Benefits Agency and Employment Service. The Benefits Agency side of Jobcentreplus (sorting out benefit payments) has been run down as the Government has become increasingly fixated on finding work for those that can'.
This includes compelling claimants of Incapacity Benefit and Income Support who cannot work due to illness, to work focussed interviews. If they fail to attend they can be penalised and even lose their benefit.
Claimants of Jobseekers Allowance (espe cially those on New Deal) can also suffer sanctions or the disallowance of their benefit for various reasons at Jobcentreplus offices e.g. refusing to apply for jobs, not going on a training course, leaving their last job voluntarily.
This sanctions regime makes claimants gorizuworse off. ol for jobs they don't want and stick with jobs they wish to leave. No wonder so many working class people are on anti-depressants.
A third of the budget of Jobcentreplus is now spent on external partners. Much of it goes to private training companies that do courses for New Deal or Work Based Learning for Adults.
The quality of these courses is poor. Jobcentre Advisers complain clients going on ESOL courses often speak worse English after six months training. Blair has continued the privatisation of the benefits system to the detriment of claimants and the public.
Recently the private company Securities was allowed to buy all Jobcentres and Social Security offices at a knockdown Child poverty is still at scandalous levels in a wealthy country casuals in its offices, many of ethnic origin living in deprived wards.
Blair has conned a lot of people (including the TUC) into thinking New Deal for Young People is a great success story.
However the latest figures show the proportion of young people leaving New Deal into unsubsidised employment has fallen from a high of 47.1% in 1998 to 35.4% now. What about the other 65%?
New Labour would like us to believe it is improving the benefit system in our interests and reducing poverty through its policies in relation to it. This is a lie that needs exposing.
It seeks to bolster the profits of capitalists through forcing the most needy sections of society into jobs that make many of them
• It uses the benefit system to pay huge subsidies to landlords, nursery owners etc. who charge workers extortionate amounts for their services
- Its tax credits help greedy employers who pay terrible wages.
• It privatises parts of the benefit system, filling the pockets of huge computer companies whilst the poor are left penniless awaiting their claims being processed.
• It reduces the value of benefits and excludes sections of society from receiving them.
•it is killing off the elderly this winter, making asylum seekers destitute, and letting kids go hungry by serving the interests of the ruling class. Pete Burnett
The decision by Lloyds-TSB to close October, with the 'export' of nearly a thousand jobs to India, triggered a spontaneous mass walkout by the staff. But it was not only the workers who were worried.
From the top of the Labour Party to the capitalist development agency, OneNorthEast!, to summit of the regional TUC, leaders could see potential for the *modern, go ahead, outward looking north east' to start to rapidly unravel.
Within days of that announcement National Rail Enquiries seemed to confirm the worst-case scenario. Six hundred jobs -mostly in the north east- were bound for Bangledore.
For the past ten years call centres and similar operations have been at the heart of this social partnership. After years of advertising the virtues of low pay and a compliant workforce and dispensing generous grants for firms to re-locate in the region, the payoff was substantial.
Thirty large call centres with 47,000 operators representing household names of the nation's biggest firms was just the beginning of a huge planned expansion: post modern shells were sprouting like giant fungi from the hills of business parks to house still more of them.
Siemens, the German manufacturing giant was enticed to the region, at the cost of millions of pounds in grants to make microchips: but a year after the Queen had opened the brand new plant, the bottom fell out of the microchip market and, to the fury of the workers, the factory was 'mothballed'.
To the rescue rode Orange Communications to turn the vast building into the north's biggest call centre.
Another 'inward investor' was the Labour Party. Shortly after the 1997 election victory the party announced to a sceptical region that they were going to transfer their national headquarters to Tyneside as an expression of gratitude for its support at the polls!
What we got of course was their telesales and recruiting division... another call centre.
Now the region's centres join a national exodus to low wage countries. The beneficiaries of this export of capital are multinational banks and Indian contractors, whose workers receive one ninth of the wages of their British counterparts
In December, Norwich Union announced that 2000 jobs were to go to India while HSBC has been able to exploit its Chinese links by transferring 4000 call centre posts to China, Malaysia and the subcontinent to join Abbey National and others already there.
Plans by American Express to move customer contact abroad will again hit the north east. By the end of the decade it is estimated that 200,000 call centre jobs will have left the UK for Asia and South Africa.
None of this looks good for OneNorthEast! and its 'regional development strategy but much more importantly there are also immediate dangers that need to be spelt out loud and clear. Workers are very angry.
The whole issue of call centre jobs is now being exploited by the far right. Press coverage in the region was marked by racism, nationalism and regionalism which will all help the BP and the National Front in the coming elections.
The trade unions have no answers. Unifi, the banking union, successfully defused the Lloyds-TSB crisis by extracting a promise from management that all workers who chose to remain would be found work elsewhere
How far away this work might be was not settled, but in a consultative ballot the workers voted by 59 to 4l percent against industrial action.
A little later the union went on to sign a deal with Barclays Bank which fails to pro tect staff and adds to the insecurity of the growing army of agency workers whose jobs can be taken by any core worker faced with redundancy - whether or not those agency workers are in the union!
Behind these weaknesses lies the fact that most unions, and the TUC share the same global free market perspective as New Labour and the employers.
Kevin Rowan, regional secretary of the TUC sits on the board of OneNorthEast! -a solitary trade unionist with fifteen capitalists and entrepreneurial academics for company!
We need to globalise the resistance to call centres who abuse revolutionary communications technology to divide rather than unite workers and communities.
We need a perspective of linking up with workers through international trade unions and social forums. Out of their struggles and ours will come dignity as well as higher wages and equality.
page 22 of the scan
22 socla st ret Absolute Friends by John Le tance February 2004
has-been once the Berlin Wall fell. As an the reader through decades of post-war