Analysis

The Truth About Job Clubs
by Chris

If you or any person you know has applied for welfare benefits recently you probably already know what a job club is. For those of you who are not familiar with job clubs, I will explain.

A job club is a program designed for people on welfare who are held to be responsible for the problems our government has caused them.

The premise of the creation of a job club is that people on welfare are unable to find jobs due to bad resume and people skills, as well as a lack of communications resources. What our government would have us believe is that there is a large amount of jobs "out there" and that employers are just waiting for people with the right attitude to apply. I am personally of the opinion that our government is "out there."

Job clubs are a requirement of all non-disability welfare recipients and can be broken down into three phases. The first job club a recipient will be forced to enter is usually a very brief seminar lasting 1-3 days and covering approximately 1 hour a day. This initial job club acts as a sort of pep rally. Unemployed workers are encouraged to have a "go get 'em" attitude, to lower their expectations as per type of work and pay.

The second job club is usually a three to four week workshop which serves as a communications base for welfare recipients. The members of these job clubs are taught resume writing skills, do mock interviews, and are offerred use of the communications resources available through the job club (i.e. telephone messaging service, computers, fax machine, etc.). They are also once again asked to lower their expectations in their job search. Recipients are usually forced to attend these job clubs immediately following the initial job club. The first job club basically acts as a show of willingness to conform to the welfare system's new screening process, while the second acts mainly as a bridge into the third job club.

Upon completion of the first two job clubs and after seven long months of looking for work that doesn't exist you are ready for your third and most painful job club: the SEVEN WEEK comprehensive. This third job club is a far more in depth abuse of the unemployed worker's rights. In the initial phases of this job club, members are taught more advanced resume writing skills, people skills, the art of kissing ass, how to shake hands, and how to smile in a non-threatening way. They do exercises encouraging group participation such as roleplaying, thinking skils, and situational exercises all giving members a chance to practice speaking skills and thus interaction with other people.

The second phase of the seven week comprehensive job club is to send workers to Practicums. A Practicum is a situation where a work offers her/his employment services free of charge to the employer over a four week period for three hours a day. This serves as a "free trial testing period" during which an employer can decide whether or not she/he likes the employee.

During the Practicum, job club members still attend their workshop to have discussions about problems in their respective workplaces and go over problem solving techniques usually involving submissiveness training as their main focal point. They are constantly told to lower their expectations, to expect less of their employers, and less wages. They are told that they will have to do that extra bit for their employers because of an ever-changing market. They are constantly told that it is their fault that they are unemployed and in short to bend beneath the whip. This is not true: it is not the worker's fault. Our government is not passing laws against the corporations in order to create the jobs necessary for our ever increasing population.

What these job clubs do for people as individuals is to form them into the perfect slave. Those who complete job clubs are often hired by large corporations because the employers know they are trained to accept less money, to accept being mistreated by employers, not to ask for time off, not to ask for raises, and generally taught not to ask for the respect that all workers deserve. Naturally an employer will fire an existing worker who is receiving $8-$9 an hour to hire a worker who has been conditioned to accept the bare minimum in wages and respect.

There are supposed to be laws protecting these workers against these kinds of firings, but it is very easy to fire a work for "being rude to a customer" or some other excuse to avoid prosecution. So in order to give one person a job you have taken a job away from another person. You might ask why our government has not figured this out, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Now let's look at the person who has just been "fired for being rude to a customer." Due to the new restrictions on U.I. (now called E.I.), this person will not be able to collect E.I. benefits due to having been "fired' from his job and will not be able to apply for welfare until three months. Until then this person will be forced to deal with poverty and due to the high rate of unemployment as well as being monetarily crippled as far as paying for telephone fees and transportation, will most likely not be able to find a job. They will be forced to live off of charity of all kinds from food banks to friends to hostels all paid for by the working class. They may even be forced to sell off their possessions until such time as they can receive welfare benefits and due to the intense screening process that welfare now employs will probably not see a check which their tax dollars paid for until five or six months after being "fired." Seven months after that they are placed in a seven week slave training course.

So what do job clubs acheive in the long run? Job clubs are part of a 20-30 year plan to destroy workers rights in Canada altogether. One factor of which has been in our schools is work practicums. All students now, in order to graduate, are required to take a "life skills" course which mirrors job clubs in many respects. They are taught how to write resumes, how to do interviews, and are forced to do 25 hours of practicum training just as job clubs. However unlike job clubs the students are encouraged to reach for the stars when seeking post graduate employment which, due to the existence of job clubs is no longer pheasible. Because of high unemployement and their star gazing tendancies, these students will most likely not find employment and will eventually end up in job clubs of their own. What's more, when they arrive in these slave training workshops they will think of them as normal and productive, havning been through similar training in the past whereas many welfare recipients have a great hatred for job clubs.

Eventually, because of this mass "lowering of expectations," wages will drop drastically. Because workers are constantly rotated in and out of their jobs by this cycle the amount of workers will to do any job offered to them for minimum wage will increase. Essentially we are left with a cutthroat society where workers have no choice but to compete who can be a better slave. This universal wage plummet will cause a drop in the economy because where less workers are performing more tasks as work and constantly learning to deal with less wages and harsher working conditions the amount of unemployed can only rise. If the working class, which is the largest class in our society taking up more than half our population, has no money to spend they will not spend money. This is what creates a recession. And due to the amount of multinational corporations appearing in Canada due to trade agreements like NAFTA, the working class is becoming a larger part of society every day. Whereas once upon a time you could work for a company long enough to obtain an executive management position in a company; all of the locally based companies are being slowly forced out of business by the multinational corporations. This is due to the fact that they can afford to undercut locally based companies. So due to the fact that the head offices of these companies are located largely in the United States, we are left out in the cold.

At this point the vast recession will become an excuse to lower union wages. In a cutthroat society such as this, a union cannot survive a strike because the society is too hungry to have respect for a picket line. If the unions go on strike they will be ordered back to work. If they refuse, scab labour will be employed and a person who works for $7 an hour and has a family to feed has no choice but to take a scab job for $10 an hour. Once the unions are gone it's all over.

Why is our government doing this? Because the multinational corporations have always paid their campaign "donations" and they owe a favour.

Why is the media not telling us about this? Well, just guess who owns the media.