The Government Benefit's
by @movingman
This article will most likely open your eyes to a different perspective of how the world is working in regard's to people receiving benefits from the government whilst they look for another job or for whatever reason. There are of course the obvious pro's to this such as reducing crime because people don't have to steal for food and also child benefit is also a good plus that is included in government benefit's. I was out of work and looking for a carpentry job back in England on two separate occasions with some years between. The first time, there was no jobs available because of a recession (it was the Tony Blair day's) which meant all building projects were on hold , No Work. I would go to the Job Center and the routine was the same, every 2 weeks we had to go to a meeting and sit with a worker there at a computer. Back in this time the internet was still "new" in a sense that the poor and working class didn't have it at home, and it just wasn't so common. They had touchscreen computers in the job center, which you typed in the job you wanted - and Bam, a list of bosses looking for worker's would appear on the display and you scrolled down and clicked the print button on the job offer and then took your separate slips of paper, with the contacts back over to the woman at the desk. They would then ring the Boss, and you got to speak with the boss and go from there. VERY Effective!
That was a REAL Job Center!!
And this Below is a job center as it is today in the UK..
image from The Daily Telegraph or Mail
There was then the second time I decided to go get benefits mainly to pay for my rent. This was quite a few years after and by this time the internet was everywhere compared to before. The job center had been moved, and a huge new building costing 10's of millions of GBP was built (by cheap labor using Eastern European workers) it was overkill. And a right piss take the people. What was worse was that we would still go every 2 weeks or maybe even weekly instead to a meeting and sit and wait well over the arranged time. Sometimes even an extra 90 mins you'd be waiting instead of being anywhere near your appointed time. The Job Center soon got the nickname "The Joke Shop".
The old public job searching computer's were long gone, and so now you would go sit at the desk and get asked these following questions :
- Have you worked since our last meeting ? "no."
- Have you been looking for work since our last meeting? "Yes" (of course that was a lie, we were in a huge recession in 2008!)
Sign here please.. See you in 2 weeks.. - NEXT!
"Wait , im looking for a job - are there any job's available to me?"
"Do you have access to the internet?? Here's a list of JOB AGENCIES so go to the website and register."
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The following can be happily considered as a rant- because it's my perspective..
What the hell! They spent taxpayers money to build a huge new job center, it had like 7 floors and was really really big, and what is the space being used for if they tell everyone to just "go online"?? My view of government money from this day on that it was a complete waste of time, I used to have to arrange so many things and pay to even get there, to sit and wait and do the routined pointless conversations for 80 gbp a week. It makes people feel worthless to be asking others for money so they can live. How many people could have the guts to go sit on a street with a cup to get some money - not many.. But how many go to the government jumping through hoops and stepping on broken glass to get the rent paid and to buy some food? Millions! I'm one of the few that would rather sit with a cup on a street instead of jumping through hoops held by a twat's. At this time me and my friend's were all tradesmen, electrician, plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters. We had a good year and a half or 2 years just sat in a house unemployed, sat playing X-box and smoking weed. I remember 1 from 8 of us still had work on and how my friends were becoming lazy and depressed. It was really shit being on government money, there was only ever enough so your belly was full of cheap supermarket foods, and that you could drink some beer or smoke daily , but there wasn't enough money to buy petrol for your car for instance or anything left over to go and enjoy yourself. I saw the restrictions it made on people, who were believing that they were completely limited to money. Who could blame us, we were surrounded by the society telling us since young that money makes you happy, the more money the more happy you are.
Every day becomes the same, and depression starts to creep in. "When will I get out of this mess and be able to work again" are common to be thinking or even saying felling terrible and useless. We literally did nothing apart from sit inside and watch Tv or play video games, we were all getting depression. I just started to create my own work with whatever I could think of and then went traveling and most of my friends from back then are even now still on government money and even harder for them, they have their own children now also! I definitely see how being unemployed limits the human. We become so dependent on that bi-weekly or monthly handout, that we loose any ideas or creativity because we have actually no need to change anything. Any creature will soon enough be happy to sit and be given enough to eat and live on for doing nothing, even the most enthusiastic of creatures soon becomes dull and saddened. I meet a lot of people since traveling that also want to go travel and you can see its what they really want , and it would be of great benefit for themselves to go and travel, but it's always the same reason that they stay and stay , month after month in a life style that they dislike - Because its always this "Yeh ill go as soon as I get the next handout, then I'll go - Yeh.." I know one guy he was on heroin for many years and all kinds of drug addictions and had really fucked up childhood. He was a great example of this thinking "ill just wait for the next check to come and then ill go travel". It just never happens because it never seems to be the right timing. This is how the Government Benefits.
Laziness.
After some time of being on benefits, you will loose motivation, and become very content on the surface level of this situation. It depend's on the human of course, some are happy to stay at home a receive benefits until they die, which is fine- but others who were once "do-ers" also now become lazy and see no point in going to create work and real money for themselves. In a world where things are sold for "our convenience" its bound to happen more and more because its quite convenient if you get money for doing nothing isn't it?
I went a told them that I had found a job and I signed off benefits - even though this wasn't true- and I went and found ways with imagination on how to create money for myself. I found much more energy and freedom, and work opportunity's when I had decided to do it all myself!
In the next 10 years we will see much more unemployment as technology is increasing and machines now do most of the job's that humans are doing. There are talks (not on the mainstream media of course) of a "solution" for the future that everyone will receive a universal income. This has already been tested out in places such as Finland (unless im mistaken) and it all sound's fine and dandy when you hear the idea. I myself also found it a great idea until I watched a documentary about a social experiment that was done in secret in America on a housing block that housed only poor family's, all of whom were un-employed and on benefits. This experiment can be found online but I have no clue what it was called. A huge housing block, situated on its own with a lot of open space around it housing poor people who were claiming benefits for many years already was the experiment and to see how this way of life would effect humans over a certain period of time. Two weeks before the experiment was set up and the family's had moved in, the people running the experiment had designed a housing block for mice which was dubbed a "mouse utopia" simulating a mock up of the housing block. The mice would receive (just like government benefits), food handouts that were shared out daily at feeding stations.
Each mouse had ample space to live in and move around in and had all the basic requirements to stay alive and living conditions were great. This experiment like I say was started 2 weeks before the human one did on the new housing block so they had a warning of what would come in the human experiment because mice and humans are pretty much the same in terms of DNA. The experiment was going as planned and the family's moved into brand new apartments, and would carry on to receive benefits. All was great the first year but the around year 2, the mice started to fight and become violent. Then this also began to happen with the housing block also. The people started to argue and the new building soon started to become destroyed with windows being smashed in and graffiti sprayed walls. The mice had also started forming gangs, as did the humans in the housing block. Finally the human experiment was called off when the mice started to kill each other, and because the mouse experiment was 2 weeks ahead of the human one, the people conducting this experiment knew that the human's would also have started killing each other within the next 2 weeks and so it was concluded and the experiment was stopped.
This happened due to the fact that if creatures (humans) have no PURPOSE, they go insane.
Do you have the same perspective as I do on this? Are you newly receiving benefits and becoming lazy from it?! Leave your thoughts and comments down below! Venus Project?!
Big Love and Abundance Everyone! The tables are slowly turning, and you are not alone!
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I've also been on the dole a couple of times, and I agree very much with your post. Every now and then we would also be sent to a "job application course", as if what we really needed was to become more clever in writing job applications.
On the positive side I must say this "class" had visions of getting all of us employed, and it succeeded more or less on that. I got a teaching position at that very same school, teaching Java to a class of people that for different reasons (mostly health-related issues) couldn't continue in their old jobs. Well, that was also a bit pointless, half of the class was there just because that's what was required for them to continue being on government handouts - they weren't really motivated to learn programming. Some of my students were actually sincerely interested in learning programming ... unfortunately that's not enough - people are born with different skill sets, and also, the older people get the harder it's to learn new things. Of course I did my best, and those students also did their best, but deep down I knew they were never going to become decent programmers. There were one person that was both motivated and had the right kind of intelligence, and he did pass the exam. I don't remember if he was the only one - the results were horrible, but allegedly I was still doing a much better job than the previous teacher they had. This class had been learning programming in different languages for several years already, but nobody knew any programming. But I digress ...
What otherwise healthy and intelligent unemployed people need is first of all a job. Nothing is as destructive as sleeping long every day and not having anything at all to do except playing computer games. In the same time, there is so much work to be done out there ... anything from litter picking, giving the kinder garden buildings a new layer of paint, doing development on open source software, etc ... if the government has enough money to build big administrative offices, employ bureaucrats, and even hand out money to people doing nothing, then they could as well pay people for doing simple useful work.
Such a great analysis!
Yes! People need some work, some struggle, some sense of usefulness and social interactions.
If you simply give them money - you are ruining them. You are degrading them and make them miserable.
Curiosity fact: after WWII, we had something we called "The Yough Work Action". Young people, boys and girls would participate in large (massive) scale public works (building the roads, factories, railways). They were paid nothing. Just shelter, food and working clothes. But thousands of them participated. Because it was fun (free courses, theatres, music, they could get driving licence...), there was a purpose and they considered that everything belongs to people. Of course they were buinding the roads, because those were their roads.
That was some rant and I fully concur! People need a purpose in life. Sure you get unemployed - done that for almost 2 yrs when my record business went bust - and then you say, now I'm gonna catch up on my favourite TV series, but after a while it starts killing you and you wish you had something to do... at least when you have a brain, but then not many people really do.
agree.
Regarding the private job application centers ...
I remember it was a big discussion here in Norway some decades ago. The state job application center had a monopoly on the task of connecting people with jobs. I thought that it was silly - there should not be any need for regulations forbidding private job application centers, if the government agency can do it for free and they do a good enough job on that, there would not be a market for private job application centers.
Eventually the regulations were removed. Fast forward a couple of decades, and while I still think the same, I can see that the growth of private job application institutions has grown. I believe this growth has not been a good thing.
There are three different kind of companies out there, it's the temp staffing firms like Adecco, there are the database providers, such as finn.no, and there are the head hunting companies. I don't think we should need those companies.
Now, instead of checking one database, job applicants should search and monitor several services to make sure they catch all the relevant job applications. At the same time, an employer looking for the perfect candidate for a position has to post ads in multiple databases to make sure they find all the relevant candidates. Competition are usually a good thing, but sometimes it can be pretty counter-productive.
Why do those companies thrive?
As for the temp staffing, it may be because of law regulations, it can be risky to hire people permanently (as one is pretty well protected against being sacked in Norway), and the laws are very restrictive on temporary hires ... so why not rent people instead of hire them?
As for the databases, I believe one simple reason may be bad associations with the government brand. It used to be one governmental organization specifically working on matching unemployed people with employers looking for people, eventually they gradually became more of the agency paying out doles to people, eventually several governmental organizations dealing with social security got merged into one - so now it's the social security organization that runs the official state-driven job application/position database. While I believe the database engine itself is good (I haven't actively been using it for a couple of decades though), I can see that companies needing a skilled workforce may want to put their ads somewhere else than in the social welfare database - people living on social benefits are generally not considered to be the best workers.
I also think there is a lot of corruption going on, as many state organizations are hiring people from the temp staff companies and putting their job announcements in private databases rather than the public database.
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I've met people who work part time just to keep themselves from losing government money in the US. It was sad to hear since they don't realize they're keeping themselves down.