Dry Weekender: Wet Weekender

This morning the news announced the government announcing that they intend to announce recruiting a bunch of frontline Jobcentre staff. This is because of the impending unemployment spike, characterised by the Prime Ministwat's statement that "many people will lose their jobs". Unfortunate one of them will not be him. He's comfortable; safe like reaching the final's in Bullseye.

So that means both the following will be true: more people out of work, and, fewer jobs. Correct?

It also means that the majority of those will not be hired in this position because the JC+ (and by extension capitalism, look up the concept of the reserve army of labour) needs customers. If the government hires everyone rendered unemployed by Covid then who will they be advising or, as they put it, mentoring.

You see, it's all a facade. This is how unemployment works under our system.

The fundamental issue is this: where are the jobs going to come from even the government is admitting there will be no jobs? What is the point of hiring advisers who, essentially, cannot do anything by virtue of the situation that necessitated their existence? By the way, that doesn't begin to address the systemic abuse unemployed people face, because you can be damn sure their job will include the threat - and deployment - of sanctions and punishments. So again, just like in the bad old eighties, people will be pushed from useless pillar to ineffectual post; cycled through the fake profiteering welfare to work industry to achieve no greater end. Because the jobs won't exist.

If they did, you likely wouldn't need these extra work coaches. That's the nonsense of it all. The media will portray this in the usual way: the government helping people. This is how the punitive sanction system is sold: a thing that helps people. In truth it destroys them. But now how can any of this cause anything but misery? People are going to know there aren't jobs - the people hired are going to know this. What can they expect people to do? How can a 35 hour a week jobsearch operate in a pandemic world? Answer: they won't care and the media will cover it all up. Just as it has for the last decade.

Surely there is a better way to do things, but that necessitates a better way to run things. A better system.

These aren't people taken on to cope with the added backlog of processing claims. I hear not a peep about that, so expect these frontline 'work coaches' to bear the brunt of their class allies' frustration. This is the ultimate expression of divide and rule. We have to watch this space.