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The Job Seekers Allowance (JSA)

In October 1996 a new benefit called Job Seekers Allowance was introduced to replace both Unemployment Benefit and Income Support in the UK. This was greeted with much protest and campaign groups were formed. This is a page of links to JSA Survival Guides, campaigns and related issues.

"During the Vietnam War I knew many Americans over here [Britain] to dodge the draft to avoid being sent to kill people in Vietnam in an ideological war they did not support. They were brave and honourable men - no one, in this country at least, suggested that they were shirking their responsibility.

These days we have Job Seekers Allowance. Anyone who is unemployed has to take any job offered, whether or not it is destroying the planet, producing garbage, or wasting energy.

I would like to see people refusing to work in any job they felt was wrong. I would like to see work-dodgers: honourable and brave people who refuse to continue to feed this monstrous culture.

We are at a turning point in history: if we take the wrong road our history will end. Industrial expansion is the wrong road - unequal sharing is the wrong road - full employment is the wrong road."

-- Chris Busby, First Coordinator of the Green Committee of 100
[In his Foreword to Molly Scott Cato's Seven Myths about Work]

JSA Related Links

Job Seekers Allowance Survival Guide - Urban75 : UK underground site.

NEW DEAL OR RAW DEAL? - report from SchNEWS 158, 13 March 1998.

Dole Bondage? Up Yours - an open letter of resignation from the Secretary of Wales Against the JSA.

WHAT'S WORK: The Charter for Transforming Work - Green Party (UK).

We Don't Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives! - jobless action in France.

Happy Man on Welfare - by Jack Saturday (Canada).

Toil and Trouble, New Labour's Puritan Agenda - The Idler, Issue 23 June-July 1998.

Seven Myths about Work - by Molly Scott Cato, (Green Party UK).

Why work? The case for a citizen's basic income - The Global Ideas Bank.

Basic Income Schemes - The sane alternative?

QUOTES:

"We have become incapable of making judgements about what is useful work. The profit motive drives our economy so anything that makes money is considered work, even when it is socially and environmentally destructive. Conversely, anything that does not make money or is not paid is not considered work, regardless of its real human value.

New Labour's vision of work is fantastical. To suggest that selling hamburgers and cleaning cars is a panacea for social ills is a fairy tale solution. The real challenge is to decide as a society what work is important, and then to share it, and the proceeds, fairly."
-- Molly Scott Cato, (Green Party UK)