Posted on 04/26/2010 5:20:58 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
As an election slogan it would certainly have some appeal:
“We should cut all your benefits and starve you into going back to work.”
Those are the words of Lord (Digby) Jones, a former Labour trade minister, on a television programme in which two middle-class youngsters said there was no point looking for work because they got £12,000 a year in benefits.
Surprisingly, when he uttered words to such effect to the Labour cabinet in 2008, “They all just said, ‘What? What are you talking about? You can’t say that’.”
I wonder why? “We’ll starve you back to work” – not quite what Keir Hardie had in mind, is it?
But he has a point. The main problem with the unemployment system is that it does not differentiate enough between young and old. People who’ve worked their whole lives and find themselves out of work because their industry is dying – ie coalminers, carmakers, welders, and, er, journalists – shouldn’t be forced to scrub toilets, pick up litter or do anything else that might heap further humiliation upon them.
On the other hand it’s perverse that a million young people aged 16-24 are not in education, employment or training, and that they’re allowed to waste their lives. These are formative years in which people’s characters are fixed. If they spend their entire early twenties at home smoking a bong while mummy and uncle Government pick up the tab, what hope for their future?
It’s even more perverse that this was allowed to happen while the British economy was desperate for cheap labour, and had to import hundreds of thousands to do the jobs the “Brits wouldn’t do” (including working on the Olympic village, an utter scandal).....
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
I HEAR YOU FRIEND.....
it is certinaly not the same as when we were kids doing what we could to earn a dollar....i remember helping the night clerk at the 7-11 mop the floors for an icee...lol...we weren’t to good for anything....from your story you and i are about the same age...never did the paper route but did mow lawns...would even help some people at the local stables brush down and walk their horses from time to time just so i could get some free rides...lol...
I worked for dad - started as a dishwasher. Eventually worked my way up to waiting tables and doing the books. That’s the way it is for a small family owned business. There is no top or bottom. Just whatever needs done.
LOL...I know what you mean. If we go into the kind of economic crises that I think we are eventually going to have, it could be tomorrow or a few more years. Unless the politicians really knuckle down and start cutting the budget. Those kind of people are going to be the first one’s to riot, or try to take what doesn’t belong to them. They are so use to having others carry their weight. There is just a big enough part of the population that aren’t willing to sacrifice even a little. We have to many politician’s that never really do anything but, make more laws and take more money and fight the few politician’s that are trying to do the right thing. Like that 99 weeks unemployment. I’m sorry but, that is just to long. Go do what my daddy did. He worked 2 full time jobs for about 1 year. And then worked all the over time he could get when he went back to one job. Many people work 2 jobs. Full time and part time, it isn’t easy. But, living off others when you can do something is immoral, even if it means scaling back your lifestyle.
A guy in my high school class was working for the county highway crew. He was lying about his age, just like me. He was digging post holes by hand in the hot sun, to put up new road signs. And that was on a good day. On a bad day, he was out scraping roadkill off the road with a flat-bladed coal shovel.
I guess that was one job I was “too good” to do. But it was probably the only one. In the winter they had him driving a snow plow and spreading salt, in a Highway Department truck at the age of 16. With today’s youth, that’s fiction too weird to be believed.
I made enough to get into school and never went back there. It was a real struggle and now, even with a degree, I have to work a part-time job in addition to my straight boogie, just to break even and save a little.
<Part of the reason their are no jobs is a business would have to offer substantially higher pay than the welfare payments to get people to work. The job might not be worth that.
No kidding.
About 35 years ago, I attended the Univ of London. I was surprised to see so many immigrants (mostly black Caribbean and African types from the Commonwealth countries, but plenty of East Indians as well) in what I’d call working class jobs like conductor or ticket-taker. I was told that the white British didn’t want those kinds of jobs anymore and many would rather not work than do them.
Almost 20 years ago I flew to England next to a man who ran a factory over there. He told me he had a difficult time finding English people to hire because they couldn’t justify getting off the dole and losing benefits for a job where they’d have to show up everyday and lose their ‘free time.’
Apparently nothing has changed.
I don’t want to penalize people who are temporarily in a tough place, but you don’t make things so easy that the temporary handout becomes a way of life.
My first job, aside from a paper route when I was 8, was cleaning a car wash and a laundromat. I took a pay cut last year to save my job and have also picked up a second job. It sucks, but that is what it takes.
However, I just finished Child 44, Stalin's Soviet Union, the MGB, the Gulags, the serial murders of children in towns along the railroad..where the State said there is no crime and it was a crime to suggest there was a murderer in a paradise for workers.
Outstanding 'first novel', a thriller by Tom Rob Smith
No he doesnt have a point! The fault in this reasoning is that last line. Why does scrubbing toilets and picking up litter heap humilation on people? The undercurrent to that thinking is that such jobs are "demeaning", but that is nonsense. There's nothing wrong or dishonorable in any form of honest labour. In fact, on that basis toilet cleaner is one up from journalist. :)
This is the exact problem. I don’t want to see people suffer (who does?) but welfare was intended to “tide people over”, not to be a career option.
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