Independent police watchdog fingers police officers across the country for allegedly providing information on workers for a blacklist of over 3,000 names which was drawn up by one of Britain’s biggest construction companies.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has informed the lawyers representing the victims of the backlist that a Scotland Yard inquiry has found that it was “likely that all special branches were involved in providing information” for the blacklist.
By privatising the Royal Mail, our coalition government has shown that it does not care a jot for our national heritage, or the devastating impact the sell-off will have on remote rural communities, or how the elderly and the poor will be disproportionately affected. They have shown us that all they care about is rewarding their wealthy backers in the City of London and keeping in with the giants of global capitalism.
Universal Jobmatch, the DWP’s job search website that became ‘mandatory’ for those claiming unemployment benefit on March 1st 2013, has been dogged by controversy amid claims it is simply a tool for keeping tabs on jobseekers rather than an effective aid to help them find work.
Websites like The Void and Consent Me have done sterling work exposing this and other government scams, like Workfare, designed to shame and exploit the victims of its economic criminality.
By cutting jobs, wages, pensions and benefits governments in the US, UK and across Europe are deliberately causing the living standards of the poor and middle class to plummet while at the same time, mercilessly removing the social safety net by slashing public services when people need them most. With a diminishing and in many cases negative disposable income, households can barely afford the necessities of life; consumer demand is floundering and this is having a predictable knock-on effect on businesses with the net result being less tax receipts for the treasury. This is not a plan for deficit reduction as we’re being told. This is class war!
Nancy Salgado is 26 years old and is a cashier at McDonald’s. She has been at her current McDonald’s for ten months. She is a single mother with seven- and two-year old children. The family currently lives in Logan Square, a community on Chicago’s northwest Side. Nancy earns $8.25 an hour, works thirty to forty hours per week and is struggling to raise her two kids. Nancy has worked for McDonald’s since she was 16 and has never had a raise.
After five years of Obama’s economic recovery, the American people are as gloomy as ever. According to a Bloomberg National Poll that was released this week, fewer people “are optimistic about the job market” or “the housing market” or “anticipate improvement in the economy’s strength over the next year.”
Walkouts and protests by fast food workers demanding higher wages and collective bargaining rights began last November and spread to 60 cities nationwide at the end of August. It is an inspiring grass-roots movement led by some of the nation’s most underpaid employees and should be supported by everyone who has a sense of fairness.
The relentless demonization of benefits claimants – smeared by association with the tiny minority who commit this kind of fraud – is pernicious in the extreme. Six of the UK’s largest disability charities (Scope, Mencap, Leonard Cheshire Disability, the National Autistic Society, Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), and Disability Alliance) report that they are regularly contacted by people who say they are taunted on the street about faking disabilities in order to receive payments and are concerned that this could lead to hate crimes and violence.
One of the purported achievements of the Coalition government’s disastrous economic policy of austerity, has been the unemployment figures. Pundits say that at 7.8% (2.51m) they are nothing to shout about but not the disastrous rates seen in states such as Greece (26.9%) or Spain (26.3%). In reality, the unemployment rate is more than double this in many areas, while those in employment are facing ever worsening conditions to retain their non-jobs.
In ‘Brave New World Revisited’, Aldous Huxley describes a new class conditioned to a normality that is not normal “because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does”.
The 2 Scariest Unemployment Charts Ever This is what a permanent underclass looks like by Matthew O’Brien Spain is in a great depression, and it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen. Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It’s […]
Unemployment hits Record Highs in Spain, France by Alex Lantier According to figures published yesterday, the number of unemployed workers in Spain and France has reached all-time highs, as Europe’s economic collapse accelerates under the impact of the global economic crisis and austerity measures imposed throughout the continent. In Spain, the National Statistics Institute (INE) reported that the country had […]
