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[dragonhawker]

i just hate this creeping bullshit in the economic sector where more and more employers are expecting to be able to get free labor. if there's one thing the 21st century is teaching us, it's that people won't pay for what they can get for free. why should labor be any different? every incremental gain they make in exploiting people for no

Comments

[reikah]

was it this british scandal? for the record (for anyone not familiar with the situation), 'JSA' or jobseeker's allowance is the government welfare for able-bodied unemployed people. unlikeUS unemployment it doesn't matter what, if any, employment you have had in the past - if you're 18 years or older and out of work you're automatically entitled to claim jsa, for as long as you're unemployed, as long as you meet certain conditions (regular meetings with advisors to assess your search for a job to make sure you're looking hard enough etc). it's about £50 a week. british minimum wage is over £5 per hour.

so when this scandal broke - people working fulltime 30+ hour a week jobs for their JSA - there were a lot of idiots insisting that people on JSA should be made to work for their benefit because atm we're all lazy scroungers etc etc, which is all well and good; except - assuming 30 hours a week for £50 means that the state was paying those people slightly less than £1.75 an hour while Tesco not only got an army of free labour, it also pocketed cash incentives /from/ the state for 'helping the unemployed get back to work'. from a business viewpoint, there's literally no downside there.

[reikah]

i'd also like to quote the following numbers from this guardian article on the situation:

...Britain's largest private employer, which made over £3.5bn in profit last April, said that it had taken on 1,400 such claimants in the last four months. This amounts to 168,000 hours of unpaid work if all participants in the scheme work for 30 hours a week.

and

..."We are participating in a government-led voluntary work experience scheme to help give young people valuable experience of the workplace. Over 300 young people have recently gained a paid job at Tesco following their work experience in recent months."

Now I'm no genius at maths, but -

... [Tesco] had taken on 1,400 such claimants in the last four months.

Over 300 young people have recently gained a paid job at Tesco...

Gosh, but those numbers seem an eensy weensy bit far from each other! But it's okay, capitalism is never a bad thing, guys. Never ever ever.

[dragonhawker]

I believe that was the one -- I remembered that it was a grocery chain, but I didn't remember the side bit about the JSA. (Probably because we don't have anything equivalent to a JSA over here, so I just sort of let the foreign concept slide off me.)

[dragonhawker]

Found where I'd heard about the thing, it was in this article: http://ontd-political.livejournal.com/9351042.html

Which was more about Iain Duncan Smith's asstastic comments than about the Tesco work scandal per se.