Mr Pat Wall: ...in this year's Budget which, incidentally, has brought 150,000 people into the payment band for the first time. Any gains can be offset against the plight of those who have to survive on the workfare schemes, which the Government suggest are some kind of training programme, and those who lose the protection of wages councils. Millions of others—the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and...
Mr Nicholas Scott: ...work. That is nonsense, but that claimant had no obligation to do any more. The other point that the hon. Gentleman raised was whether what we were proposing in this clause was a move towards workfare. I have three words to say about that: no, no and no. Our object is to encourage people into real jobs, not to force them into non-jobs. That is, and that remains, our conclusion.
Mrs Alice Mahon: ...agree that this silly game of union bashing has to stop and that a considered decision was taken by the TUC and NUPE on the employment training scheme? They would not subject the unemployed to a workfare scheme that would force people into slave labour the like of which has not been seen since the 19th century.
Mr Graham Riddick: ...dinosaurs in the union movement, notably the Transport and General Workers Union, the National and Local Government Officers Association and the National Union of Public Employees, complain about workfare and cheap labour. However, they claim to champion the cause of the working class and the unemployed. What humbug. The response of employers and training organisations to the employment...
Jeremy Corbyn: ...advertisements and the publicity that has been produced, at great expense, to con people into believing that there is genuine training for our young people when, in reality, such training is merely workfare?
John Battle: ...are in temporary, part-time, low-paid work. Last night the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) addressed the Employment Institute and recommended once again that the American system of workfare, the pricing of people into work, be taken up in Britain. Underlying those proposals is the Government's refusal to acknowledge that individuals who are unable to work and save are full...
Austin Mitchell: When the Minister talks of suspending South Korea's benefits, he makes it sound as if we are dealing with some kind of international workfare. However, we are dealing with a basic matter of industrial policy; with an order which is unimportant in itself but which involves important principles. We have the full attention of this packed and tumultuous House, and the presence of a Minister who...
Dennis Canavan: ...not ashamed to come to the Dispatch Box to give those figures? Why is his boss, the Secretary of State for unemployment, swanning around the United States of America? No doubt he is cooking up some workfare scheme for the unemployed instead of coming to the Dispatch Box to tell us how the Government will create real jobs for unemployed people and get unemployment down to the level that...
Michael Meacher: ...higher training standards, Sweden has achieved an unemployment rate only one fifth as high as ours? Why does not the Secretary of State look to Sweden's record on training rather than to America on workfare?
Mr Harry Barnes: ...in their hands. We now know that rights, pay and conditions at work are equally unsafe. The Bill worsens an already bad situation and inevitably moves us towards more compulsory labour schemes and workfare. The Government cures unemployment for 16 to 18-year-olds by coercing them into cheap labour schemes or low-paid jobs. They introduced a new adult training scheme, on which claimants...
Mr Robert Clay: ...to do with training. Dial-a-ride and services for the disabled are two such schemes. The Government are trying to deceive us that the new schemes are about training—that is their excuse for workfare-plus and for cutting the rates of pay. The Government are telling the truth to the extent that the existing community programme schemes will go altogether. They have nothing to do with...
Michael Meacher: ...The Guardian today that, in four inner London boroughs, if an unemployed person refuses a job, his benefit will be withdrawn? Does that not take us a big step further down the road towards American Workfare in Britain? Does that not indeed follow from the creeping compulsion that we have already seen over Restart, YTS benefit withdrawal and the powers in the current Employment Bill to...
Clare Short: ...to the Secretary of State's announcement of 18 December. It outlined plans for a new compulsory work scheme for the adult unemployed. Such a scheme exists in the United States. It is called workfare. The intention is to force people to work for their benefits. The Government have now announced the introduction of workfare to the United Kingdom. They are combining the budgets of the...
Henry McLeish: ...Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman provide resources in the statement so that those concerned can embark on projects that are worth while and provide effective training—or is that to be a workfare scheme on the cheap?
John Prescott: ...do not provide much opportunity for jobs. That is why people do not want to accept a place on those schemes. Some 20 per cent. turn down a place on YTS and more and more are turning down JTS and workfare projects. All those schemes witness the development of an army of skivvy labour who will be available for the inner-city programmes that the Government are now beginning to introduce. The...
Eric Illsley: ...meet previous guarantees. There will also be concern among many unemployed people of all ages that the power to withhold benefit is the thin end of the wedge and a precursor to the American style workfare scheme —a system of welfare conscription where unemployed people have to take any sort of work or face destitution as an alternative. My constituency will suffer under the...
Harry Cohen: ...; contrasts these objectives with the hidden agenda of the Conservative Party in relation to the extension of value-added tax, further contraction of health and social services, the imposition of a workfare scheme for the unemployed, and an accelerated withdrawal of the state from its role as a protector of the weak; and notes that these intentions will be carefully concealed from voters...
Mrs Margaret Thatcher: We have no proposals for compulsory work or training. There are countries that have what is known as a workfare scheme. Such schemes vary enormously from state to state in the United States. At the moment we have the community programme in which people can engage, and we hope that they will engage in it. At the moment we have no proposals for compulsory work as a condition of receiving...
Mr George Park: ...rather than to pay them benefit for doing nothing? The idea now is that if people do not take part in the job training scheme they will not be entitled to benefit. We see here the influence of workfare, the American idea, which is utterly contrary to most of our ideas. Together with a job, decent accommodation is a basic necessity for most people, but we find that of the 2,500 prewar...
Margaret Beckett: ...poverty, with consequences for themselves, their families and the country that could be dire. They are a step along the road which the Government seem to be pursuing of introducing American-style workfare policies. It has been confirmed that there are jobs that need to be done, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer has made it clear that it is no longer true, if it ever was—we would argue...