For those of you who aren't intimately familiar with the UK legal system...

There was a time when if you didn't have gainful employment, you either 
became a thief, or you starved to death. That time was several centuries 
ago. More recently, if you were unemployed, you could claim 
"unemployment benefit" from the government, meaning that they basically 
pay you enough money to live off until you can find another job.

The trouble is, that lead to a generation of people who had no 
/intention/ of ever doing an honest day's work, and just spent their 
lives lounging around, sponging off the government. [At least, assuming 
you believe the mass media.] In other words, it has the exact same 
problem as the hundreds of other benefits schemes that preceded it: 
Trying to help the people who /actually/ need it, without benefiting the 
people who just want to cheat the system.

The stereotype goes that kinds from poor families go to school, don't 
apply themselves, dos around, don't turn up half the time, drop out of 
school with no skills or qualifications, and go on to spend a lifetime 
living off government handouts and nicking cars for amusement. Even if, 
by some miracle, someone offers them a job, they turn up for maybe a 
week or two, and then can't be bothered with it any more. Because hey, 
why /work/ for a living, when you can just sit on your arse and still 
get paid?

Then there are the people who get the chance to take on a job, but 
"legitimately" turn it down because the job actually /pays less money/ 
than being unemployed. In an ideal world, no such jobs would exist in 
the first place. Doing productive work should /always/ pay more money 
than doing nothing. But that's apparently not how the real world works. 
(Especially if you lack skills to go into highly paid jobs.)

Basically the benefits have to be high enough that honest people don't 
starve to death just because they genuinely can't find work right now, 
and yet not so high that lazy people decide to live off them their whole 
lives...

This has always been and always will be the problem that any benefits 
scheme faces. Helping the people who deserve to be helped, without 
discouraging people from helping themselves.



OK, so where am I going with this? Well, as you know, I am now 
unemployed. Right now I have a stackload of money in my bank account. 
Owing to the levels of WTFness at my ex-employer, I am essentially 
getting my usual monthly wages paid until the end of the year, even 
though I'm not doing any work. Plus I just got a large lump sum paid 
into my account. So right now, I have more money than I've had in years.

Of course, once I stop getting paid, all of that is going to change. In 
short, it's time to sign up for some benefit money from the government.

Now, the government scrapped "unemployment benefit" a long time ago. 
They no longer pay you to just "be unemployed". Because we don't want 
that. If there's some specific reason why you genuinely /cannot/ be 
employed, there's a number of benefits different benefits for that, 
depending on what the reason is. Otherwise, they pay you "jobseeker's 
allowance" (JSA).

Now JSA is basically a different name for the same thing. (This is 
government, right?) The basic idea is that they are not being you to "be 
unemployed"; they are paying you to "seek jobs".

When I did this ten years ago, the difference is that you have to check 
in twice a month and convince the [very irritable, probably poorly-paid] 
government employees that you /really are/ trying to get a job. And the 
government reserves the option to /force/ you to take a specific job. 
And if you fail to do any of these things, they stop paying you.

Well, on Friday I went to get JSA again. Unsurprisingly, in ten years, 
the process has changed somewhat. On the one hand, I am going to get a 
piffling amount of money which almost pays for my petrol costs. (It 
won't even touch the costs of the loan for my car.) On the other hand, 
it appears that I've just signed up for a full-time job: finding a job!

Essentially it seems that in order to claim JSA, you have to be working 
5 hours per day trying to get hired. So if you work it out, 5 hours per 


essentially, I am now in full-time employment by the UK government, for 
about half the legal minimum wage. Isn't that fantastic? :-/

Still, hopefully this state of affairs won't persist long. [At least, I 
damned well hope not!]

So what can you actually /do/ for five hours every single day which will 
actually increase your chances of getting hired? Well, there's a 
government-run jobs site, which I have to check at least twice per week. 
(I strongly suspect that a /very/ tiny fraction of the jobs they list 
are for anything highly-skilled like computing, but we'll see.) I have 
to check either the print version or the website of two specific local 
newspapers every week. I have to perform searches of [unspecified] sites 
such as Total Jobs - and I have to do that /daily/. (Because hey, it's 
not like they only get a few new jobs per month... oh, wait.) On top of 
that, I have to somehow find and register with at least three jobs 
agencies [Because those aren't a total waste of space... oh, wait.] and 
I have to hassle them at least once per week.

In short, I have to do a whole crapload of work, very little of which is 
likely to actually get me hired. On the other hand, the only "proof" I 
have to supply is that I wrote on a sheet of paper that I did this. I 
could literally just /invent/ this stuff out of thin air, and nobody 
would ever know. [OTOH, if they find out, presumably I'm going to jail 
for a decade or two, after which I will never be employed ever again.]



Having just said all that, it's now nearly 11AM on Monday morning, and I 
haven't done /any/ of my appointed activities yet. So I suppose I'd 
better go get on with it. :-S

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