[joeysteele]

Originally Posted by Vicky.

They will never do away with 0 hour contracts or the true number of unemployed people would start to show. So many in those and doing 0-5 hours a week and classed as fulltime employed..its ridiculous

You are right Vicky, I would love to know the full number of so called 'employed' people who in reality barely get at best 10 really full time weeks work a year who are on these contracts.

That is before you start to calculate others on what is described as part time work too.

Real unemployment falling, that is the biggest con yet as to that statement.

[user104658]

Originally Posted by joeysteele

You are right Vicky, I would love to know the full number of so called 'employed' people who in reality barely get at best 10 really full time weeks work a year who are on these contracts.

That is before you start to calculate others on what is described as part time work too.

Real unemployment falling, that is the biggest con yet as to that statement.

Even worse are the "self-employment based opportunities" that are everywhere, supposedly guaranteed to return at least minimum wage. A friend of ours lost his job (an experienced manager at Tesco) and took up one of these on the instruction of the job center... a door to door type thing. He was putting in 70+ hour weeks and struggling to make £150 a week (less than £2.50 an hour, 35 hours at minimum wage is over £220 a week). He gave it up and was then ineligible for JSA on the basis that he had "voluntarily given up full time employment". Luckily, he found a real full-time management role fairly quickly, but they had already had to sell their car and were 3 months behind on their mortgage. If they'd been in a private rent they would probably have been evicted :/.

The jobs on offer have to be real, meaningful jobs that actually reflect what they are. If that's less than full time they should just say so - tax credits etc. at least mean that it's possible to scrape by on a part-time salary and continue looking for better without the constraints of jumping through JSA hoops.

The things they force you to attend are abysmal. I was unemployed for 6 months after Uni and avoided that fate by the skin of my teeth. I got a job after about 5.5 months but didn't start for 4 weeks so had to continue JSA... for the final two weeks they made me attend jobsearch groups (read: a room full of brawling junkies and alcoholics on one side and horrified normal people on the other) twice a week even though I already had a job (pointless hoops...). Those 5 months and especially that final two weeks were enough to open my eyes completely to the system and not wish that fate on ANYONE who is genuinely seeking work. That was in 2009, and apparently it's only gotten worse since then.