Welcome to Finland, the country where the exploitation and abuse of the proles looks pretty civil to outsiders, but it is such a devious fucking system with nowehere to turn, that the only way I can describe it is as a carceral system.

My partner has worked hard his whole life. He was a welder who happily worked in the ship building industry until neoliberals made landfall here in the 90s and he as a union man (steward) was eventually let go. He did odd jobs after that, but never found anything permanent so he decided to go to nursing school and became a practical nurse.

He was great at it. Did it for 10 years until he got so severely burnt out by it that it nearly killed him. He has never recovered and applied for retirement then, but wasn’t allowed to retire. He’s been in these joke jobs assigned by the empoyment agency several times since. They were short contracts of all kinds, but those at least were paid work. And his disability was taken to account with things like 4 hour days which he could still do.

He has been on this slightly better unemployment now for little over a year after the last stint of work. It’s the sort of benefit that ends after a period and you drop to this shittier general benefit that we can’t survive on despite my wage. He has been looking for any part-time work for 6 months now and had zero callbacks. He could probably do part-time work, he has tons of work experience in everything from construction to elderly care.

He has been in line for adhd assessement for over 2 years at this point and is still not allowed to retire, nor does he get called in to get tested. Covid also did a number on him and he is even more forgetful, tired and easily stressed than before.

And now the unemployment agency decided to put him into a 3 months “work rehearsal” which means no wage slave labor, full time. As a janitor for some small business owner. This way he gets to stay on that higher benefit tier for three more months, but after that it will end anyway. This is no prospect for actual waged work, nor does he get even meals or any support for commuting, but has to pay all that out of pocket. Yet it is mandatory and if he was to refuse, his entire benefit would be cut.

He also can’t call in sick at all, because sick days for the poors have a 7 day wait period for any sort of sick leave payment and unemployment also isn’t paid for sick days. So if he can’t do this, he gets financially fucked.

So here I sit. Listening to this amazing human sleep as he has to get up at 6am to go to work for free and pay for the bus to get there. All to be just as unemployed three months from now as he is now. Time he could spend trying to find actual paid part-time work that would not burn him out.

This won’t end well. I hate it.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    22 days ago

    He had trouble even filling in job application forms. After being unemployed for about 2 years they told him he had to start earning his jobseeker’s allowance. And what they mad him do was just plain weird. He had to stand in the town centre, fundraising from passersby and then use the money to round up all the homeless people in town and take them on a day trip.

    That is wild I’ve never heard a story like that before.

    In the years after that, unemployed people on benefits were forced to work full time in shops such as Poundland. They didn’t actually get paid wages for this, they just carried on getting their pittance of jobseekers allowance. A woman who was forced to do this took the government to court after the government stopped her from doing voluntary work in a museum and forced her to work for free (except for her JSA) in poundland instead.

    Yes i vividly recall the poundland period. There were some people I knew at the time who would sign off briefly with some contract work then sign back on to reset the time they had been seeking work so they fell out of the requirements for forcing people into that. I think it was 3 months unemployed? I don’t recall very well.

    It would be better to focus on helping people develop useful skills but we’re still living in a Victorian mentality where people need to be punished rather than helped.

    Privatisation of all of these systems with Capita taking over also turned all the staff members that administer the system from being people looking to help into people that despise people on benefits and are looking solely to catch them out.

    • DisabledAceSocialist [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      22 days ago

      There was stuff in the news a few years ago about how DWP staff were filmed by an undercover person, amusing themselves by making up their own quotas of how many people to refuse benefits to, literally refusing people benefits just for fun. The entire system is designed to torment people rather than help.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        22 days ago

        Set it up like uber or just eat and have people on benefits rate every single one of their interactions with the system and how well they feel they are being helped with their situation.

        The attitude will completely shift and the system will have genuinely useful metrics coming straight from the people who actually need the help.

        • DisabledAceSocialist [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          22 days ago

          They’ll never do this. The government feeds all of the news stories about how benefit claimants have it too good because they want people to hate us and turn against benefits, so they can cut them without backlash. That’s why, despite most benefit claimants struggling on a pittance, there are always news stories about the very few who are doing well on benefits, making out it’s like that for everyone. Just the other day there was a woman bragging in a news article that she’s a benefit claimant and that she’s going to get an extra 5K or something a year, and now angry people are writing articles about how this show people on benefits get too much and it needs to be stopped.