Essay: Nationalising the labour force

Towards a very British gulag

The Government's welfare reforms and workfare programme represent a curious kind of nationalisation, argues Mark Cantrell in this essay originally published on one of his earlier blogsites

GULAGS are often associated with the incarceration of political prisoners but behind all this rhetorical justification they tend to have a rather more practical economic purpose: the provision of state subsidised labour.

To put it in less euphemistic terms, that would be slavery. Under this model, the State ‘harvests’ a captive labour force, either for use on its own projects, or to farm out to clients, but either way it bears the costs for the upkeep and secure management of the unwilling participants.

By their nature, forced labour camps are – forgive the pun – labour intensive and costly institutions so we’re not likely to see them here on British soil any time soon. Anyway, it’s not as if they’re really in keeping with the national spirit. For a society that prides itself on its progressive credentials, labour camps most certainly give out the wrong message. Barbed wire fences and armed guards make for bad PR as do the incarceration of people simply on the basis of economic misfortune or supposed incapability.

With the right approach, however, these unfortunates can be suitably criminalised into an institution capable of extracting some shareholder value out of otherwise obsolete livestock. Labour is one of the biggest costs any business faces, after all, so the opportunity to gain some basic manpower free at the point of delivery has to be of benefit. Why pay when you can simply take? That’s got to be good for the bottom line.

One might consider it the ultimate in externalised costs, getting someone else outside the business – that's the still remunerated tax-paying public – to stump up for the payroll, but it needs some serious spin to sell it to we the suckers.

Forget ‘political crimes’. That’s dubious territory and likely to backfire. Better that the inmates are seen as feckless layabouts leeching off the good will and charity of the citizenry. Put them to work and they’ll learn a thing or two about thrift and self-reliance. Better still, if the carrot of ‘self-improvement’ can accompany the stick of hard reproach then it surely proves a boost to any progressive reputation, but there still remains the problem of ‘harvesting’ and stockpiling this plentiful resource.

Nationalising the labour force

'Workfare', Soviet style

Fortunately, there’s a better way than labour camps for offering private business the chance to partake of this nationalised resource. Indeed, in many respects it already exists ‘pre-herded’ into suitable ‘enclosures’ ready to be farmed out.

Successive governments and media outlets have also long-since prepared the ideological ground needed to justify a crackdown on the ‘burdensome parasites’ riding free at our collective expense. With the scapegoats at the ready, all that needs to be done is to modify the existing system into something that can manage the resources accordingly. The current Government appears to be doing just that. And there’s not a barbed-wire perimeter fence in site.

Nice work, if you can get it (and be paid for it).

The solution relies heavily on the legacy of the Welfare State, throwing together some old-fashioned Dickensian thinking, with the latest wave of 21st Century reforming zeal to twist some cruel barbs into the economic ties that state benefits invoke. Welcome to the re-forged Welfare State, harnessing the dismissed and excluded to furnish a little welfare for business. Just don’t call it slavery, okay – it sends out the wrong signals – think of it as charity.

Back in the old days, Britain witnessed the dubious charity of the workhouse. These were brutal and callous institutions – deliberately so, lest the poor succumb to the temptation to indigence that was somehow inherent in their nature (very much a similar line to the attitudes taken today). Once incarcerated under the thumb of the Beadles, there was little chance of ever escaping the hopeless regime of gruel and back-breaking toil, beyond the Reaper’s tender mercies that is.

Workhouses were to all intents and purposes prisons – ‘micro-gulags’ – for people who had committed no crime other than the worst sin of all – to be out of work and utterly poor. Oh yes, and utterly desperate too.

Fortunately, Britain in the 21st Century is a progressive nation utterly dedicated to the pursuit of social justice, so there will be no return to the workhouses any more than we will see traditional labour camps arising. At least, not just yet, but even so it appears the good old Job Centre is fast becoming the modern equivalent.

In a nasty twist on the whole concept of the Job Centre, Government welfare reforms are slowly transforming them into ‘command and control’ centres for amassing and directing an army of state-subsidised labour. Essentially, once their grace period ends, the unemployed are increasingly expected to work for their benefits.

Often the justification is that the work helps the unemployed regain the skills needed to find and hold down a job, but according to opponents of this burgeoning ‘workfare’ aspect of the welfare system, they are being used to displace paid workers from employment.

The organisation Boycott Workfare is taking issue with the new Government Work Programme, a crucial component of its transformation of the welfare system. Essentially, its concerns hint at the shift from ‘safety net’ and support system for individuals and their families to a punitive mechanism that effectively undermines hard-won employment rights – even employment itself.

“The Work Programme is a cash gift from the Government to businesses which can replace employees with a constant free labour source mandated to work by the Job Centre at risk of destitution,” said Joanna Long, a spokeswoman for Boycott Workfare.

“It is a disgrace that Government and providers are talking about this as a boost to job seekers’ prospects when it is putting them to work – often in unsuitable roles – for far below the minimum wage.”

So much, then, for the valuable lessons and positive benefits of hard work the politicians often hector us about from on high.

In place of direct provision for the inmates' upkeep – food, clothing, shelter – this 'gulag' out-sources the means of subsistence to the inmates themselves via their meagre benefits. Okay, it's still an expensive system to maintain, but you have to speculate to accumulate. In the meantime, those on the receiving end can kiss goodbye to social mobility and working hard to get on in life – just keep toiling in the hope the benefits won’t be stopped and there might be a real job at the end of it.

Well, when it comes to the second aspect, dream on suggests Boycott Workfare. The organisation is a coalition of organisations and groups, taking in the unemployed, anti-cuts campaigners, charity workers, trade unionists and others. It alleges that the Government’s Work Programme undermines opportunities for paid employment and does nothing at all to help people find work. Instead, they are being exploited as cheap labour – essentially free from a business’s perspective – under the threat of losing their benefits.

This might not seem like much of a sanction, for those not struggling to make ends meet on JobSeekers’ Allowance [or the forthcoming Universal Credit]; of course, loss of benefits includes housing benefit, which means that the threat doesn’t just cover food in the belly, but the roof over someone’s head too. Losing the first is bad enough; the two combined is one hell of an argument for compliance.

The Work Programme ups the ante on unpaid ‘work experience’; it has already been carried out in some areas under the Flexible New Deal programme. Boycott Workfare alleges that some companies have reaped the benefits, stringing people along in unpaid work with the suggestion of jobs that never materialise.

Poundland and Primark are two of the companies the organisation has accused of using a succession of people mandated by their local Job Centres, replacing them one after the other, as each person’s mandated work period ends, but the two businesses aren’t alone – a number of charities are said to be making use of such mandated labour too. One might expect business motivated by the margins to make the most of the Government’s schemes, but charities? That’s another matter.

“It is astounding that some of the larger voluntary sector organisations are collaborating with the Government on the Work Programme to replace volunteers with mandatory unpaid labour,” Long added. “This flies in the face of the sector’s values and will surely damage their reputations.”

Will work for food?

Obviously, the application of mandated labour is somewhat limited; but with the British economy now so reliant on the service sector, it remains a potentially sizeable pool of subsidised labour, but for how long and what ultimate cost to our society?

'Commissar for Workfare' Iain Duncan Smith

So far, it’s early days for the Work Programme. For the moment the prospect of learning on-the-job-skills and boosting the CV remains a persuasive argument, but sooner or later scepticism will turn to resentment. That’s the downside of forced labour: sooner or later it gets uppity. But there are always means of applying discipline to a captive labour force, and Britain’s very own ‘open plan’ gulag is no different.

For one, the numbers mean there’s plenty to play with. Second, the ‘inmates’ of the system exist in a scattered and fragmented form; difficult to crystallise into organised resistance (though not impossible). And thirdly, the threat of losing benefits can be a potent persuader of the benefits (sic) of obedience. And if that fails, there’s always the conventional State apparatus to deal with the recalcitrant. This brings us to the cruel twist incorporated into the Welfare State: the move from social security to social disciplinarian.

True, the Welfare State was never built to cope with mass unemployment of the kind we have seen these past 30 years: in its origins – and for much of its later use – its purpose was to provide a safety net to citizens. This was the social contract that said we were all in it together and if we fell on hardship we would be supported. But it wasn’t just about a safety net; it was about standards and values for a decent, humane society.

The system was far from perfect, of course, even before it was expected to mop up the 'collateral damage' of economic 'restructuring', but for a while at least it proved a handy ‘warehouse’ for the unemployed created by the Thatcher Government’s abolition of whole industries and the communities that had arisen to serve them. Since then it's creaked along, bursting at the seams, to carry the heavy burden imposed on it, not to mention wave after wave of 'reform' proposals motivated by a combination of ideological prejudice and realpolitik convenience.

Now, we have a new regime, a curious amalgam of Tory leaders and LibDem lieutenants, that is forging ahead with the solution to the alleged trans-generational worklessness their political forebears fostered (and which studies by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others has revealed is a myth, with the reality being a cruel cycle of poorly paid, insecure work and unemployment); the poverty and the unemployment of communities that are being trashed by the latest recession, even as they were still struggling to recover from previous downturns – they will grant their labour free to clients in the private sector.

The transformation of the unemployed into state-subsidised labour, delivered free at point of delivery, is welfare for the business class. It rips the concept of the Welfare State inside out and utterly revokes the social contract of old. More than that, it epitomises the transformation of the welfare benefits system into a mechanism for social control – one that can be used to herd us all into quiet compliance.

Every Job Centre becomes the local ‘command and control’ hub, where the unemployed [and the 'under-employed' part-timer workers] must duly report; where every aspect of their lives is subjected to intrusive scrutiny, gathering intelligence that may be used against them; where the fear of losing benefits replaces watchtowers and guards and barbed-wire fences. This is the surveillance state – one aspect of it – that will strip the citizenship from all but the wealthiest.

Some may welcome the ever-more draconian regime that those on benefits face in this day and age, but the wise citizen must surely realise that few of us are more than a P45 away from reporting for duty in this brave new world of a very British gulag. Over the last two years, there have been many in 'secure' employment who suddenly found themselves reporting, bewildered, for duty at their local Job Centre; how many will subsequently find themselves back at work – on pain of losing benefits?

First they came for the long-term unemployed. After that, everyone else was easy.

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The Social Security Advisory Committee is said to be scathing of the workfare proposals. It released a critical report about the Work Programme in April 2011. Find it here.

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Copyright © August 2011. All Rights Reserved.

This article was written for one of the author's earlier blogsites, The Word on the Wall, and published there on 29 August 2011.

Interview: Terry Waite CBE, Emmaus

At home with the underdog

Given the wealth of time and effort he donates to charities and good causes, it’s little wonder that Emmaus president Terry Waite has been called a “roving humanitarian”, but it was his time as a hostage in the Middle East that really tested his mettle . He talked to Mark Cantrell about how his experiences have moved him to promote the cause of human dignity

First published in Housing magazine 

Terry Waite CBE

TERRY Waite, president of the homelessness charity Emmaus, is no stranger to hardship and deprivation, having witnessed much over his long and varied career; he has endured it firsthand too, as a captive in the Middle East, but he has never allowed his experiences to dim his humanitarian flame.

That’s obvious from the 73-year-old’s full CV; equally so from his good humour and thoughtful manner, even while talking about his own captivity. Most of us gain little opportunity to test our mettle in the face of extreme duress, but in 1987 Waite found himself faced with the severest personal test when his efforts to negotiate the release of Western hostages ended with his own captivity in Lebanon.

At the time, Waite was working for the Archbishop of Canterbury, then Dr Robert Runcie, as part of his personal staff at Lambeth Palace. Tasked to manage the Archbishop’s diplomatic and ecclesiastical affairs, he also found himself in the media spotlight for his successes in negotiating the release of hostages in Iran and Libya in the early 1980s. Waite was under no illusions about the risks he faced.

“I went on many hostage missions and was successful on a number of occasions,” he said. “When I went I always took with me a clockwork watch because I always believed that if I was wearing a battery watch and I was captured, the battery would run down and I wouldn’t know the time. Of course, best laid plans – when I was captured they took my watch away so I was no further forward. So I never believed I was immune to captivity, but when I was captured I had to learn how to develop my own strengths from within.”

Waite was incarcerated for nearly five years – 1,763 days – and for some four years of that he was held in solitary confinement. It wasn’t until 19 November 1991 that he was finally released.

“I suppose it sounds very trite when I say it, but it was actually something that did enable me to develop a greater sense of identity, a greater sense of self, which you have to do when you are in adverse circumstances like that,” he said. “Nobody else is going to give you any positive feedback; you’re going to be kicked around and you are going to be treated as a non person, and therefore you have to generate from within yourself the ability to be yourself, in other words to stand up and recognise that you are an individual, that you are a person, and a person of worth.”

Waite’s experience of captivity has fostered a deep well of empathy and understanding for those who are less fortunate in life, he said. This “sympathy for the underdog” has its roots in his earlier career, working in Africa to deliver aid and development programmes, for instance, or his work as a consultant to the Roman Catholic Medical Order, for which he worked on a broad range of development issues, health and training programmes across the world.

“I’ve worked in many – if not all – the main trouble spots in the world during the course of my life,” he said. “It’s given me a sympathy with the underdog, a sympathy with the people who have little or nothing in this world, in particular with children who are born in poverty, who will live in poverty, and will die in poverty. Now, I’m not saying riches necessarily improve in every instance the quality of life but there does have to be a better chance for many people in the world today.

“I suppose, by having experienced this through working in different parts of the world, and also having experienced severe deprivation through my own captivity, I have an instinctive sympathy with those who find themselves in similar positions and believe that one should do what one can to at least give more and more people at least some opportunity in life.”

Having seen so much deprivation and hardship, it must surely be difficult not to be ground down by it all at times. Waite added: “Yes it is, at times, but I think what I had to learn during those years of solitary confinement when I was almost five years alone, was that one of the things you must do is find resources within yourself and be able to maintain hope. If you can somehow maintain hope, both for yourself and for situations that appear to be hopeless, it’s not an easy thing to do, it’s a battle, but it is possible.”

These days, Waite earns his living by writing and lecturing, but he donates a great deal of time to charities and good causes. Indeed, the list of organisations he is involved with – as president, vice president, chairman, trustee or patron – is so extensive you might wonder where he finds the time to write.

“There is no such thing as a purely altruistic motive, you always do it for yourself as well,” Waite said. “I find a certain personal satisfaction at seeing people who have formerly been in a deprived situation getting back into life. That in itself is its own reward.”

Homelessness is one of the many issues close to Waite’s heart. The experiences of being homeless resonate strongly with his experiences of captivity, he feels, and he is adamant that homelessness can happen to anyone.

“It’s a terrific mistake to categorise the homeless as being just drops outs, alcoholics, drug addicts and wastrels. Many of the homeless that I meet – and I meet them constantly – come from all walks of life,” he said.

Emmaus can’t help everyone – nor does it pretend otherwise – Waite explained, but it works to give homeless people back their dignity and their independence by the way the organisation works, based on a few fundamental principles.

The organisation has created 21 self-sufficient communities in towns and cities throughout the UK so far – the latest is being put together in Cornwall – where homeless people live and work together and support each other as part of the wider community.

“Emmaus provides a structure and a community life for homeless people to enable them to get back into life,” Waite said. “The basic principles are very sound. First of all, [when] a person first comes into an Emmaus community they must agree to leave behind state support. One of the reasons for that is state support, or indeed charity to put it another way, is demeaning for the individual. At times it is necessary to receive a handout but to be a constant recipient of a handout does nothing for you and for your own development, and your own dignity, as a human being, because you are being put into a subservient position to other people. So they must leave behind the dole, leave behind state support.

“Secondly, they come into a community, a community which is a supportive group of people, no larger than say 25 people, and they get a good standard of accommodation, and the reason that [important] is you are recognising people have dignity. Thirdly, they must agree to work according to their capacity and in so doing regain their dignity as a human being.”

The work can vary. Clearing houses, for example, or renovating furniture and white goods, while In Bedford the community runs a bistro that not only provides food and work for residents, it also provides subsidised meals to elderly people living in the wider neighbourhood. Being an active member of the wider community is an important factor wherever Emmaus sets itself up.

Given his extensive involvement in charities and good causes, not just Emmaus but the many others too, it is tempting to wonder if all of this hasn’t been part of his own process of rehabilitation from his experience of captivity. “I suppose it is, I don’t know, I never thought of it in terms of rehabilitation. I thought of it in terms of having some form of active involvement in some of the issues that society faces today. Something which I have done right across life but probably now do more fully than I was able to do when I was younger,” he said.

“One thing I ’m glad of: I’m 73 but I still have the same passionate commitment to some of those social issues that I had when I was a young man of 23. I haven’t lost that and I haven’t lost that campaigning spirit – thank goodness.”


This interview first appeared in the June 2012 edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently re-published on the Housing Excellence website, 21 June 2012