When It's More Cost Effective Not To Work

It took a year to get it sorted out.

The poor child lost the presence of a mother and got a bill for Council Tax as a replacement.

By moving out of the family home, I made my oldest the ‘second adult’. This meant a liability for council tax if that young person was in employment.

Never mind the fact that the wage being earned was well below minimum as an attempt was being made to add to experience in the workplace rather than rely on the State for support from the start.

Never mind that going straight onto Job Seekers would have meant an exemption from Council Tax, as well as access to cash benefits.

Never mind the fact that many young friends in that predicament spent the day in bed, watching Jeremy Kyle on the television whilst chatting with similarly unemployed chums on their computers, steadily becoming more depressed at their own lack of worth in both the eyes of employers and the public at large.

It’s not surprising that, in the end, it became easier to just join the queue at the Job Centre and Benefits office.

Only then could we start to recoup the amounts that had been taken via direct debit by producing all payslips, travel receipts and other documentation.

Despite the notices at the Job Centre promising to get people jobs that will earn them more than they can get on Benefits, it beggars belief that for 18-25 year olds, they are better off being on Job Seekers than in a minimum wage job where they work 12 hour shifts with only 30 minutes break.

On the former, they don’t pay Council Tax and get Housing Benefits and their Job Seeker payments. Whilst doing the latter, they have fractionally more cash in their hand each week but then have to find their own Council Tax. If they fill out the right forms, they can get help with Housing Benefits but are not entitled to Working Tax Credits because they are too young – which is just ridiculous.

They can get Job Seekers if they don’t work and sit around all day ‘looking for jobs’ but not a top up to a figure that will allow them them to be able to pay their own way if they do manage to get a job. It doesn’t make sense. There is no reward for effort and then Job Seekers does nothing to promote the understanding of a day’s work for a day’s pay.

Whilst the Welfare State is an admirable premise in theory, it is far too easy to abuse the system and far too difficult for genuine people to get the help that they deserve.

We are building a timebomb of disenfranchised and undervalued young people, isolated from the central tenets of consideration and mucking in wherever needed that make a community work.

It’s bad enough that they have grown up with the culture of fame engendered by Big Brother and other reality game shows. Most believe that they will be famous one day… but not through any skill, talent or effort on their part.

But they also have a material belief that they are owed a living and this is not helped when it is more cost effective to not work. I point my finger here at the greed of the larger employers, who insist on paying minimum wage for dull jobs with long working hours. Because in the current economic climate, they can – when there are still people queuing to take those jobs.

Where are the apprenticeships and the opportunities to learn a trade? When I was a teenager, most people couldn’t wait to get out to work so they could get their own accommodation – away from their parents. Young people today don’t have that overriding passion for independence. They see no alternative but Job Seekers and a visit to the Job Centre every other week to sign a form that has all the right boxes checked?

And most of the people that work in the Job Centres are there only to ensure that those boxes can be checked. They pay lip service to ‘training’ but a young person that has an idea which is out of the employment norm has to investigate the possibility on their own time and completely unaided. And, for many, that’s either too much effort or they don’t have the knowledge to even start the research process.

Have we mollycoddled and protected our young until they have lost that intrinsic instinct to survive on their own?