to do it all again. Start again. The browser has remembered how I filled in all the fields in the from, which is identity theft waiting to happen. Freezes again.

Wipes browser history. Works! Most Windows solution ever. Of course, as this had evidently happened with several people just at Framework this is obviously a major problem, and as the job shows up on your account homepage as having been submitted (but is never submitted at the other end) no doubt lots of people just assume it's worked when it hasn't gone through at all. His only response to this pretty much fatal flaw in their website, which is the only way their company recruits, is that they don't get many reports of problems, which they wouldn't if the site shows the applications as submitted when they haven't been, and head office don't know of any problems. Presumably they're the same ones who wrote this piece of shit in the first place. He's not going to report any problems to them or anything, then they might know about problems and have to fix them and who knows where that might lead.

Ok, drama over, literacy and numeracy test. Right, they order 18, there are 500 in the warehouse, how many left in the warehouse after the order is filled. 482. Hmm. Multiple choice question. 482 is not one of the answers. Well, never mind, the next one'll be fine. Price list, which product has the least discount. Easy. Hmm, all the answers contain two products. Probably meant to say "products" in the question there, it's fine. And so on. The literacy test didn't seem to have been composed by someone whose first language was English. But hey, I'm used to working around that sort of thing. A4E gave me a leaflet about how to write letters to employers, incomprehensible due to poor spelling and grammar. Another company, OTR, supposed to help with writing a CV, gave me one full of misspellings and made-up words. So, fine, I can understand this stuff. Probably.

Is there a place on here I can apply to run the company? Because you're all idiots. I'd have to be a graduate, you say. Well, that certainly does reassure me about the state of the education system. Talking to myself. He's gone. Managing the personnel at a shop without any staff, and judging by all this without the prospect of any staff. Must be very busy.

Oh look, frozen again.

[blanc]

Keep us posted; I love tales of the details of incompetent private sector ripping off millions from the taxpayer. What stuck in my mind about Asda is from about 20 years ago the local to me branch successfully prosecuted their employees engaged in cleaning the place up for helping themselves to rubber gloves and handcream to facilitate the work. So if you land one of these plumb jobs do watch your back.

[Stephen Morgan]

I'm not even sure I've applied for it, to be honest. I've seen better websites run by the government, it's true.

[Seamus OBlimey]

I attended enough of these of these courses to realise I might just as well get a job..

So I did..

Poor me

[blanc]

Wouldn't it be grand if public accounts were actually accountable? I was part of one of these kinds of jamborees one time - not providing 'training for jobs', but providing an input on the environmentalist bandwagon. Similar, lots of money thrown around for minimal result.

[Stephen Morgan]

Didn't get it, ifg anyone's wondering.

[semper occultus]

sorry to hear that...better luck next time

[Simulist]

The best luck to you going forward, Stephen.

[Stephen Morgan]

The best luck to you going forward, Stephen.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what their e-mail said. But with my real name, of course.

[norton ash]

The best luck to you going forward, Stephen.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what their e-mail said. But with my real name, of course.

The best of luck to you going forward, Jude Mason.

[Stephen Morgan]

My name isn't as cool as Jude Mason. That's why I took on the jazzier nom de plume of Stephen Morgan.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

I was applying for unemployment benefits today, it was all digital via internetcomputers, didnt get to talk to anyone. They were actually a little annoyed i turned up in person, could have done it from home.

[MacCruiskeen]

From Owen Hatherley's blog, Sit Down Man, You're A Bloody Tragedy:

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Mandate my Ass

In writing about ‘Jobseeker Mandatory Activity’ I’m going to start with a building, and not just to conform to type. In the dead centre of Lewisham is the former Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society's Tower House, built in 1933, a redbrick and white tile department store, with reliefs of trains, liners, the motifs of local industry, the work that was most likely painfully absent in that depression year; inside was a department store for those, like my Grandma, who would get their schoolclothes from the Co-Op and thus be regarded as ‘common’. Nonetheless, loudly holding the borough’s dead centre, the Lewisham RACS was clearly a thumping affirmation of collective, working-class pride. It’s façade-deep. Follow it round the back to find concrete & stock-brick warehousing, snaking round to link up with what is now a Bowling Alley. The RACS building was chopped up into individual franchises: a Yates’s (with SKY SPORTS INSIDE promised), a branch of Fitness First, and at the back, through the warehouse entrance, Twin Training, a private purveyor of education and ‘training’. This is the company to which the (unusually bluntly named) Mandatory Activity has been contracted out. ‘It’s by the bowling alley’, they told me at the Jobcentre, as that’s a better marker than the RACS’ towering (but seemingly invisible) monument to solidarity.



JMA, if you will, is a scheme being ‘tested’ in selected areas of the nation – South East Wales, Warrington, Lanarkshire, South East London (prizes for guessing what links these). At Lewisham Twin, JMA will, according to the bumph, entail ‘upbeat motivational training’. So the image of the Restart counsellor, encapsulated beautifully in The League of Gentlemen’s Pauline, doesn’t quite apply here. The JMA is something a little more insidious. Certainly no-one here is being treated with the casual contempt that Pauline doles out, or that anyone who has waited in line at a ‘JobcentrePlus’ (or tried to walk into one without conferring sufficently with the newly contracted heavy-duty security) gets subjected to. This much is clear when our host – earnest, Nigerian, lanky, clearly very good at his job – declares to us that we should regard the Mandatory Activity as a break, even though it is compulsory, on pain of loss of an already piddling income. ‘Think of it as being like a management training course’. He introduces himself in the third person: ‘Anthony is a person who values people.’



There’s around 25 of us, all men bar five women, one of whom disappears after the first day. Many are people in their 40s, 50s who have worked most of their lives as electricians, shepherds (!) or even lawyers and find employment unsurprisingly tricky to return to. Only one or two conform even remotely to the archetypal hooded malingerer that haunts the dreams of MailLand. So, we get a couple of ‘games’ in groups, such as the ‘you are one of a group who are sole survivors from an aeroplane which has crash-landed in the Indian Ocean on a flight from Cape Town and Karachi. You have managed to get into a life-raft, what personal effects will you throw out’ one, but what the Mandatory Activity really entails is listening to an experienced exponent of managerial tosh wax motivational for three days. Perhaps the best bit is the mnemonics. We’re handed a sheet of paper headed ‘STAYING ON TOP WITH SWOT ANALYSIS’. SWOT being Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. In the midst of the discussion of Swot analysis another is thrown out: GROW, which is made up of Goal, Reality, Options, Will. While we’re taught how to GROW, we’re handed out extracts from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Later, another mnemonic explains that, in interviews, ‘you have to communicate STAR in order to be the Star’. That’ll be Situation, Task, Action and eventually, Result.



The ostensible point of all this is to get us into work by helping with our apparent lack of confidence and social graces, explaining the alleged obstacles that led to our being unemployed for an extraordinary six months. Our host, who lays proud claim to pioneering, when back in Nigeria, 'the project Building Your Tomorrow Today' and a book entitled You Can Make It, repeatedly stresses the importance of three things: Service, Values and Vision. Every job is a service. All organisations provide a service. All organisations have values, and visions. You too have values and visions, you just have to match yours with the organisation’s. Curiously enough, rather than demystifying, the motivational training makes the grimly mundane world of work (Southwark Pest Control is one of the examples we are given) into a baffling, messianic world of entrepeneurs sharing with each other their visionary visions and their valuable values. ‘Anything you want to do, you can do it’ (I quote) is the plainly stated philosophy, a bizarre mismatch with the data entering, painting-and-decorating and benefit-claiming that lies in wait for most of us here. People are mostly bored but relieved by the lack of the Jobcentre’s more obvious inhumanity. That’s still very much here, of course. Someone turns up late for the third day, and the jobcentre are swiftly informed. The stark possibility of weeks without income. In the world of vision, punctuality is brutally important. ‘You must be the master of time’. (again, I quote)



Central to ‘JMA’ is an individual ‘Action Plan’ for each one of us to take back to the Jobcentre and whisk into work, handed out at the course’s end. We’re first given these to fill out ourselves, though the oh-so-efficient private contractors manage to lose some. Regardless, the end result is a chart with cuttings and pastings from internet job sites for each of us to take home. So the only concrete part of the whole thing is the pep talk, and here, in true market Stalinist style, ‘cadres decide everything’. There’s none of Pauline’s dismissal of the ambitious, or the proverbial careers officer’s admonition that you give up space travel for the sausage factory. We can, all of us, make our dreams come true. Right at the end, as everyone hurriedly picks up their travel expenses, we’re told that we’re not to be seen here again. ‘I will next see you…’ ‘On TV!’ someone interjects. ‘As an entrepeneur!’ He’s impressed. ‘An entrepeneur, that’s the aim, isn’t it’. We might all be living on a pittance, but by god we’re going to make it, now that we’ve realised that all that holds us back is our lack of vision.



So at the end of a mercifully brief three days we all walk out, not noticing that this has all taken place in a building once devoted to the now quaint belief that profit might not be the only possible ‘motivation’. Remember the mnemonics, aim high, hold onto those values, and soon enough SE London will be awash with the exploited shedding their collective chrysalis and floating away as exploiters, as long as their benefit isn’t cancelled first.

posted by owen hatherley at 4:39 PM

http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot. ... y-ass.html

[Stephen Morgan]

I was applying for unemployment benefits today, it was all digital via internetcomputers, didnt get to talk to anyone. They were actually a little annoyed i turned up in person, could have done it from home.

I don't know about the internet, but it's meant to be done by phone here. Last time I had to make a "new claim" the jobcentre just gave me a leaflet, on which was a little credit card sized bit of plastic, on which was a phone number, which is the only number you can't dial on the jobcentre's phones, so you have to pay to do it, then you answer their questions and they send out a form ready filled-in for you. Although I've done that twice, and on neither occasion has the form ever turned up. Then you take the form to an appointment at the jobcentre which they set up over the phone, where they go through every question again to verify your answers and make sure you haven't cocked anything up.

At least, that's how it was last time I made a new claim. I say new, actually the old claim had just been interrupted by a New Deal "placement", which they count as a new claim and which means you have to reapply for housing benefit and wait for a couple of months as they slog through their waiting list and so on.

[Pierre d'Achoppement]

In reply to my application I just now received an automatically generated e-mail informing me they have automatically generated a workplan for me which i have to read and then send a confirmation e-mail to my anonymous e-coach asap. So far so good! I'm glad i can stay at home actually.