Hazel Blears’ shocking double standards have been exposed again this week with two stories posted within hours of each other on the Manchester Gazette news website.
One of these is the results of her Kids Without Connections programme, a workfare scheme where young people are tricked into working without pay in the mistaken belief it may help them find a real job. Sadly for most of those who took part it was waste of time. Just 16 of the 42 people who worked for free on the scheme have since found jobs or apprentices.
This is a truly dire figure given the nature of the young people involved, who were not just so motivated they were prepared to work for free but had passed any selection procedure for their placements. They would almost certainly have found work just as quickly had they spent the time looking for a job. Despite that Blears once again calls her unpaid work scheme ‘fantastic’.
The gushing response from Blears to this shambles is made even more astonishing by a story posted just a few hours earlier on the same website. This features a report in which a large number of Manchester businesses state they believe unpaid internships for graduates are ‘wholly unacceptable’.
Hazel Blears agrees. Workfare for the middle classes is not fantastic. She thinks that “unpaid internships are unacceptable and that difficult economic conditions are no excuse for exploiting young people in the workplace.”
These quotes seem to have come from Blears’ office within days, if not hours of each other. That she did not even notice her breathtaking double standards tells us everything we need to know about the attitude to unemployed people in the modern Labour Party.
Blears will no doubt be welcoming the poverty pimp jamboree in her home town as annual convention of the welfare-to-work industry opens in Manchester today. Join in the Week of Action Against Workfare today by telling the exploiters what you think on the hashtag for the conference at #w2w2013.
And if you are in Manchester get down to the plush Beetham Tower Hilton Hotel tonight (Tues 9th July) at 7.30 and protest where the parasites will be enjoying a tax payer funded slap up meal.
Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid
the void 
fuckin unbelievable
Reblogged this on kickingthecat.
If they are going through a selection process then IMHO they are cherry picking those most likely to find employment, while at the same time taking them out of the workplace and telling them that it will be a valuable addition to their CV.
The only use showing you do unpaid work on your CV possibly because of force of loss of benefits if they didn’t do the course is that it gives any prospective employer the incite to show that if pushed they could get them to do extra work for no extra pay if they wanted.
#ClassWar
Keep re-tweeting as many of our anti-workfare tweets, with the #w2w2013 hashtag, as possible to drive them up the top tweet rankings
The unapid interns or middle class workfare slaves probably have parents who are part of the poverty pimp industry.
What about the poor working class forced onto inferior workfare schemes or don’t they count?
Guy you dumb.
Apprenticeships?…The Employer who takes these young people on,are out .10p per hour…Fucking Slavery,and do they keep them on? Not on NMW!
whitevanman
What are you on about?
“Just 16 of the 42 people who worked for free on the scheme have since found jobs” and the other 26 of 42 well, possibly bitter and less likely to find or want work in the future after being used and giving false impressions.
Although 16 out of 42 is considerably better performance than the Work Programme! But we don’t know whether those jobs have been sustained or not.
My friend is working for free as a nurse right now – through an apprenticeship. Makes me sick to have seen how much they bully her there but she sticks through it in the hope of getting a gruelling but highly respectable minor position. Politicians are banking a lot on the desperation and good nature of their voters of late.
I hope my friend is recognized for her hard work and long hours and not a penny to her name soon – or else gets the hell out of that place and finds a better place with some morals and standards. She is more than capable of it.
truly double standards!! its ok for us the working class and our children to do unpaid work, whilst the middle classes do nothing!! My daughter has two degrees and is a social worker even though she comes from a council estate! what would hazel blears done in her case? let her sit on her backside!! out of work means that whatever class you come from you need to work, so why the middle class graduates cant do unpaid work I don’t know? bloody stinks!!
The top and bottom of it is nobody should be working for nothing, if anything the middleclass kids have parents in a better position to support their kids if they want to work for nothing, but for the working class working for free is not an option.
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they are a bunch of hypocrites….
Why
jobs are disappearing faster than, being created…and they have to act as if the opposite is true…or politicians are seen to have no purpose, and justify hording their wealth, as if they have earned it…instead of accepting, the employment market, as the way it is, that labour saving devices,have brought to the way we work…introducing work share, a citizens income..and a right to unconditional access to vitals…food shelter…clothes and decent health care…
And they can stuff their big lottery too
I wonder how much a hostess costs at w2w gig
http://www.mind.org.uk/news/show/9183_disability_charities_consortium_calls_for_urgent_rethink_on_employment_support_for_people_with_disabilities
Desperate charities who have lined their pockets out of misery and collusion in my opinion.
Night, night!
someone playing silly buggers with the comments.
miliband no longer wants the unions as their paymasters, that sounds like a precursory to the tax payer funding political parties – politics gets enough of the public purse already especially with the planned controversial 15% pay increases.
Sounds more to me like another step to the political and economic right, where they’ll compete with the Tories for Big Business and bankers money; wait for the free-for-all when both sides are selling legislation and tax-breaks.
Why doesn’t someone email her and confront her with this hypocrisy and let us know her response?
I have done, she doesn’t reply.
People of Salford, kick this parasite out
We tried that already, the power of the dark-side is too strong!
http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=468
Maybe next time eh?
This from the MP who flip.p-flopped her houses as much as possible to screw the taxpayer out of as much expenses money as she could. She should be deselected!
A4e coach wins top award
http://mya4e.com/a4e-coach-suzanne-green-wins-top-award/
Highlights from last yeard funfest at w2w gig..
Doncha just love religious zealots who show up at w2w gigs
Lambs to the slaughter poll tax #2
http://www.chrisspivey.co.uk/?p=12987&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ChrisSpivey+%28Chris+Spivey%29
The W2W conference is listed as a trade fare not about helping people..
They trade in human misery. Seems pretty accurate to me.
http://jobcentreplus-murderers.webstarts.com/?r=20130709120510
I like how the article in the gazette claims 16 out of 42 is ‘nearly half’. It’s 38%, for fuck’s sake.
IDS getting a propa grilling on BBC parliament channel, what a toff!
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Hazel Blears: not so much ‘Kids without Connections’ (why is it called that when it goes up to age 24?) [patronising crap bollocks name anyway; assumes you’re directionless and useless/inactive]
as Politicians Without Brains.
Which’d be most of them.
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