Inside A JobCentre JSA Group Meeting

Full story at Kate Belgrave’s brilliant blog. Extract below:

It is late on recent Thursday morning at one of the north west London jobcentres and I’m sitting in a new JSA claimants’ group meeting, watching the jobcentre adviser in charge of the session totally lose it with one of the new claimants (there are about 12 new claimants and an adviser crammed into a very small and rather dark side room). The jobcentre adviser and the new claimant bloke are having a full-on shrieking-match, which they’ve been working towards since the session started. I’m guessing that the louder parts of it are now reverberating around the jobcentre.

The new claimant guy – let’s call him Mark – obviously can’t take being patronised, or tolerate bullshit in any form, and has decided to come out swinging (metaphorically on this occasion). And fair enough, too. I know for a fact that if I was siging on, there’s absolutely no way in this world I could put up with the high-handed, JSA-claimants-are-on-the-make-and-must-be-kept-in-line presentation that we’re stuck in front of today. If I had just lost my job, this thinly-masked institutional hauteur would be needling me to the brink. It is anyway. The adviser’s address is full of You Lot Better Pull Finger directives such as: “If you have no commitments… we’d expect a lot more effort from you. And to be honest, you should expect a lot more effort from yourself.” The adviser chucks in plenty of poorly-disguised sanctions threats, too (even though nobody’s actually signed on yet): “The less effort we feel that you’re putting in [to find work], the more chance there is of your jobseekers’ allowance being affected,” and “the more vague your information, the more chance that your jobseekers’ allowance may be affected,” etc, etc. This pitch starts to work on your brain like nails down a chalkboard: “Your Jobseekers’ Allowance May Be Affected.” On and on it goes and my word, it grates. Without a doubt, the assumption from the get-go is that people sign on to sponge.

Anyway. The argument. Mark describes the jobcentre adviser as “sanctimonious” (which he is. To be fair, I suspect that anyone who must channel Iain Duncan Smith for a living inevitably struggles to come across as anything else).

Mark prods the adviser right the way through the session. He coughs very loudly when the adviser talks (the adviser can’t be heard over the hacking and hawking), asks if the adviser is part of a government agenda (“you work for an agenda!”) and intones meaningfully about people who toe party lines. “There is no party line!” the adviser says. “Is there not?” Mark asks. “There’s no agenda?”. Mark has chosen an interesting topic here, with its insinuation of government string-pulling, closed doors and DWP targets. It may be that it strikes some sort of nerve. The adviser finally spits the dummy and yells. He accuses Mark of petulance. “You are not only delaying this induction – you are delaying everybody else here!” he shouts at Mark. “Normally, I don’t need to raise my voice in this room, but I’m going to make an exception… If you have nothing of use to say, don’t saying anything at all!”