TESCO - Forced Labour on Starvation Wages

[Audley Strange]

Well they could always burn down TESCO and murder the bosses. At least they'd get three square and be allowed to sit on their asses all day in jail. Well at least until some greedy cunt realises prisoners are also good slave labour.

It's business, as usual.

I believe the Tories are going to announce new schemes to get prison inmates working while incarcerated. As long as they've time on their hands, it's wrong for someone not to be making a profit.

That wouldn't surprise me and while they are all excited about this forced labour, real jobs will be cut, meaning more and more people as wage slaves.

Still society deserves what it gets and until such time that we learn to spill blood again it will continue.

[Jesus_of_Nazareth]

Well they could always burn down TESCO and murder the bosses.

Are you inciting me?

FWIW I won't ever burn down a TESCO.....but dealing with someone who is trying to kill me (and mine) is another thing.

Head on a stick - BOGOF

[Audley Strange]

Well they could always burn down TESCO and murder the bosses.

Are you inciting me?

FWIW I won't ever burn down a TESCO.....but dealing with someone who is trying to kill me (and mine) is another thing.

Head on a stick - BOGOF

No, I am not inciting anyone. I am asking you to appreciate what a bunch of servile wretches who live on our knees this society has become. We have lost something and will not regain it easily and not by picking what butler of the landed gentry we choose to throw scraps from the banquet out the window at us.

[Jesus_of_Nazareth]

No, I am not inciting anyone.

Ooops

I wish you had made that clear a bit earlier

[Audley Strange]

No, I am not inciting anyone.

Ooops

I wish you had made that clear a bit earlier

I'm like Gandhi, I'd never condone what you did, but good for you... etc.

[Seth]

Well, it's absolutely fucking clear that not a one of you actually bothered to read, much less comprehend the article cited, which said that the ad was a simple mistake and had been withdrawn. The article also points out that the government subsidizes the temporary employment of out-of-work and particularly unskilled new workers with Tesco (and I assume other employers) so that they can gain work experience and will have a leg up at the end of six months by having a guaranteed job interview.

In this way, unemployed persons get government dole money while learning a new job, and the employer is not required to waste money paying full-time minimum wages while training unskilled employees, which induces the employer to hire them in the first place, something they are NOT REQUIRED to do at all.

According to all the numbnutz comments I've seen so far, you all would prefer that the employer simply not hire anyone they don't need and not give anyone without job skills (like immigrants and youth looking for their first job) any sort of job because there's a huge pool of more highly skilled (and therefore more valuable) employees out there to pick and choose from.

Great work!

Now you see why minimum or "living" wage laws don't work, and how they actually increase unemployment and perpetuate it among the unskilled, particularly inner-city youth. Every single time the minimum wage is raised, particularly when unemployment is high, unskilled workers lose ANY hope they have of earning ANY money and getting ANY sort of work experience they can put on a resume or job application.

They don't deserve "minimum wage" because they are not WORTH minimum wage in a glutted labor market. Why on earth would an employer hire an unskilled or new worker for the same wage he can get a more skilled or more mature and experienced worker for? That's fiscal stupidity.

In the good old days, youth entering the labor force were apprenticed to a journeyman or master tradesman and they got room, board and perhaps a little money to spend in return for work as they learned a skill or trade. It was a system that worked well for hundreds if not thousands of years and created legions of master craftsmen and journeymen who got a very low-cost education that exceeded, most of the time, anything offered by public education, and they got it at their own expense, through their own diligence and labor, and they went on to train others in the craft they had learned.

I'm actually quite surprised that the socialist UK actually offers this program, and I wish like hell we would adopt it nationwide over here, because it's a grand idea that offers unskilled and new workers a substantial leg up in becoming gainfully employed, which beats having them sitting around selling crack and making babies.

You all's knee-jerk Marxism would be quite amusing if it weren't so pathetic and dangerous.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Actually, we were all laughing. We wont' say at whom, of course.

[Atheist-Lite]

Too many people like Seth says. The labor market is glutted. This is a direct consequence of improved technologies in both information processing and manufacturing. In the future there will be less and less need for large numbers of people, who will move on in years with no prospect of work. The only answer is a civilized mass suicide culture which allows the humane exiting of these unwanted masses. Going out on a dose of opiates to your favourite tune in a warm and cosy suicide booth is better than slowly dwindling away in over-crowded abject poverty?

[MrJonno]

In the good old days, youth entering the labor force were apprenticed to a journeyman or master tradesman and they got room, board and perhaps a little money to spend in return for work as they learned a skill or trade

Thats one of the problems minimum wage(or lower) doesnt cover room and board, no to mention Tesco isnt supplying any real training its just getting in shelf stackers . If you can't work out how to stack shelves after a days training you are probably never going to be able to do.

If we were talking genuine training courses it would be a different matter , can't get a job after 6 months goverment pays for you to do a carpentry course (you get no more than benefits isnt unreasonable and if you don't make any effort on the course you lose that as well)

[Robert_S]

A guaranteed interview?

If capitalism as a system could look after its long term interests, it would realize that employing more people at wages that left them with some discretionary income would increase growth all around. However, just as our brains are more forward looking than the individual cells, pure capitalism is less forward looking than the brains it is composed of.

Say what you want of communists, they'd be nothing without a large section of the population that's pissed off enough to start shooting. Without Batista and company, Che and Fidel would never have made it out of the coffee shops. They'd have been a couple of harmless pretentious proto-hipster wankers spouting long winded rants about how to fix everything at anyone hapless enough to sit in their general vicinity.

[Jesus_of_Nazareth]

Well, it's absolutely fucking clear that not a one of you actually bothered to read, much less comprehend the article cited, which said that the ad was a simple mistake and had been withdrawn. The article also points out that the government subsidizes the temporary employment of out-of-work and particularly unskilled new workers with Tesco (and I assume other employers) so that they can gain work experience and will have a leg up at the end of six months by having a guaranteed job interview.

The mistake was in describing the job as PERMANENT, not temporary. By the end of 6 months they will have starved to death anyway on those "Wages", so the difference is moot.

The Min Wage is stop Employers exploiting those who can be - and to reduce an Employers subsidy from the Govt (Folk on min wage still receive benefits to top up wages so folk can afford to live)......IMO any Employer who cannot afford to pay own staff a living wage (which is also still subsidsed by the State) is either a crap businessman, in the wrong business or a greedy f#cker and in all cases their business deserves to fail.

As said already, if TESCO were offering training (above Baked Bean tin stacking) that could be used by the "Employee" (Prisoner?) in the future that would be a very different thing as the person receives something of value in lieu of cash.

All that is happening is TESCO is creating further unemployment by not employing folk on the current (albeit shit) wage terms and depressing the wages of current employees - they are not creating new jobs out of thin air (TESCO are not that stupid). As a business owner myself I can assure you that if employing someone makes me more money than they cost (in cash and aggro) then I will employ them - someone earning less than a living wage simply costs too much, not in cash - but in Aggro.


What the UK desperately needs to avoid (for the benefit of all) is going too far down the US route of treating it's own citizens as disposable commodities - as the locals here are not fundamentally as docile as the Americans are. and don't swallow govt propoganda so easily.


And the above is written by someone who:-

a) thinks that work camps for prisoners is a good idea.
b) is politically somewhat to the right of Adolf Hitler.
c) who would bayonet babies if I was paid a dollar each.

I just hate short sighted stupidity

Seth - do you run a TESCO death camp?

[MrJonno]

What the UK desperately needs to avoid (for the benefit of all) is going too far down the US route of treating it's own citizens as disposable commodities - as the locals here are not fundamentally as docile as the Americans are. and don't swallow govt propoganda so easily.

Don't think it will happen without religion, takes religion to get people to vote against their own economic interest and there is always going to be more people at the bottom outnumbered those at the top.

Even thick people realise this and only with religion an you overcome this

[Seth]

In the good old days, youth entering the labor force were apprenticed to a journeyman or master tradesman and they got room, board and perhaps a little money to spend in return for work as they learned a skill or trade

Thats one of the problems minimum wage(or lower) doesnt cover room and board, no to mention Tesco isnt supplying any real training its just getting in shelf stackers . If you can't work out how to stack shelves after a days training you are probably never going to be able to do.

Indeed. But it's not just the skills, it's the work ethic and the employer's opportunity to evaluate that work ethic over time. And nobody's being "forced" to "labour" for Tesco, they are being invited to do so and they evidently are glad of the offer, as any unemployed worker ought to be. Holding out for higher wages in a glutted labor market is a particularly socialist (and therefore bad) idea.

If we were talking genuine training courses it would be a different matter , can't get a job after 6 months goverment pays for you to do a carpentry course (you get no more than benefits isnt unreasonable and if you don't make any effort on the course you lose that as well)

Maybe if the program works for Tesco and the government, they can expand it into the skilled trades.

Oh, wait, the skilled trades are all unionized, and the unions are incredibly protective of the high wages they make so they can't afford to agree to pay any trainee less than "scale," for if they do, they demonstrate how overpriced their services are. So, they don't allow new trainees into the unions as long as there are unemployed journeymen out there (who are unemployed precisely because they are unionized and therefore overpriced).

That's what I like to call "hoist on your own petard."

[MrJonno]

Not sure there are that many 'skilled' trades as in practical non-academic ones, they simply don't exist in any real numbers unionised or not. Who actually makes anything in the 1st world these days we leave that to ultra capitalist non-unionised China.

The work 'experience' for the long term unemployed isnt optional its compulsory, if tax payers topped up the benefit for 3 months to minimum wage (which really wouldnt be that expensive) with serious benefit penalties if the person doesnt turn up/work then morally perhaps this could be justified.

At the moment this isnt about welfare or workfare for the unemployed its a pure case of corporate welfare

[Seth]

A guaranteed interview?

If capitalism as a system could look after its long term interests, it would realize that employing more people at wages that left them with some discretionary income would increase growth all around.

Capitalism does so all the time, which is why almost no one gets minimum wage, and those that do are the unskilled workers and entry-level workers who almost always (if they are even marginally competent) get pay raises above the minimum wage within a year of employment.

The notion that there are legions of people stuck in minimum-wage jobs is pretty completely a liberal/progressive lie. They deliberately focus on the highly-transient minimum-wage workforce and falsely imply that it's larger than it is and that the people in it stay there, which they don't.

However, just as our brains are more forward looking than the individual cells, pure capitalism is less forward looking than the brains it is composed of.

Say what you want of communists, they'd be nothing without a large section of the population that's pissed off enough to start shooting. Without Batista and company, Che and Fidel would never have made it out of the coffee shops. They'd have been a couple of harmless pretentious proto-hipster wankers spouting long winded rants about how to fix everything at anyone hapless enough to sit in their general vicinity.

Okay, I will. Communists are pathological liars, deceitful charlatans and utterly evil scum who don't deserve to live.

This is because everything they spout is a fine-sounding lie, and those who follow them are "useful idiots" and cannon fodder for the Marxist elite to use and abuse to gain and maintain power. The proletariat always loses, and usually dies brutally in large numbers.

Communism (and socialism) are evil lies because they do not work, they cannot work, and they have never worked, but Marxists keep right on telling the credulous masses that it will work. And when it doesn't, they blame everyone but themselves and their idiotic ideology that's based on class warfare and economic stupidity and an utter lack of understanding of human nature.