(UK) More jobseekers told to do unpaid work or face possible loss of benefits

Now a minimum of 16 makes sense especially if they use them for things like cleaning roads, providing assistance for the elderly and disabled.

Are the unemployed just being used as unpaid labor by some companies or the state?

Plus looked at from another angle by providing the help they meet people and perhaps they can make connections that could lead to a job so that they can get back to full time work.

"I love the smell of slavery in the morning!"

what a strange concept.

And it's disgusting that you'd defend a policy that isn't based on lowering unemployment but simply on punishing the unemployed.

Why do you post here if you're a Thatcherite, btw?

You don't receive "unemployment insurance" unless you were employed to begin with. Your over-the-counter, employed income means that money is going into the unemployment insurance bucket to protect you if you lose your job. The whole right-wing fight against unemployment insurance is that supposedly people would be paid *more* if the companies that employed them weren't forced to pay into the unemployment insurance bucket, and that then individual people could choose to do what they wanted with that extra bit of money. So right-wingers claim that money would otherwise have been wages. In that case, you did the work and the money went into the insurance bucket instead of your pocket, for a rainy day.

Well the rainy day is here, and that income was your prior withheld wage.

It has been set aside for you and is intended to keep you afloat while you re-group and look for new *paid* work. Now you may, during your unemployed time, *choose* to do volunteer work as one means of networking. But since it is *volunteer* work and *uncompensated* it is, by definition, *not mandatory.*

This is way down the slippery slope to slavery, period. Even by right-wing thinking, you earned that money when you were employed. And yes, unless the unemployment compensation meets or exceeds the wages that would be paid to a normally employed person, it is taking paying work away.

In the same way that social security here is referred to as an insurance program.

Companies and employees pay social security and fica taxes into the social security pool.
Companies also pay into the unemployment pool, and when they lay off employees, the government pays benefits out of the unemployment pool to the unemployed employees.

William Wilberforce is rolling in his grave.

do the full time work of looking for a job in a shitty economy.

welcome to the new reality.