The BBC has an excellent human interest article up on their website about the reality of being on the dole and trying to find a job. Some extracts:
Carl, 24, and Lauren, 20, have been together for nearly a year. They are both unemployed and receive benefits.
Lauren has been out of work for a year, and Carl for three years. They live in a deprived former mining village in the north of England where – a generation or two down the line from the pit closures – unemployment levels remain high.
[…]
Both Carl and Lauren left school at 16 without any qualifications and initially found work.
Carl drove a forklift truck at a local firm and has also done some window-fitting work. Lauren has worked as a packer at a factory and last winter had a temporary job in a pound shop.
She has also done part one of a college course in childcare.
Carl says employers usually ignore young people, and the jobs going are often so insecure and poorly paid they are not worth coming off benefits for.
[..]
“Everything that’s in the newspaper, you need qualifications. And at the jobcentre they don’t help you out much. They tell you to get a job and stuff like that, but then they just tell you to look on the [electronic] ‘job points’. I’d like them to help me out better,” she says.
Having nothing to do except search for jobs “makes you feel depressed”, says Lauren, who has two siblings also out of work.
“If I had the money and the chance I’d go back to college,” she says.
[…]
They say they had both hoped for a better life than their parents. They believe it is harder for young people now than in previous generations.
A sad indictement of Labour’s accomplishments over the pat decade. Gordon Brown boasted he had ended the cycle of boom and bust, but while he pinned all his hopes on London as the world’s number one financial centre and regenerating failed northern industrial cities with identikit city centre redevelopment schemes, he completely failed people like Carl and Lauren. People who unlike their parents and grandparents would never have a lifelong job as a highly skilled industrial worker because all the old industries were gone. People who didn’t have the opportunity or the ability to go to university to get that highly paid white collar job and escape their decaying town. Brown and Labour should’ve spent the last decade rebuilding Britain’s industry but instead decided that people like Carl and Lauren would be best of working in some call centre easily outsourced to Mumbai or selling dieet lattes to their betters. Eleven years of New Labour have been wasted for them and now the credit crunch is really starting to bite they’ll be joined by millions more.
