The Jobcentre: the 21st century workhouse

According to a BBC producer unemployment is "no longer an issue", I beg to differ. There is nothing more soul destroying than being unemployed. Nothing worse than the sharp feeling of dread in your stomach that gnaws your gut while being led down a corridor after your boss furtively asks for a quiet word or receiving that unexpected letter from your employer telling you that you are now surplus to requirements. With the economic downturn it’s a familiar story in many households, including mine. So unemployment will be an issue at the General Election, how can you possibly brush off the economic woes of 2.5 million people? The answer is simple you can’t. Being made redundant and being unemployed is one of the most deeply wounding events that can ever befall someone, and it makes you angry. Anger makes General Elections volatile situations.


It’s the feeling of uselessness that redundancy brings that is now felt by millions as the dole queue has increased yet again as new figures have shown. The jump was hardest felt in Scotland where 10,000 joined the ranks of the unemployed in figures released last week. However despite the fact that many of these people have done nothing to bring on their misfortune many treat the unemployed as second class citizens or they brushed aside as unimportant as is made evident by a producer thinking it’s no longer an issue.


The stigma of unemployment still remains, that tarred brush of having to say you don’t have a job to go, people expect that you must be sat there in front of Jeremy Kyle with a can of Special Brew doing nothing but generally nothing could be further from the truth. I have met those out of work from all classes and backgrounds roll their sleeves up and do something they might have never expected they would do. Some volunteer, some retrain and one thing many of these people will do is head to the Jobcentre (or Jobcentre Plus as they prefer to be called), expecting help, assurance and a friendly face. Such naivety is soon extinguished after crossing the threshold.


You go to sign on for Jobseekers allowance, but wait you can’t do it there you need to call up the helpline or apply online. Which if you have just a mobile you can expect to say goodbye to a small fortune. One phone call cost me over £5 due to the person at the other end of the line not being able to understand a Scottish accent and taking well over the stated 30 minutes it takes to apply.


What you have to remember is that the Jobcentre is the epitome of ineptitude; it becomes a symbol of misery and disdain as you go in every two weeks or every week once you hit 13 weeks on the dole and you are sneered at by the staff. No t all but enough to make you feel uncomfortable. You take your card and sit waiting in a queue filled with people all with the same deadened look. Each person sat on the same uncomfortable sofas with the same thoughts, no matter what colour, creed or class. “How am I going to pay the rent/mortgage? How am I going to feed us all? What bill can be put off until I can borrow some money from someone? You are desperate for the paltry sum you are entitled to under Jobseekers Allowance if you are young such as myself you get just over £50 a week up to the age of 25 then it goes up to £64. A small fortune I hear you say? Hardly. That could be a quarter of the leccy bill paid.


Then finally when your name is called you head to a civil servant who looks just as suicidal as some of those claiming benefits all without even looking at you as they tap away on a computer. “Now had any luck finding anything?” Now being a naturally sarky person it takes a lot of strength to hold back the reply, “If I had I wouldn’t bloody be here now would I?”Its these kind of asinine comments that make you want to rip the keyboard out and lay waste to every piece of IKEA furniture in the building in a fit of incandescent rage. The experience of the Jobcentre drives people into tears, depression and utter fury. I can't admit to being surprised at hearing stories such as this where a man attacked Jobcentre staff as I have often felt the temptation to wrap the computer mouse cable around the benefits officers neck after being repeatedly denied training courses or being told there was not any money left to send me to any course other than an ECDL despite the fact the IT qualifications I already had surpassed it. I signed up for a course that should hopefully get me into University and was told by Jobcentre staff that if a job came through that clashed with the course I would need to give up the course. Despite it being obvious I was trying to improve my future prospects by getting better qualifications and making myself more “recession proof”. All you get is a shrug when you ask them what the point is.


The Jobcentre today it seems is designed to humiliate as much as the workhouses in the 18th and 19th centuries were. The poor were responsible for their plight not the economic cycle and the same outdated method of thinking persists even today. Poor relief has been replaced by Jobseekers allowance. Those who are unable to find work are sneered at despite the state of the economy being common knowledge that many are going to have to stick on the dole until things improve whether they want it or not. Being unemployed seems to be treated not with sympathy and help as it should but by derision by those who should know better You are thwarted most often by the ones who we are told are there to help. People still hate the thought of supporting those out of work. They still think you must just not want to work.


I have spoken of these problems both in Debate is Free and in my own time for the benefit of councils and community councils and time and time again there seems to be a state of denial on the utter uselessness of services that should be helping the unemployed particularly the young. As one councillor said during a meeting after I lambasted services that seem to be there to simply tick boxes rather than help, “Now you have said every service is rubbish, don’t you have anything positive to say?” It seems now that if you point out the inadequacies of a system that should be helping not hindering it must be because you are at fault


But that’s the problem; most of our politicians don’t understand what being unemployed feels like. Of course they give the lip service, visit the odd council estate and listen to the woes of a single mother with two kids but that’s it. They don’t live it, they don’t experience it and they certainly don’t lie in bed at night terrified of what may come next or what could appear in tomorrow's post.


I have now moved from the realm of the unemployed to those of the underemployed. A shift I am sure many of the 2.5 million on the dole queue will be envious of, as each of them would relish the chance to escape from the regular humiliation of the Jobcentre.