John McArthur, a 59-year-old North Lanarkshire resident, has for the past three months been staging a one-man protest against the draconian policies of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). John, a former electronics specialist, had been ordered by the DWP to perform six months unpaid work for LAHM recycle – a company which until recently had actually employed him!
John McArthur, a 59-year-old North Lanarkshire resident, has for the past three months been staging a one-man protest against the draconian policies of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). John, a former electronics specialist, had been ordered by the DWP to perform six months unpaid work for LAHM recycle – a company which until recently had actually employed him!
In reaction to his refusal to perform what is essentially slave labour, the DWP is withholding John’s unemployment benefits until January 2015, forcing him to subsist on a paltry £149 per month – money he receives from a pension. Unable to heat his home or afford basic necessities, Mr. McArthur has been sustaining himself by eating 16p tins of spaghetti.
McArthur, however, has refused to take this lying down and has been actively challenging the DWP’s heinous treatment of the unemployed by spending two hours each day parading outside the LAMH Recycle facility in Motherwell, baring a placard which reads ‘Say no to slave labour’ and urging local residents and workers to abstain from volunteering with or buying goods from this ‘charity’.
When questioned by the Guardian, Mr. McArthur expressed the opinion that the CWP (Community Work Placements) programme was ‘entirely exploitative’ and is instigated at ‘the expense of poor people who’ve got absolutely no choice’. McArthur, who has been relentlessly searching for employment in the meantime, also criticised the ‘psychological and economic’ force the government exerts when attempting to force workers into these slave labour conditions, often leaving them with little choice but to accept these measures or see their limited welfare contributions taken from them.
However, bourgeois apologists would argue that McArthur’s plight is an isolated case, and in the words of Joe Fulton, the operations and development manager for LAMH recycling, would propose that the government scheme ‘worked for people who want to make it work for them’. This is clearly not the case. In keeping with the coalition government’s terrible economic policies, this policy of the DWP only serves to further alienate and subjugate the working class. Since the advent of this administration, the average worker has seen his rights slowly eroded from beneath him – all in the name of austerity!
The Community Work Placements programme is yet another patronising attempt of the DWP to legitimise their abhorrent ‘Help to Work’ initiative, in spite of the mass unemployment that is affecting the country.
The DWP, under the leadership of Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith, has been gradually implementing policies which have been detrimental to workers – increasing the age at which people can claim state pension, restricting unemployment benefits, imposing benefit caps – and now they are attempting to force the unemployed to perform slave labour, so that they may receive their benefits!
Despite IDS’s comments that ‘the purpose of this is not to punish people’ the proof of the proverbial pudding is in the eating, as millions of people have been catapulted below the poverty index. It has been estimated that despite the UK’s economy almost doubling in size in the past 30 years, the number of impoverished families has almost doubled. 33% of households endure ‘below-par living standards’ – whereas in the early 1980’s the figure was 14%.
This policy of economic austerity and the complete demonisation of the working poor only further accentuate the incapability of the British ruling classes to bundle their way through this period of global capitalist decline. Despite the so-called “economic recovery”, there has been no recovery for the vast majority of ordinary workers and youth. For the vast majority, there has just been continued austerity and attacks on living standards.
John McArthur’s predicament is not an isolated phenomenon, and is representative of the massive struggle workers face under capitalism. The system is rotten to the core. Only with the socialist transformation of society can such absurd contradictions in society be abolished.
