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please, you will get no sympathy from me about your situation, man up, go out and get training/volunteering/**** job and make a start on your life.
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i have a good friend who made his job, what job you ask? he goes down the local sainsburys and he takes the trolleys off women just outside the door, helping them to the cab/car. with a smile and a laugh. they inturn let him return it for the pound, he always offers the pound back to them, but mostly they refuse. his previous career? civil engineer.
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A reflection of a society is in the manner in which it treats its weakest members...
to rip a lotr meme - one does not simply 'get a job'.
Certainly not these days - you can put yourself forward all you like, but if employers aren't looking for staff, you're not going to make them give you a job, no matter how good you might be.
Your mate sounds like the scam artists at my local supermarket who try and blag the coin out of your trolley
- the sort I always tell to **** off! (I know I know your mate is being honest and all of that, just made me laugh).
If its bad enough for those not in work who are able bodied then how bad is it for those that are not:
A friend of the family has recently recovered from a brain haemorrhage, loosing his career of the last 22 years (agricultural stuff). He still cannot see to read or watch tv for anything but short periods of time, he cannot drive, he cannot use a computer (indeed he wouldn't know how to use one), he has trouble sleeping and waking and being cogent enough to function when he gets up, at least for several hours to begin with.
Recently, despite the recommendations of his consultant neurologist, and his GP, his 'sympathetic' Atos medical assessor has returned the same letter your dialysis guy article has got -
You must take part in work-focused interviews with a personal adviser to continue to receive employment and support allowance in full.
“The adviser will help you take reasonable steps to move towards work.”
The poor ******* is in his mid 50's and has no experience of anything outside of what he's done in farming and agriculture all of his life. What exactly he'll get out of 'back to work focused interviews' in his current state is anybody's guess. Probably some snotty graduate with a fledgling career in recruitment, teaching him how to put his O-levels and experience of shooting livestock for the knacker on to a CV no employer will ever take a second look at.
He'll have to have someone take him to the interview, as he cannot see well enough to catch a bus.
If you saw him in the street you'd not know anything was wrong with him.
Somehow this last exactly illustrates the problem with the current government policy regarding long term illness and this welfare to work thing. At face value everyone should get on your bike (tebbit) and get a job. In reality all of these 'reforms' (although we should really call them 'budget cuts' - we all know that's what these reforms are really about) take nothing but the most simplistic and cursory view of the individual, then trundle on attempting to make the proverbial square peg fit into a round hole. Just like every other government department and policy linked with the benefits system.
These mandatory work schemes just sound awful.
On the whole they are almost worthless in their intent and their application.
The only good thing about mine was the people I worked with - it didn't teach me anything or give me any skills; the only thing I did learn was how wasteful we are as a culture, both in the things we throw away, and the things we manufacture. Sorting other peoples junk, or 'quality items' as we used to joke about shows you how wasteful we really are.
It's worth noting that the DWP and their partners had nothing whatsoever to do with finding or enforcing any 'work placement' that I was on - I went and found the 'job' at the PDSA, independently and without any influence from the jobcentre, just for something to do in my local area. But of course the company running CAP got paid for my going to the PDSA - though the PDSA received nothing except my time.
Somehow it seems unfair for a charity to get no financial subsidy for 'welfare to work community action program' participation, and yet a private company who is in it for the money and nothing greater than that, stands to make a profit from unemployment - after all, if there were no money in it, why else would a privately owned 'for profit' organisation be involved with such a scheme? Purely out of the beneficent nature of their golden little hearts?
I don't think so.
