Jon Bright (London, OK): Nick Robinson reports here on the government's new scheme to allow "bids" for an unemployment market of up to £1bn from multi-national companies - who will offer their services in helping the unemployed back to work. He comments, astutely, that this tells you a lot about how different things look in No. 10 than in No. 11 - Brown had previously been an opponent of the plan, dreamed up by David Freud, until the Conservative party promised to implement it.
I can see how such a scheme would be superficially attractive. Freud has, apparently, worked out that it would be "economically rational" to spend up to £62,000 a head getting people into work. You can also probably imagine, though, where the system would bite. Anyone who has worked for a temporary agency will know this. The absence of rights, the commodification and exploitation, the extreme uncertainty - all generated by the fact that, to the temporary agency, the worker has basically no power whatsoever. A friend of mine, for example, is currently doing temporary work, for an agency whose name I won't mention, and was sent to work the reception in a pharmaceutical company - only to find out she had actually been assigned to hand out methadone in a clinic. Needless to say, with the job market being what it is, she gamely stayed for two weeks, until an ex-patient attacking the place with a large lump of concrete convinced her there had to be somewhere better.
The one, small power agency workers do have is the power to exit the system. If we follow through with this scheme then this loophole, as it were, will be shut. As benefits become ever more dependent on looking for work, and large, private companies, able to bill the government large sums of money for getting the unenmployed jobs, are given access and contact with the large mass of unemployed, a new breed of temporary agencies will spring up, controlling a veritable army of cheap, flexible, and powerless labour. I think they'll make far more than the £1bn above, not least they will be billing £15 an hour for the services of their workforce, and handing back just minimum wage (this Polly Toynbee book is an excellent read on the subject). I am sure "unemployment" as a national figure will be reduced. But I am less sure in whose benefit the system will operate - and I can guarantee these companies will not care a jot for the workers they prod into methadone clinics up and down the country. Surely a measure of Brown's weakness that he has come to this.
