When did being lowly paid become a criminal offence?

Increasingly, corporations and politicians treat the poor with distrust. That's why this week's ruling on workfare was important

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2013

‘In the ruling in favour of Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson the judges were clear: these people were treated dishonestly.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon

Inside Amazon's flagship factory in Rugeley, Staffordshire, a new way of working is evolving. There is a strong topnote of distrust, evinced by the full-body scanners that workers have to pass, every time they leave, to prove they haven't stolen anything. The profound insecurity built into the employment model is dressed up as discipline – which is to say, Amazon expects huge seasonal fluctuations in the number of people it needs, yet likes to mask their dismissals behind a misdeameanour, so a lot of people get axed for crimes like being ill. There's a lifesized blonde lady made of cardboard at the entrance, with a think bubble coming out of her head that says, "This is the best job I've ever had!" If that detail alone is enough to make your blood run cold, marry it to the testimony of the chairman of nearby Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club: "The feedback we're getting is that it's like being in a slave camp."

Of all the details revealed by the Financial Times, the one that sank my spirits was the electronic tagging – workers have a handheld device directing them to goods. But these devices also measure their productivity in real time. If they lag behind, the machine bugs them. They are issued with constant warnings not to talk to one another or tarry for any reason. A lot of people find it quite stressful. Call them crazy. (Amazon counters: "Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazon employee, and we measure actual performance against those expectations.")

Meanwhile, in Tesco's Donabate distribution centre in Dublin, workers wearing these tags are awarded percentages for their speediness (100% if they perform a task in the time estimated, 200% if they're twice as fast, and so on), but claim they are docked if they take a loo break; afterwards, they find they have to work much faster – to get back up to their 100%. To put it in context, workers routinely scoring 110% are reported to be sweating quite hard for most of the day. So making up your targets is no walk in the park. Tesco insists that their tag is turned off while workers are in the toilet.

Anybody who's ever worked in a very repetitive, menial job will recognise this suspicious atmosphere – the less enjoyable a job is, the more people there are who suspect you of trying to get out of it. That's reasonable, I suppose, though if people were treated less like robots to begin with, they might not need so much surveillance. But the fabled "innovation" of the private sector never seems to be able to extend itself towards making jobs more self-determining and satisfying. Presumably this is because there's always a danger that self-determining, satisfied people might distinguish themselves in some way, might cease to be interchangeable and might want – indeed, deserve – more than the paltry wage they might be being paid.

But there is innovation here, in a new shamelessness. Let's be honest, tagging is what you do to criminals. Criminals often don't mind this, because the alternative for them is prison. The understanding, however, is that there's already been a significant breakdown of respect between the authority and the person before anybody's movements are electronically monitored. It used to be taken as read that you wouldn't do that to a person until you already had good reason to suspect that they wouldn't tell you the truth.

I am reminded here of the Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke calling for people's benefits to be delivered on a card, rather than cash, for the easier prohibition of the purchase of booze, fags, Sky+ and trips to Tenerife. Again, the government has form with this idea –certain categories of asylum seeker are given their sustenance on a card, with which they are banned from buying condoms and (obscurely) sanitary products.

A friend of mine stood behind an asylum seeker once while she was turned down for the purchase of some crayons. It's not a system I'd want on my conscience, but its development has some deterrence rationale to it: that is, to make conditions so unpleasant that the bogus claimant gives up of his or her own accord. So when did that become OK – to exclude benefit claimants from the mainstream economy, to humiliate them? Does Shelbrooke hope to deter them all from living here? Where does he propose they go?

What I cannot help noticing is a failure of normal human respect for the people at the bottom of the heap – Tuesday's ruling in favour of Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson has had its bones picked over for what it does or doesn't say about slavery, and yet the judges were clear: these people were treated dishonestly. They were treated as though, being unemployed, they could be parcelled about at the whim of the secretary of state.

A similar belief pervades the suggestion that those on benefits need to be ritually humiliated every time they go into a shop; or those on low wages, by dint of their low status, need to be monitored like criminals. Across the piece, having a low financial status is now elided, by politicians and by corporations, with being untrustworthy.

They may have different motives; Shelbrooke is hoping to make political capital out of the contempt in which he holds the poor; Tesco and Amazon's contempt is just a byproduct of their drive for profit. But the wellspring doesn't matter; what matters is that this is a frighteningly divisive worldview.

This Poundland ruling is a welcome blow to the Work Programme

It's invaluable that three judges have ruled in the Cait Reilly case against an appalling back-to-work system

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 February 2013 15.02 GMT

Cait Reilly after winning her claim that requiring her to work for free was unlawful. Photograph: Cathy Gordon/PA

 

Before we get too excited about the judges' ruling in Reilly and Wilson v the secretary of state, this is not a judgment against slavery or forced labour. Both Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson lodged this appeal on the basis that, in forcing them to do unpaid work or lose their benefits, the government was breaching its own regulations.

You may think that there is a moral case to answer for the secretary of state, in pulling someone away from unpaid work in a sector they're interested in, forcing them instead to work unpaid stacking shelves in Poundland, with no training and no advancement of their skills, driving down wages for the rest of Poundland's employees while benefiting nobody but the retailer and the workfare provider. I know that's what I think.

You might think that when you train a skilled engineer to clean furniture – on the basis that the reason for his idleness was that he'd got out of the habit of work, that he needed to prove his mettle with whatever menial task you chose for him – there's a moral case to answer here, too. I'd agree.
But judges Black, Pill and Burnton haven't ruled on morality, they have merely ruled on nuts and bolts: Reilly was told that her scheme was mandatory, where in fact it was not. Wilson was told that if he refused to take part in a six-month work experience programme, he'd lose his benefits for that period. In fact, the maximum sanction would have been a two-week loss of benefits.

Nevertheless, though a ruling on slavery might have added some weight to it, this remains a punch in the face for this government, the Work Programme generally, and workfare in particular. Even the profile of these two cases significantly damages the reputation of this policy, whose raison d'etre is that long-term unemployment is the result of people getting out of the habit of work.

"What are the barriers that people have?" the employment minister Mark Hoban wondered aloud today on World at One. "One of the things people need to demonstrate to an employer is that they can turn up on time." This old chestnut – that long-term unemployment is the preserve of people who can't haul their sorry bones out of bed, must be countered all the time. The more cases we know about of unemployed people who are highly trained, gainfully occupied and routinely insulted by stupid workfare suggestions, the better.

On a practical note, people who've had their jobseeker's allowance stopped on grounds that are similar to Reilly or Wilson's can now claim the money back. This rights a grave social wrong, and delivers a sorely needed sanction to the workfare providers themselves, who understand nothing but money, and might finally question their deficiencies with cash at stake.

But most importantly, there is a growing sense that this back-to-work system is corrupt – my colleague Shiv Malik discovered recently that people on unpaid schemes were being counted as employed to massage the government's figures, even though by any reasonable person's understanding, they were not. Then the BBC revealed that people were being told to declare themselves "self-employed", even when they were simply without work, on the false basis that they could claim more in in-work benefits than JSA – the real benefit, of course, accruing to the Work Programme provider who could then claim them as having been "helped".

All the statistics released about the Work Programme show execrable results, and yet we've heard nothing about penalties, or remaking the contracts, or rethinking the system. There is a creeping sense that this is turning into a cash cow for the private sector, a get-out-clause for the government ("we've spent all this money, if people can't get jobs despite our help, it's because they are inadequate"), and unemployed people will be left at the bottom, ceaselessly harassed by a totally specious narrative in which their laziness beggars a try-hard administration.

A judge, casting doubt on all this in a sober way, is invaluable – three judges, better still. It makes me want to shake the legal profession by its giant hand.