Shifting blame on to the jobless under the guise of positive thinking is not only demeaning but sinister
Among a pile of papers and leaflets in the Warrington branch of Cheshire Training Associates there are two American self-help books. The New Dynamics of Winning and Seeds of Greatness are both by Denis Waitley, a graduate of the US navy academy at Annapolis and mentor to astronauts and American football stars. The former brazenly offers the chance to "gain the mindset of a champion"; the blurb on the back of the latter promises "secrets" that will help any reader to "become a happier, healthier and more successful person".
Waitley-ism, perhaps, sits awkwardly with the town outside, in which youth unemployment increased by 230% in 2011 and gaining the mindset of a champion must be challenging, at least.
But his credo fits perfectly into what happens in these offices: the day-to-day operation of the government's work programme. In Warrington the standard payment-by-results contract was given to the security firm G4S, who outsourced the work to Cheshire Training Associates. The impression is of bright, sparky people – "employment consultants", they call them – seeing to a machine that runs on one article of faith: that unemployment should be understood not in the context of a dead job market but the knowledge, motivation, expectations and behaviour of the individual.
At the end of last week an indication of the essential idea came from the Conservative work and pensions minister, Maria Miller, when she appeared on Radio 5 Live. "There isn't a shortage of jobs – what there can be is a lack of an appetite for some of the jobs that are available," she said. "I don't think it's a lack of jobs at the moment … I think it really is making sure that we've got people knowing where those jobs are."
You're generally eligible for referral to the work programme if you've been out of work for a year, though for those aged 18-24, nine months is sufficient.
When we asked for firsthand testimony about what it involves from readers of Comment is free, we received about 300 online posts and emails: accounts of dead-end unpaid "work placements"; stories from people in their late 50s who couldn't see any way back into work; suggestions that, in the face of rising unemployment, some of the work programme's providers are barely bothering their clients.
One of the most incisive responses came from someone freshly inducted into the care of DWP contractor and multinational group Maximus. "The exploratory talk centered around our perceived failure to achieve employment," they wrote. "The woman asked each of us for potential 'barriers to employment', which seemed to be a general trawl through people's private lives … the national employment crisis was not suitable for discussion, apparently."
Thirty years ago Norman Tebbit told the story of his father's bike, and attracted not just controversy but infamy; now, much the same thinking is tightly built into how the state treats the unemployed. This is unsettling: you could easily think of it as being close to a moral outrage. There again, before lefty ire got the better of you, you might just as easily wonder whether, if the only option available to the unemployed is to stoically look for work, why not equip them with the skills and mindset such a grind requires, and encourage the habit of positive thinking?
The problem is that the infusion of the work programme's gospel into individual minds can seem not just sinister but demeaning. In Warrington the DWP's press person introduces me to 27-year-old Richard Dunn, who has spent time on the programme and now has a job, of sorts: as a driver's mate for furniture chain SCS on a six-month contract. He was unemployed for nine months. At the peak of his search for work, he says he was averaging 25 to 30 applications a week, most of which did not even get a reply. So, I wonder, in the end, does he think that the fact he was unemployed was his fault?
"Yeah," he says. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this – tried more. When you're feeling down you start blaming the world for your mistakes … You feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try. And that's what this place helped with." I mention the 2.6 million people officially out of work, and suggest that his time on the dole was possibly not because of any failings on his part. "But half the people don't want to work," he says.
Which brings us to an immovable aspect of the national understanding of unemployment. Do not think that the recasting of joblessness as a matter of individual failings, or the shift to conditional benefits, are anywhere near as controversial as some – myself included – would like. Look at the latest British Social Attitudes survey: when presented with the suggestion that "unemployment benefits are too high and they discourage the unemployed from finding jobs", 54% agreed, up from 35% in 1983.
Sped on its way by pop psychology, the free market conception of joblessness has oozed into the national consciousness; as more encounters in Warrington prove, it even defines the thoughts of some of the unemployed themselves. On this evidence there is not just no such thing as society – by implication there must be no such thing as the economy, either.
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