Editorial: The ‘new’ workfare schemes in historical and class context

The storm of public outrage expressed against workfare schemes in February and March this year was quite unprecedented. People being forced to work for their benefits featured heavily in the news for weeks. This was perhaps surprising. The illegitimacy of attacks on benefits has usually been a marginal issue even in the ‘political’/campaigning scenes1 and the labour movement,2 let alone the mainstream press.

In the face of this hostile ‘public opinion’, the government made concessions over sanctions for some of the workfare schemes.3 Around the same time, a succession of the big companies involved - TK Maxx, Sainsbury’s, Waterstones, Shelter, Marie Curie, 99p Stores, Maplin, Oxfam, Mind, BHS, Burger King, HMV, and Boots - publicly announced they were pulling out of some of the schemes.4 Afraid for their reputations, they didn’t want to be seen to be ‘exploiting the vulnerable’ by using compulsory (or near compulsory) work experience ‘placements’ that did not lead to jobs or constitute real training. Workfare had become a national scandal. Tesco supermarket was the cause célèbre – though their recanting was only partial since they only pulled out of the high profile Work Experience scheme but not the Work Programme.

For those of us who had for many years been involved in small and at times lonely campaigns around the dole and benefit cuts more generally, there was a mixture of surprised delight tinged with irritation to see this sudden wave of public indignation and its dramatic consequences. On the one hand, given that our involvement in struggles against workfare had in the past been criticised by some for parochialism5 or for the supposed narrowness of our concerns, there was a sense of vindication. There was also the excitement, of course, of seeing the government defensive and vulnerable, and beating a rapid retreat in the face of the opposition to the schemes. On the other hand, we noted that many of the howls of outrage at the workfare schemes reflected a complete lack of historical perspective. Workfare schemes specifically, and the disgusting treatment of the unemployed more generally, have a very long history of course. Forms of workfare – required work for unemployment benefits – have been used (or attempted) on many previous occasions in the last century, though they have a much longer history of use in the USA than in the UK.6 In the UK, we can trace early versions and indeed the basis of today’s schemes to the Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA), which was introduced in 1996. A pilot workfare scheme, Project Work, was introduced in 29 towns by the Tories in the same year, and continued under New Labour. In one of these towns (Brighton), the scheme was badly holed by what police and Jobcentre managers in Brighton called a ‘thuggish’ campaign,7 but it only ended when it was superseded by the more ambitious (and expensive), New Deal in 1998.8 The current government’s Work Programme workfare scheme is based upon, and inherited much from, New Labour’s Flexible New Deal.9 Rather than a new development, therefore, the ‘new’ schemes represent a recurring theme in recent welfare policies.

In the welter of news scandals and indignant commentaries on the injustice of workfare, this utter lack of historical perspective was closely related to an almost total absence of interest in the class context of the recent developments. Before analysing this class context more closely, however, we should recognize that, alongside the continuities with previous schemes for the unemployed, there are indeed some features of the current programmes that distinguish them from past attempts to implement workfare.

There are perhaps two important differences from the schemes of the past in the current crop of workfare schemes. The first difference has to do with the place of workfare providers in the economy. Back in the 1980s and 90s, the companies running the ‘back to work’ schemes were either small businesses or charity wings of multinationals. For example, the multinational GrandMet (now part of Diageo) set up a company that later became ‘Tomorrow’s People’ as a response to the riots of the 1980s.10 It was a ‘social conscience’ decision, based on fears of deteriorating social cohesion, not a business decision to make money. Now, by contrast, firms like A4e and Working Links who are involved with ‘getting people back to work’, both directly (by providing the experience of work discipline as part of ‘mandatory work activity’) and indirectly (acting in effect as an employment agency or go-between, through involvement in the Work Programme) treat workfare schemes as part of their core business. Indeed, there has developed a whole sector of the economy that depends entirely on the massive contracts to run these schemes. This in turn is just one example of the huge growth in government outsourcing more generally as a profitable industry in its own right.11 The other point to make about this, of course, is that the individuals running the companies getting these multi-million pound contracts to deliver services that might in the past have been run from the Jobcentre have in many cases been shown to have extremely close personal links to both the Labour and the Coalition government.12

The other difference with the past is the sheer brazenness of the new versions of workfare. As we have stated previously,13 with Project Work and the Flexible New Deal, placements were sought largely in the voluntary sector. In the present case, however, workfare has been extended into many areas that previously would not have been touched for fear of being attacked by the unions for job substitution. Now, however, it is not only high street shops which are involved, where it might be expected that organized opposition from workers would be relatively weak, but also public service organizations including Southern Railway and the health service.14 Indeed, far from opposing the schemes, in the Post Office, the Communication Workers’ Union have actually supported this attack upon the wages and conditions of their own members!15

Partly, perhaps, it was this sheer brazenness that served to catapult cases of people on the current workfare schemes into the mainstream consciousness. While a number of activist campaign groups had already been busy on the issue for several months, it was the discovery by middle class journalists that workfare was being imposed upon people very like their own graduate children that led to the acres of coverage. The blatant Tesco advertisement for a job at ‘JSA plus travel expenses’;16 the exposé of them and other supermarkets for their extensive and cynical use of ‘work experience’ placements that consisted of little more than shelf stacking and offered no real training element; the legal action taken by a graduate whose career prospects were damaged when she was forced to work for Poundland:17 all these scandals fuelled the indignation in the liberal press and the associated Twittersphere. Following the initial flurry of media interest, the ‘Right to Work’ campaign (a hideously-named front organization for the Socialist Workers’ Party) cleverly jumped on the fast-moving bandwagon by occupying a Tesco store near the House of Commons in an effective publicity stunt.18

The middle class interests of those who led the mass media campaign against (aspects of) the workfare schemes was reflected in the framing of their critique, which was almost entirely one of moral indignation about the treatment of a minority of individuals, and lacked recognition of the wider class context of what was happening.

In this individualistic, moral critique of workfare, the unemployed claimants forced onto the scheme were the unfortunate, vulnerable victims.19 The villains in this tragedy were easy to identify, for not only were A4e and Working Links trousering huge contract fees from their role as middlemen in the schemes, they were also found to be engaging in various fraudulent practices to top up these profits - for example by claiming fees for placements that they hadn’t provided, being paid twice for the same person, getting people to clear their own offices as a ‘placement’, and so on.20

While of course there is a moment of truth in this purely moral critique – forced work-for-dole under the guise of ‘training’ or ‘work experience’ being an outrageous attack on, and indignity for, those subjected to it – it is partial and limited. One of the central problems with it is that it concedes far too much to some of the government’s own claimed justifications for the scheme and the individualistic ideology of the ‘deserving-versus-undeserving poor’ that it has promoted in order to gain legitimacy for its wider attacks on benefits. Indeed, it was precisely because some concessions were made in relation to some of the more flagrantly immoral of the practices (lack of real training, some of the sanctions, the lack of jobs at the end) that the fuss died down by April this year, and the schemes have continued with perhaps greater claims for legitimacy.

The ‘moral’ critique – the emphasis on the unjust treatment simply of unemployed individuals sent on the scheme – fails to challenge the discourse of ‘helping the unemployed’ that frames the government’s workfare programmes. This is precisely because it keeps the focus on the unemployed individual rather than the wider class context of the schemes. For example, the objection made to some of the schemes and employers for not providing genuine training or work experience, with the demand that they do, implies that such training or work experience might be a good thing – as if to give the underpaid individual some training that improves her position in the jobs market a little makes up for the fact that her ‘placement’ takes the place of what would otherwise be someone’s more properly paid job.

Some of the limits of framing the critique of workfare simply in terms of the (good or bad) treatment of (some) unemployed individuals can be illustrated by the experiences we have had picketing high street shops involved in the schemes. At our pickets of Poundland and Holland & Barrett, the managers sought to defend themselves by wheeling out an employee they said had started on the workfare scheme (as unpaid ‘work experience’) and then got a real job with them at the end. The individuals themselves (both of them) readily corroborated this version of events, adding for good measure that they welcomed the scheme and that their experience demonstrated that individuals who really wanted to work could now do so, thanks to this scheme, meaning that those who did not (who were not there to speak for themselves, of course) were to blame for their plight. Of course, who among the small minority who have gone on to paid jobs after workfare placements would turn round in such a situation and say they had been duped by the Jobcentre, A4e and Poundland et al.? From the individual perspective of these people, the schemes are completely morally justified. So, from a class perspective, the purely moral critique fails; or it ends up giving away the class prejudice underlying some of it (‘well, it may be ok for someone like you, but it is not right that my daughter, who has a degree, should have to stack shelves in a supermarket’), something seized on, albeit in a distorted way, by the minister defending the schemes.21

If the essence of what’s wrong with workfare is not the ‘immoral’ treatment of unemployed individuals, what is it? The word ‘slavery’ has been bandied about by many of the critics.22 Within a capitalism system the functions of workfare schemes may be similar to that of having pockets of slavery; but this slogan lacks precision, for workfare workers are not chattels in the same way as slaves.23

What about ‘exploitation’, another popular characterization of what’s wrong with workfare?24 While it may be true technically that workfare is exploitation (people paid less than the value their labour creates), this works, like ‘slavery’, more as an emotive slogan than a proper analysis. For, if workfare work is exploitation, does this mean that most other jobs do not constitute exploitation?

In fact, the immoral treatment of most of the unemployed forced onto the workfare placements is a means to an end. The unemployed are being used as an instrument, and it is the ends to which they are being put which is the nub of the issue. The real problem with workfare is the pressure it puts on existing jobs and wages.25 It creates pressure both directly and indirectly. Directly, the threat that it poses is job substitution; there are a number of reports that paid jobs are being replaced by workfare placements.26 Indirectly, workfare allows employers to cut back on paid overtime, to resist wage demands, to expect harder work from their existing employees, and so on: why should they make any concessions to you and your workmates if they know they can get someone else to do the same as you for next to nothing? The case against workfare therefore is essentially one of class interests. In any market giving some of a commodity away free will drag down the overall price. So it is with labour-power. Workfare is sometimes considered just a claimants’ issue – by both claimants and workers. But the struggle against workfare is not really a ‘dole struggle’; workfare is more an attack on existing workers than it is on the unemployed.

As we noted recently, while the current crop of workfare schemes were proposed and introduced before the crisis,27 the age of austerity has not seen any slackening in the government’s enthusiasm for these schemes – quite the opposite, in fact.28 Workfare schemes are not about reducing unemployment. They are about making unemployment work for the economy. As we have argued, in the 1990s workfare schemes and other attacks on benefits were introduced in an attempt to make the unemployed function as a proper reserve army of labour, ‘skilling’ them up with basic labour-market discipline (such as getting haircuts and the ability to get out of bed in the morning), which had fallen away with the long-term unemployment of the 1980s. All the time people on the dole were ‘recalcitrant’ and ‘autonomous’, they exerted no pressure on those in work to work harder to keep their jobs.29 The result was a sellers’ market. The purpose of workfare now is to prevent a repeat of the 1980s, when so many people became disconnected from the labour market and the unemployed failed to function as a reserve army of labour. This is clear from the fact that at least some of the schemes are not about real work experience but about learning work discipline.30

Workfare is just one part of a massive programme of welfare reform, backed up by an unprecedented ideological attack on the ‘undeserving poor’. This attack was launched by the Conservative-LibDem coalition and Blairite allies (such as Frank Field) as soon as they came to office. The ideological attack had two prongs. In the first place, there was the attempt to create division through a campaign around so-called benefit fraud. Second was the propaganda stirred up against those supposedly getting large amounts of benefits compared to the wages of those in work. Instead of this being a narrative about appalling low wages, the government ideologues sought to class ‘greedy’ claimants alongside the hated greedy rich bankers – both were getting ‘something for nothing’ – in relation to the ‘squeezed middle’, who were encouraged to link their predicament to the lifestyle of their neighbours on benefits (many of whom, ministers said, didn’t open their curtains till the afternoon).31

In this ideological attack, and even in the face of global recession, explanations for unemployment in terms of economic conditions, which were accepted in the 1980s, were displaced by individualistic and hence moralistic explanations. This focus on the unemployed individual – whether as victim, beneficiary or moral reprobate - is part of bourgeois ideology, accepted as common sense, which hides our relation with each other as a class, through the wage relation. Many of the justifications given for workfare are built upon this ideological individualism. Thus, while some of the schemes may serve to move the occasional unemployed individual from the dole into (very often low paid) work, these examples are taken by supporters of the scheme as indicative of the way that the problem of mass unemployment might be addressed, buying into the myth that unemployment is caused by the unemployed, rather than by the current crisis.

In this issue of Aufheben, we analyse the nature of the euro crisis and show both how it relates to the financial crisis that began in 2008 and how the European bourgeoisie are now trying to use it to their own advantage. Likewise, in the UK, there is a long-term attempt to restructure the labour market,32 and the crisis has been used to accelerate this process, reconstructing the relations of work in new, harsher, terms, while maintaining or increasing profits, particularly in the financial sector as well as creating new locations of accumulation for the government’s friends running welfare-to-work ‘consultancies’.

Together, the propaganda war on benefit claimants and the ‘need for cuts’ brought on by the crisis, have been used to justify savage attacks on a range of benefits (not just for the unemployed, but also the sick and disabled and even more to the poor in work through attacks on housing benefit and working tax credits). These operate as the stick, while ‘help’ in the form of the (actually very costly) workfare schemes are a kind of carrot that are together reshaping the unemployed into active jobseekers of any job.

In this issue, our article on the possibility of ‘green capitalism’ raises in passing the prospect of ‘green jobs’, which may be presented as socially useful and for that reason morally easier to include as part of workfare schemes than shelf-stacking placements for rich multinationals like Tesco.33 The framework for such a use of workfare already exists in the form of the nascent Community Action Programme, which could be seen as complementing the ongoing attacks on jobs and conditions in the public sector. Indeed, it is precisely where workfare jobs are presented as socially useful that perhaps their biggest threat lies. Working for charities and other third sector organizations involved in such activities as ‘caring for the environment’ (including street sweeping, parks and gardens) offers the government and the employers not only inculcation into the work discipline necessary for a dynamic labour market, but also the opportunity of saving money by getting rid of whole local government departments.

Two years ago, in our last article on the attack on benefits and the rise of workfare, we discussed some of the problems in organizing against these attacks.34 We pointed out then that the welfare reforms in general and the workfare schemes in particular were an attack on the working class as a whole, and that therefore the resistance should reflect that fact. Since that time, the struggles against workfare that we have been involved in have become bigger and, in a sense, the targets easier. As participants pointed out at a recent national conference against workfare,35 while two years ago the target was the offices of A4e and others, now it is high street stores who are vulnerable not only to attacks on their nice image but their profits, through people standing outside encouraging others not to shop there. As we found with Project Work, it doesn’t take a very large number of people sometime to have a very damaging effect on these scumbags.

While there are many businesses involved in workfare, there continue to be companies pulling out of, or reluctant to get involved in, the schemes;36 and, now that the mass media furore has died down, this seems to be down to people approaching them directly.37 Holland and Barrett has been the focus of a national campaign by the Solidarity Federation.38 As we go to press, it has just been announced that they are pulling out of the scheme, not because of any shame over their involvement, but because they didn’t like so many groups of people standing outside their shops discouraging their customers and ruining their image. This victory is one of the most high profile and is significant in that the company themselves attributed it to the pickets (rather than to other forms of campaigning).39

Further, the fact that many of the schemes work on the basis of payment by results, and that the continuing recession means that there will not after all be the jobs to put people into, means that there is another point of vulnerability in the programme, for some of the scheme providers will be forced to pull out, allowing us to concentrate pressure on the remainder.

• 1Back in 1998, we complained that some people who, as ‘full time activists’, were involved in struggles that depended on the dole for their very existence paradoxically did little to resist attacks on the dole. See Dole autonomy versus the re-imposition of work: Analysis of the current tendency to workfare in the UK. http://libcom.org/library/dole-autonomy-aufheben
• 2Back in the 1920s and 30s, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement was rejected by the TUC and the Labour Party. See Dole autonomy, footnote 6.
• 3For example, they lifted the sanction (loss of benefits) for leaving a workfare placement on the Work Experience scheme. See the Guardian, 29th February 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/29/ministers-drop-sanctions-work-experience
• 4Workfare takes place as part of five schemes: Work Experience, Sector-Based Work Academies, Mandatory Work Activity, the Community Action Programme, and the Work Programme. The best guide to the schemes is Abolish workfare: The Solidarity Federation’s guide to the government’s unpaid work schemes. http://www.solfed.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/workfare_pamphlet_v2_0.pdf
• 5The workfare scheme Project Work was piloted in Brighton and became a focus of our struggles and our articles. See Dole autonomy.
• 6The workfare programmes in the USA, which have functioned to displace paid employment in parts of the public sector in New York and Wisconsin, have been the model for some of the schemes in the UK. See the Dole autonomy appendix, Workfare: the USA case (1998). http://libcom.org/library/appendix-workfare-usa-case
• 7In reality a combination of pickets of charity shops and effective alliances with militants among Jobcentre workers.
• 8As we have pointed out previously, while the stated rationale for the New Deal was to help unemployed people into work through enhancing their ‘marketability’ (with the implication that mass unemployment was due to the poor quality of unemployed individuals), the government’s own evidence showed that it was not the New Deal at all but the upturn in the economy in the early 2000s that reduced the unemployment figures. See Dole autonomy and work re-imposition: An epilogue (1999). http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/pamphlets-articles/dole-autonomy-and-work-re-im-position-an-epilogue
• 9The Flexible New Deal was introduced in 2009, 11 years after the original New Deal schemes, and placed more emphasis on coercion rather than training.
• 10A second wave of scandal broke when it was found that workfare workers were involved in some of the stewarding duties during the Golden Jubilee weekend in June. The organization administering the scheme in this case was Tomorrow’s People. See ‘Unemployed bussed in to steward river pageant’, Guardian, 4th June 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/04/jubilee-pageant-unemployed
• 11There are numerous big businesses involved in the provision of benefits services and other government functions. They include Atos (running the notorious ‘work capability’ tests and the even more infamous NHS database software, and now involved in the Community Action Programme and Work Programme as well), G4S (prisons, policing, Work Programme), Capita (housing benefit software cock ups), and Maximus (Flexible New Deal, Work Programme).
• 12Private Eye has documented many of these links in detail. Just one example: Quiller Consultants, owned by prime minister David Cameron’s constituency party chair Lord Chadlington, and run by lobbyist George Bridges, has been hired by A4e who have been given huge sums by Cameron’s government. See Private Eye #1315 (1st June, 2012) and passim.
• 13‘The renewed imposition of work in the era of austerity: Prospects for resistance’ in Aufheben #19, 2011. libcom.org/library/renewed-imposition-work-era-austerity-prospects-resistance .
• 14‘Unpaid jobseekers to deliver patient care in three hospitals’. Guardian, 21st May 2012
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/may/21/unpaid-jobseekers-deliver-patient-care
  
• 15See ‘No to workfare at Royal Mail’, Boycott Workfare, March 2012. http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?p=855
• 16‘Tesco drops ‘jobs for benefits’ ad for Suffolk store’, BBC. 16th February 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-17066420
• 17‘Graduate 'made to stack shelves' seeks Judicial Review’, Public Interest Lawyers.
  http://www.publicinterestlawyers.co.uk/news_details.php?id=200
• 18 ‘Tesco job advert protest closes store in Westminster’, BBC News, 18th February 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17084634 - The SWP largely dropped the issue of workfare after this stunt, moving on to more promising publicity and recruitment opportunities. The SWP did not seem to mind that ‘Right to work’ is the name of anti-union legislation in the USA, banning the closed shop. See right-to-work.org
• 19The Daily Mail, traditionally one of the newspapers most ready to attack ‘unemployed scroungers’, now condemned this treatment of the ‘vulnerable’, comparing it with the Nazis! See ‘This is not wartime Nazi Germany and Cameron's attacks on the vulnerable and needy must be stopped’, Mail Online, 20th February 2012. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2102484/This-wartime-Nazi-Germany-Camerons-attacks-vulnerable-needy-stopped.html
• 20‘DWP 'did not do enough to stop fraud among welfare-to-work companies'’, Guardian, 16th May 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/may/16/dwp-fraud-welfare-work-companies While the Guardian and BBC coverage brought to public attention some of these corrupt practices, as well as the staggeringly large pay-packet of A4e chief Emma Harrison, it was Private Eye which had been pursuing this scandal long before it was fashionable, and continues to provide the dirt on these companies. See for example Eyes 1313 p. 10, and 1314 p. 29 and passim. The important point here is that that many of the petty frauds taking place in A4e’s offices have occurred because they were unable to find enough real placements.
• 21‘Workfare that shames UK plc or a leftwing plot by the job snobs?’, Guardian, 28th February, 2012. guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/28/workfare-uk-plot-job-snobs
• 22‘Phone-a-slave’, Daily Mash, 27th February 2012. http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/jobless-offered-free-glimpse-into-very-slightly-better-future-201202274944
• 23For a more developed rant against the use of the word ‘slavery’ in anti-workfare campaigns, see ‘On slavery’, June 2012 at http://aprogramandrifles.tumblr.com/
• 24See for example the posters in this action ‘Edinburgh Tescos invaded by anti-workfare protestors’, Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty, March, 2012. http://edinburghagainstpoverty.org.uk/node/70
• 25Of course, the class analysis of the workfare scheme also has a moral dimension; but since our moral condemnation is based upon that class analysis, rather than an alternative to it, our indignation has broader targets: the ‘victims’ who we argue have been wronged by the implementation of the workfare schemes, are the wider working class, not just the individuals forced onto the schemes.
• 26‘Unpaid jobseekers to deliver patient care in three hospitals’, Guardian, 21st May 2012 (op. cit.); ‘My job was replaced by a workfare placement’, Guardian, 3rd March 2012. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/03/20/job-replaced-workfare-placement ‘Back to the workhouse’, Guardian, 8th June, 2012. guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/08/jubilee-stewards-unpaid-labour-growing .
• 27The Flexible New Deal was planned before the crisis, and mandatory work activity was used for the young unemployed and many others before the recession.
• 28‘The renewed imposition of work in the era of austerity’, Aufheben #19, 2011, op. cit.
• 29‘Unemployed recalcitrance and welfare restructuring in the UK today’, Aufheben, 2000, in Stop the clock! Critiques of the new social workhouse. http://libcom.org/library/aufheben/pamphlets-articles/stop-the-clock-critiques-of-the-new-social-workhouse/unemployed-recalcitrance-and-welfare-re
• 30This is the case with ‘Mandatory work activity’.
• 31What is ideological about the idea of the lazy, undeserving poor of course is not only that it creates division but also the work ethic it promotes (i.e., ‘work as inherently good’). It is purely in the bosses’ interests that everyone seeks work, works hard and values this hard work. What’s in our interests is workers (unemployed and employed) refusing to work for shit wages and refusing to compete.
• 32Other evidence of this restructuring of the labour market is to be found in the rationalization of prison labour, which is now being brought into the mainstream labour market. See ‘Plan for cheap prison work 'may cost thousands of jobs'’, Independent, 5th June 2012. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/plan-for-cheap-prison-work-may-cost-thousands-of-jobs-7815140.html. A recent commentary can be found here: libcom.org/blog/new-social-workhouse-16022012 .
• 33A greater emphasis on ‘socially useful’ workfare placements would win over some of the current left-liberal critics like Polly Toynbee, for example, who attacks DWP minister Chris Grayling now but states that she backed Project Work for precisely this reason. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/the-tories-were-right-workfare-really-works-1280874.htm
• 34‘The renewed imposition of work in the era of austerity’, Aufheben #19, 2011, op. cit. Problems of organization in resistance to benefits attacks is also discussed in section 2 of ‘Theoretical criticism and practical overthrow fifteen years on: A reflection’ in Aufheben #15, 2007. libcom.org/library/theory-practice-recent-struggles-brighton .
• 35‘How do we break workfare – National Conference held on May 26’, Brighton Benefits Campaign. http://brightonbenefitscampaign.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/how-do-we-break-workfare-national-conference-held-on-may-26/
• 36Secretary for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith recently told parliament ‘One of the big problems we had was that some people, including the Labour party and those anarchists, have tried to stop those companies from doing that [i.e., providing workfare placements]’, June 2012, from Hansard. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm120625/debtext/120625-0001.htm
• 37We heard recently about a chain of pubs in Hastings that have pulled out after being approached by campaigners; and Boycott Workfare announced in June that the Body Shop have pulled out: http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?p=1025
• 38http://www.solfed.org.uk/?q=taxonomy/term/989
• 39 ‘Holland & Barrett pulls out of jobseekers' scheme’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jul/06/holland-and-barrett-jobseekers-scheme Guardian, 6th July 2012.