This countries unemployment policy is simply not working.

First topic message reminder :

There are times when contentious political issues become starkly simple for a person. I have had just such a moment this morning.

The brutal fact is that there are people receiving benefits for not working while there is work that goes undone. I am talking about the state of the roads. Pot holes and poor surfaces. Tatter verges and flooding where they need not be flooding. Why the hell do we have a system that sees taxes used to pay people who have no work while work that should be paid for by taxes is not done because of lack of money?

If a single unemployed person costs the public purse about £8800 in combined benefits over the year for which they do nothing why not increase the payment from the public purse by £4100 to make minimum wage and have them repair and upgrade roads. Or have the unemployed person put in 27 hours for the £8800 they are getting anyway?

If instead of seeing the unemployed as a problem to be solved we started seeing them as a resource that simple needs a little extra money to utilize we could change our whole way of functioning.

I know there will be people saying that road repair requires highly paid skilled operatives - its not a simply job, because they way its done at the moment does utilize technical machinery etc but if we stop and think about it roads can be built and maintained with simple tools and labour - they were for hundreds if not thousands of years. Yes it takes longer, and costs more man hours, but that is the irony. If the men who worked the hours no longer needed do not find work elsewhere they still cost the public purse - so although they are paid less for doing nothing they still cost and now we are paying more for what is being done as well as paying for people not doing it.

Why the hell dont we (society, government) say right we are going to take every single person signing on, put them in Labour gangs, and pay them minimum wage instead of unemployment and fix the roads. Fill in potholes or strip surfaces and replace them by hand. Paint white lines along verges - all verges not just A roads. Re paint the central white lines. Where there is bits susceptible to flooding analyse why and if could be prevented - for example near me a 50 meter stretch could be protected by the building of a bank about 100 meters long, other places might benefit from better drainage ditches etc.

We have work to be done and people needing work - we need to put them together.

Irn Bru wrote:

sphinx wrote:Yeah I would still call them labour gangs and I would still send out with pick and shovel because the job can be done with that.

On the job instruction for 5 minutes is not training.  I guess a roller could be called machinery.

They would be public sector workers the way people are agency workers. No permanent contracts, free to leave at any time to take up a different better paying job, no private pension or sick pay.  Instead of holiday pay one week off with pay after each 4 months worked - non transferable.

So there we have it. You would rather send people out with just a pick and shovel to do work that can be done more quickly and more efficiently with equipment that has been designed to do just that. That's just making people work harder and for longer which sums it up as making people work harder for hard works sake. And 5 minutes is nowhere near enough to teach someone to do the work because there is more to doing jobs than just pouring concrete in a hole and damping it down.
You really are beginning to sound like one of those gangers that would send Chinese people out into Morecambe bay to pick cockles telling them that everything is fine after giving them a quick shifty of 5 minutes on how how to pick cockles. You wouldn't treat the dogs that you love watching chasing foxes around the countryside and ripping them apart but you have no problem sending human beings out onto the roads ill equiped to do the work quicker and more efficiently with the means that are available to them
Says it all

So should be done about the poor souls who do it that way right now? I know lets make them redundant and put them on the dole it will be much better for them.

Repeat I would send them out the way half the crews around here are sent out anyway.