Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land

There is a land, a strange, unfamiliar land in which bland pop music and beeping checkout scanners can always be heard. The world outside is largely shut out – visitors wander its aisles under the pallid glare of electric light, pulling colourfully-packaged objects from its shelves and depositing them in baskets. The inhabitants of this land spend all day putting more objects on the shelves and mopping the floor, marked by the visitors’ footsteps. In return, they receive a tiny amount of money, well below the minimum wage to which you and I are accustomed. It’s barely enough to live on. But the inhabitants don’t have a choice because in this land, there is no other work available to them: without it they’d starve. This land is called Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land, and is also known as Britain.

Cait Reilly is an inhabitant of Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land, an unemployed graduate on Job Seeker’s Allowance forced onto the coalition’s workfare scheme. Last week she published a piece in the Guardian about the court case she is launching against the government, on the grounds that the scheme violates human rights legislation. In her article, Cait points out that workfare merely disguises, rather than decreases, unemployment figures (over a million young people and counting), as well as taking up overtime that could be given to paid employees. She also talks about the highly personal backlash she’s received from the right-wing media, in particular Jan Moir’s piece for the Daily Mail.

Jan Moir is literally nuts, a friend posted during the week, linking to the article. She’s right, as can be observed in Moir’s assertion that Cait’s plight is ‘hardly like being incarcerated in a Nazi prisoner of war camp for five long years, never knowing each day if you would live or die, sewing cross-stitch samplers to stop yourself from going insane.’ Too late, Jan.

But it’s worth debunking some of the myths that Moir, whose writing reads like the ill-considered ranting of a hormonal teenager on Facebook, sets up. She criticizes Cait (‘a student with barely an NI payment to her name’) on the grounds that working for nothing at Poundland constitutes putting ‘something back into the pot’. If Poundland, and Poundland alone, paid JSA to every single unemployed person in the UK, it might be accurate to describe its revenues as ‘the pot’. But the JSA pool is actually funded by every single employed person in the country. So if claimants were required to put ‘something back into the pot’, it might be a better idea for them to volunteer in the public or charitable sectors, doing something that benefits communities. Increasing the profits of Poundland by providing free labour only benefits, well, Poundland.

But why force people to do any sort of unpaid work in exchange for benefits? Workfare is counter-productive: the more time someone spends stacking shelves at Poundland, Tesco or Asda for nothing, the less they have to dedicate to finding paid work. Looking for a job is a full-time occupation to the unemployed – scale that occupation down to weekends and the chances of success decrease. The scheme is also unethical: for people that need JSA, the alternative to receiving the benefit is starvation. That is to say, there is no alternative. The workfare scheme is tantamount to slave labour because claimants cannot choose not to do the unpaid work.

Moir, however, is resolute that nobody ‘owes this girl [Cait] a living’. Okay: let’s for a moment close off our peripheral vision and look at this issue from the narrowest of perspectives (Moir's). Let’s think of Cait’s £54 a week JSA as her ‘living’, earned in exchange for forty hours of work a week at Poundland. Her hourly wage? £1.35. Somebody owes Cait more of a living than that.

But in the ludicrous, soulless world of Pound-thirty-five-an-hour-land, nobody’s going to give it to her. There, Cait and others like her could stack shelves and mop floors for free in order to receive their benefits for up to six months. Which is why she’s decided to fight for it herself, through the legal system. As she says in her Guardian article, ‘A case such as this cannot result in significant damages; from day one, my challenge has been about the principle, not the money. It is about social justice.’ Now that really is putting something back into the pot.