Boycott Workfare conference: 30th May

Message from Haringey Solidarity Group:

<< OK, the elections are over...but the fight continues. So, come along to the Boycott Workfare conference on 30th May at the London Welsh Centre (details here) and let's start preparing to fight the onslaught that could be coming our way. The Tories might have a majority but so did Thatcher when she introduced the Poll Tax and look what happened there. It can happen again. If we stay strong.

Boycott Workfare are asking people to sign up in advance so they know how many to cater for and allocate space.>>

List of workshops happening at the conference

Organising against workfare in your town or city: 

How groups have had a huge impact and ways to get started in your town.

It can seem a daunting prospect to start a campaign against a workfare provider or business when sometimes there is only you and a couple of mates. What can a couple of people do? How can you sustain a campaign? Who's going to take notice of you? But, this is exactly how groups like those in Edinburgh & Haringey started many years ago, and these groups now having a huge impact against Workfare and sanctions. And it’s how most groups start. Just look at the rise of Housing Action type groups around the country. Most were started by a few people who knew each other. Come and listen to groups who have just started out and others who have been going for years. The workshop is for us all to share experiences, learn from each other, help those out who are thinking of setting a group up and mutual support.

Challenging sanctions and mandation

Over half a million people were sanctioned last year, and unless we fight every sanction we now risk three years without even a subsistence income. This session explores the key facts that people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance need to challenge sanctions. We’ll look at both the formal processes and ways we can collectively put pressure to overturn sanctions as well. We hope people will go away equipped to support each other to fight every sanction!

Knowing your right to Access to Work support, before going on Work Placements

We can use Access to Work as a stalling tactic for avoiding work placements. If disabled people need support to work, such as equipment or a support worker, or can’t use public transport, they can apply to Access to Work. Big employers have to pay themselves so may think twice about taking a workfare placement on if it’s going to start costing them.

Take part in this workshop with Andy Greene of Disabled People Against Cuts to explore ways disabled people can resist forced unpaid work placements.

Taking on Workfare

Together we have brought a flagship government policy to near “collapse”, but with all three main political parties and UKIP firmly committed to workfare and sanctions, we need to keep pushing. Take part in this workshop to share information on the shape of workfare at the moment: where it is taking place and the latest tricks of the providers. We’ll map out workfare’s weaknesses and find the places we can push together to bring it down once and for all.

Universal Credit: The time for welfare and housing campaigners to come together

Universal Credit is slowly being rolled out nationwide, Job Centre by Job Centre. People on “in work” benefits will soon face the same evil job seeking and sanctions regimes that those of us on JSA and ESA have had to endure for years. For people in low paid work, it could mean facing workfare or losing housing benefit. Could this be the present government’s “Poll Tax” moment when different groups come together to destroy a hated piece of legislation? Come and share knowledge about Universal Credit, explore ways to make sure people know what it could mean for them, and discuss how we can bring people together to put a stop to it.

Tactics to resist and navigate the Work Programme

A few different companies have contracts to deliver the Work Programme, the flagship two year workfare scheme. They’re all supposed to follow the same regulations. These can be used against them. There are lots of ways not to cooperate with the Work Programme.

Come to get information from groups and individuals about what Work Programme providers don’t have the power to demand, and the personal data they can’t force you to give them – and more on how to avoid and overturn benefit sanctions they inflict. We’ll hear from welfare action groups in Edinburgh and elsewhere about what can be achieved by insisting on your right to be accompanied to appointments.

This workshop is for everyone to share strategies for stalling and changing the activities that providers try to impose, and for resisting their demands about attendance, unhelpful training, and unpaid work placements.

Keeping Volunteering Voluntary: Workfare stops when there’s nowhere to send people

For workfare to happen, the government needs charities and voluntary groups to take placements. But more and more voluntary organisations are standing up and saying no. Over 550 have signed Keep Volunteering Voluntary’s pledge not to take part and the word is spreading. With most national charities now out of the schemes, we need to get the word out at a local level where charity workfare placements are still rife.

Come along to this workshop with Kevin and Penny from Keep Volunteering Voluntary to explore the key arguments to challenge the voluntary sector’s involvement, to share which tactics and approaches have been successful so far, and to plan how to take the campaign further and win!

Staying strong: Supporting each other through the emotional impact of punitive welfare reforms

When we work in mutual support groups, before we ever overturn a sanction or force a workfare user to pull out, we are already doing something important: sharing our experiences and offering emotional support. The reality is hard: the punitive culture at job centres, ever-present threat of sanctions, and the psycho-coercion of workfare providers take a heavy toll on people’s wellbeing. This session is an opportunity to share our experiences of working in groups dealing with these issues and discuss good ways to share support and look after ourselves and each other.

http://www.boycottworkfare.org

Claimants and unemployed issues and struggles in the 1970s and 1980s (especially in Tottenham in the 1980s) - what can we learn from them?

In 2006, the government is continuing its ever-increasing attacks against the hard-won benefits of all kinds of claimants (pensions, invalidity benefits, unemployment benefits etc), and stepping up its pressure on claimants to take any job at any price in order to drive down wages. What can we learn from the widespread struggles by unwaged people in the not-so-distant past, and what can be done today to stand up for everyone's right to a decent income?


The 1920s-30s

There had been a big movement of the unemployed in the 1930s, focusing on demanding work or basic payments. There were marches, lobbying, stunts and sometimes direct action protests - like storming into expensive hotels demanding food. There was a Tottenham branch of the National Unemployed Workers Movement which had a meeting room on Tottenham High Rd by High Cross. A couple of local factories were occupied by protestors to demand jobs and prevent overtime working.

The 1960s - a new wave

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a new unwaged and unemployed movement sprung up throughout the UK demanding the right to adequate benefits for all adults. People formed local Claimants Unions, and the CUs formed the very active Federation of Claimants Unions - at one point there were over 100 active local CUs. This movement was one of the new wave of radical,self-organised and often overlapping movements and struggles which came out of the ‘60s, including struggles for women’s liberation, black liberation, wildcat strikers and ‘rank and file’ industrial organisation, gay liberation, grass roots community action including independent radical newspapers and bookshops, squatting and international solidarity. These
movements tended to be characterized by collective working, solidarity, class-consciousness and anti-sexism, a tendency to direct action and radical protest whilst promoting a culture of ‘we demand our rights’.

The Federation

From about 1970 to 1990 the Federation of CUs held annual conferences and also camps, rotated each year around the UK. It had an influential and popular programme of ‘claimants helping each other to claim what we can from the welfare state, especially the Social Security office’, whilst demanding ‘a basic income for all’, and coupled with a longer term explicit libertarian / socialist / anarchist vision of ‘power to the people’. It was a ‘right to live’ movement rather than ‘right to work’ movement. It was building a well-respected and to some extent an effective claimants’ movement of grass roots day-to-day mutual aid, and of militant ideas and
protest aiming to defend and improve the lives of millions of people in previously marginalised sections of society. However, its local impact around the UK was patchy, very much depending on whether local CUs could get established…

Tottenham

In 1981 I got involved in Haringey & Islington CU which met at the Crouch Hill Recreation Centre. This was one of the longest established CUs, active since 1970. Around 1982 Tottenham Claimants Union was formed (or indeed re-formed as there had briefly been a TCU 10 years earlier based in Broad Lane) - meeting in a house in Radley Rd, N17 and mostly helping each other with our claims and housing etc. When we heard the Trades Council was setting up a Council-funded Unemployed Workers Centre we started meeting there in what was little more than the broom cupboard. For about 5 years we met there, soon to be on almost a daily basis.

The Centre

Part of a national network of TUC centres in the 1980s, it was very much intended to be part of the TUC/Council approach to ‘the unemployed’ as individuals needing advice by professionals, plus recruiting people into campaigns run by trade unions and left-wing parties against unemployment or for benefits. It was initially run by the Trades Council (effectively the Communist Party). However, the unwaged regular users soon expected a great deal more, and began using the place as a public base to reach out to local claimants, to support each other, to demand our own collective voice in the borough, and to develop our own independent ideas and activities. We
gradually built up a very high level of mutual aid, friendship and solidarity.


The following are some of the activities and achievements:

- supporting each other and other claimants with claims at the DSS. And also over other basic needs like housing - for a couple of years there were Homes For All meetings supporting short-life use or squatting of empty homes
- campaigning against DSS claimant harassment squads - this definitely had an effect
- campaigning fairly successfully for free or 'concessionary' services and facilities for all unwaged
- organising social events (including a 4-day free food kitchen at xmas)and helping organise the annual FCU camping holidays (15 of us from Haringey went one year)....
- supporting independent unwaged groups using the Centre (eg Unwaged Women’s Group, creative writing group, a poetry group, drama group), and also a local pensioners’ action group - occupying the Civic Centre to demand emergency payments when the DSS was closed for 2 weeks by industrial action - 200 claimants took part but were
ejected by police
- joining DSS and Jobcentre workers on their picket lines (there were regular disputes there), and at one time joining Coombes Croft library workers successful occupation to prevent closure
- supporting the miners strike (1984/5) including attending Haringey Support Group meetings at the centre, putting up visiting strikers in our homes, visiting mining villages and going on demonstrations
- supporting Wapping printworkers in their 1986/7 dispute, including going on pickets and supporting strikers producing their own ‘Picket’ bulletin.

Communist Party

We began to insist the Centre be run by the unwaged/unemployed. The Trades Council / Communist Party were dead against this and pulled out all the stops to ensure it didn’t happen. When the TCU agreed to let Wapping printworkers use the TCU address as a contact for their independent ‘Picket’ bulletin, the Communist Party (which dominated the official Union machinery trying to keep control of the very militant Wapping dispute) lost the plot and launched a local campaign against the TCU trying to prevent local trades unionists and pensioner activists working with us.

Our own base

Eventually we decided to set up our own Haringey Unwaged Centre in a shop front at 72 West Green Rd. The Unemployed Workers Centre became an advice centre where people had to have an appointment to go in - it eventually closed a year later. [In fact the local Communist Party branch seemed to collapse around this time or just later]. Although we had no funding we managed to run our own ‘drop-in’ centre, open daily (and sometimes evenings) for about 4 years, holding a range of events and activities
similar to before, but maybe less strong. For 7 or 8 years TCU had also played an active role in linking up with unwaged organisations around London and the country. But times were changing, and government efforts to suppress ‘rights culture’ and opposition movements were beginning to have an effect throughout society - ‘unemployment’ and claimants’ issues were being depoliticised.

Poll Tax

From 1988-1991 the Unwaged Centre was instrumental in helping to build the largest community-based civil disobedience movement in Haringey’s history - the anti-poll tax movement. [For more info, see the HSG local history pamphlet on the subject]. Tottenham Against the Poll Tax was based at the Centre which was the hub for distribution of tens of thousands of leaflets, and all manner of continuous activities and protests for 2-3 years - and eventually victorious!


The end, or moving on?

In 1991 the 3 main anti-poll tax groups agreed to set up local Solidarity Groups (which eventually became Haringey Solidarity Group). The Centre became less and less used, and we eventually donated it to the mainly turkish International Transport & General Workers Union activists for their own use. During the 1990s, the government adopted increasingly oppressive 'right to work' measures and propaganda, and the claimants’ movement largely lost its way and dwindled - although a ‘Groundswell’ activist network was set up in the late-1990s to oppose job seekers allowance rules and incapacity benefit cuts.

In 2006 in the UK there are still some claimants' groups, an active pensioners' movement, disability campaigns, and various other campaigns around related issues. Should efforts be made to build on the successes of the past? Or are there better ways these days for unwaged people to stand up for their interests? Can the tactics used in the past be employed today in other movements?

Dave Morris